Valentine's Day in Eilat

Today we docked at Eilat, Israel.   The first excursion was to the underwater observatory (AKA Coralworld).   This is the oldest specifically built tourist attraction in Israel and it opened 45 years ago.  

The white building above is the observatory, and as you enter at ground level you can go up to the top for a view of the surrounding countryside, or down to the underwater rooms (there are 2) which are 6 to 8 metres below sea level.   They somehow managed to construct this without damaging the coral that it is sitting in the middle of, so it was teeming with colourful fish. I know it looks like Denise is standing in an aquarium in this photo - it's hard to believe that it's the actual sea outside those windows.

As well as the observatory, the park had several actual aquariums and some large pools for turtles, etc.  There was also an enormous tank holding shards and stingrays.  So we spent a very pleasant few hours enjoying the sea life.

Unlike Egypt and Jordan, Israel isn't full of hawkers trying to sell you cheap Chinese "authentic Egyptian" items.   So I chose to do most of my shopping at the gift shops in the park. 

Our second excursion of the day was to a place called Timna Park.  This is an area of mountains rich in various ores with some spectacular rock formations.  It is also the site of the oldest copper mines in the world. 

By the time we finished in Timna it was dusk, so it was back to the ship for the Captain's Farewell Dinner.   Technically, there is another night left of the cruise after this one - but we will all have been on an 11 hour trip to Petra and will probably be too exhausted to enjoy ourselves tomorrow night.  We sat with Slavko, the future cruise sales manager, who is from Montenegro.   After a lovely meal I went up to deck 6 where I joined a few other passengers to form a team and take part in the music trivia quiz.  We managed to win - and our prize was 2 boxes of dates, which no one wanted.   We even tried to give them to the 2nd placed team, but they didn't want them either. 2nd prize must have been 3 boxes of dates.