Hidden Valley Tours: Israel On and Off the Beaten Track
Nir and Tanja invite you to an unique off-the-beaten-track trips that connect between the land and its history, its landscapes and cultures, its people, flora and fauna
When the life-story of your 41-year-old licensed tour guide includes six months motor biking through the Himalayas with his new wife, a Patagonian dig which unearthed the largest dinosaur bone ever found, a kibbutz childhood, IDF officer’s stripes and a BSc in geomorphology, you can expect a very different encounter with Israel.
“We had an amazing experience with him,” Mordechai D of Atlanta, Georgia, reported to Trip Advisor, April 2022. “We traveled off-road through the desert, learning history, geography and geology, while having tremendous fun. This is a must-do tour if you want to connect to the land of Israel.”
“Nir is a knowledgeable and passionate guide, who understands in a glimpse the kind of traveler you are and customizes your trip,” Elisabetta C posted on Trip Advisor, which has given Hidden Valley Tours a Certificate of Excellence. “We had a wonderful experience, discovering not only history, culture and nature but also part of ourselves.”
Hidden Valley Tours is a family business, run by Nir Friedman and his Swiss-born wife, Tanja. “We met at Ben Gurion University, where she was studying geology and I was enrolled in geomorphology,” he says. “With her specialty and mine, our friends call us ‘rock stars!’”
Returning to Israel after traveling the world, they decided to make accessible to Israelis and foreign visitors hard-to-reach gems of their country, and in 2014 created Hidden Valley Tours. Acquiring several comfortable, air conditioned, four-wheel drive Toyota land cruisers (many Trip Advisor posts attest to NIr’s skill in off-road driving), they began building unique off-the-beaten-track trips that connect between the land and its history, its landscapes and cultures, its people, flora and fauna.
“We especially love the desert and, with our vehicles able to go anywhere, many of our trips — standard and customized — are in the Negev or the Judean Desert,” says Nir.
A Hidden Valley trip to the Judean Desert, for example, sets out from Jerusalem in the early morning. “We leave the city and are quickly in terrain that would be familiar to our ancestors,” says Nir. “We drive off-road to visit nomadic Bedouin, encamped with their tents and flocks, and hear from their shepherds about their way of life, untouched for generations. We drive up Mount Azazel, the sacred hill from where the scapegoat carrying the sins of the people was cast each Yom Kippur. We visit Mar Saba (1,500 years old and one of the world’s oldest inhabited monasteries) and Nebi Musah (where Muslim tradition holds that Moses is buried), stopping along the way to swim in the natural springs of Wadi Qelt.”
Nighttime tours of the Judean Desert may include a picnic under the stars, with hot herbal tea, the herbs from Nir’s garden, prepared on a camp stove. There is sunrise at the towering desert fortress of Masada, a dip in the salty Dead Sea and a hike through the lush oasis of Ein Gedi, continuously inhabited from Biblical times through to late antiquity.
Among tours west from Jerusalem is the Burma Road, hacked through mountains during the Independence War siege of Jerusalem in 1948. Hidden Valley’s 4x4 follows the rocky path of the old armored vehicles from rolling hills and vineyards up into the steep Jerusalem hills. Older battles are explored in the caves and tunnels from where Bar Kochba led the Jewish Revolt against Rome, and in the Elah Valley, where David slew Goliath, and where the Maccabees did battle. Burial caves, labyrinths and wineries add to the picture of life in the land in ancient times.
“We’ve recently introduced a new kind of tour — Painting Nature — in memory of my sister, Roni,” says Nir. Roni died two years ago, aged 36. “We grew up on Kibbutz Nachshon in the Ayalon Valley, and at 4.30 am on Sunday mornings our very special art teacher would come to the children’s house, wake us kids, put us on a tractor-drawn trailer along with several freshly baked loaves of bread, and drive us to a nearby hill. Here, each of us was given paper and crayons to draw the landscapes we saw as the sun rose. Now, inspired by that memory, our tours set off into the landscape to experience it from a new vantage, and record it in paint, graphite or water color.”
Nir and Tanja have been guiding now for eight years (their children — Bar, 8, and Geva, 6 — are homeschooled) but have yet to find it dull or repetitive. “Every time we go out, we see Israel through the eyes of others,” says Nir. “That’s endlessly exciting.”
The excitement clearly travels in both directions. As a client from Australia puts it: “Nir is a lovely human being with a passion for his country that he is able to share.”
Hidden Valley Tours: Israel on & off the Beaten Track
Website >>
Facebook >>
Instegram >>
Partnered with Hidden Valley Tours
