Q. When is the best time to see Bethlehem (without the queues), armed guards at the Wailing Wall, gun toting West Bank settlers, four hour border crossings on the daily three mile trip to school or military sonic booms over the plain of Armageddon?

A. Between the start of the bombing in Afghanistan and the assassination of the Israeli tourism minister.

During this lucky interlude, we found deserted hotels, bankrupt businesses and ordinary people trying to go about their lives. Girls in school uniforms remarkably like Wimbledon High; market traders bargaining over spices; and the first words of a Bedouin goat herd met over the brow of a hill “money” and “fish and chips”.

Through our much travelled and well read Chris Eyden, the land came alive. Jerusalem rises from Roman cisterns through churches, mosques and shrines to satellite dishes and roof terraces for the kids’ football. Millennia of living archaeology where mankind first farmed corn and wheat; a trade route, invaded, settled and defended. Jerash, Petra, Masada, Yad Vashem, Israeli settlements on the West Bank; awesome architecture from BC to 2001 AD. The architecture of occupation or defence or civilisation?

Is this Land Holy? Is there holiness in the fear of the neighbour, or the rule of the past? Yet this land gave us moments of tranquillity, celebrating communion in a cave at Petra and by the Sea of Galilee, padding hushed and barefoot through the King’s Mosque in Amman; and watching total immersion baptism in the River Jordan.

Do the people make the land? Through our warm-hearted leader, and the best guides, we tried to connect. To the little boy at Hope School Bethlehem recovering from a sniper’s wound and a football injury. To the Director of the Hospital in Amman supported by the Diocese of Southwark. To Adib our Jordanian Tourist policeman, fun, sociable, respectful, devout and cultured. An ordinary religious Moslem, he neither drinks nor smokes. In a land where it would be unthinkable for families not to care for their elderly, he is understandably angry when the West call his culture primitive, crazy and cruel.

So many memories; emotionally intense and unforgettable. With a lot of style and fun from camel rides (races?) at Petra, or hours of haggling with souvenir traders, to our leader’s faultless rendering of the Prologue of Henry V in the superb acoustics of the amphitheatre at Jerash. And the mud baths at the Dead Sea: yes, there are photographs………

Christopher Coombe