Saturday, Jan. 16

A full work day today, mainly doing the work I talked about yesterday: First marking the points that will be used for surveying with red tape (because rain is expected) and spray paint. Then setting up the laser surveying instrument and "shooting" the points. This involved an amazing amount of movement by Dan and Greg over the site. Mainly I worked the instrument. We managed to shoot well over half the points and hope to finish tomorrow. Rain is expected Monday and Tuesday and we hope our markings survive until the aerial photos on Wednesday. Here's a photo of Greg programming the instrument and an "architectural feature" across the wadi.

Below is a picture of the village of Ghajar taken from Omrit. The heading is northwest into Lebanon. In fact the village in white you see is right on the border. Actually the border, as determined by the UN, runs right through the village! The north half is in Lebanon and the south half is in Israel. To top it all off, the villagers consider themselves Syrian. Only in the Middle East. Here is an NPR story about this from last summer. (Update: Here are recent articles about Ghajar in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.)
(And yet another reporter who also visited from Foreign Policy magazine.)

Note the column drums in the right foreground.

To finish, a not very spectacular photo of the spectacular sunset over Lebanon this evening as we headed home. And yes we arrived to work at sunrise.