the times Saturday December 18 202140 Travel
How I found
serenity at Israel’s
new oasis
Susan d’Arcy makes a miraculous
recovery from the stresses of
pandemic travel at one of the
year’s hottest hotel openings
A
nyone else have trouble
understanding Covid-
related travel docu-
ments? I find them so
oddly phrased that it’s
as though they’ve been
written in Mongolian,
then google-translated into English.
The entry form for Israel baffled me, and
by 4.30pm the day before an early-
morning flight to Tel Aviv my online appli-
cation had been rejected five times.
Cue stress levels similar to those of Alok
Sharma on the last day of Cop26.
I threw myself at the mercy of my friend
Jess, who, it turned out, is fluent in
Mongoogle and raced through the
questions with embarrassing ease. Um,
so it’s just me then? Moving on swiftly,
that left only the result of my PCR test
pending... 6pm, no email notification;
8pm, still nada. Double those stress levels.
I finally got my negative result at 11.25pm.
So when my alarm went off at 4.30am
for the Heathrow run, I no longer cared
that Six Senses Shaharut in Israel’s pristine
Negev desert is one of 2021’s hottest hotel
openings — I didn’t want to go. I wanted
to stay in bed with a helping of sedatives to
calm my frayed nerves.
It was early evening before my taxi
pulled up at the resort, which was shroud-
ed in darkness and felt eerily empty. I was
exhausted and definitely not in the mood
for party tricks, but Val, my ebullient
guest-experience manager, wasn’t picking
up on my vibe.
He led me to my room, a creamy cocoon
of pared-back loveliness, and showed me
a shrivelled-up ball of tumbleweed,
draping it across his palm like a priceless
Cartier necklace. “This is a Rose of Jeri-
cho,” he stage-whispered. I managed an
“ooh”, aiming for polite interest but coming
out more as tearful despair. “It looks dead,
doesn’t it?” he asked.
It was a close-run thing, but I reckon I
looked worse.
He placed it in a glass bowl. “Now you
pour in the water,” he instructed, pointing
to a nearby carafe. I felt so tired that I
wanted to cry, but I obeyed in the hope it
would make him go away. “And tomorrow
you will see,” he said with a smile and left.
He was right. I awoke in my Princess and
the Pea bed, carefully positioned to maxi-
mise my sight line of the numinous beauty
of the Negev beyond my floor-to-ceiling
window. Six Senses Shaharut is an hour
from Eilat, almost four from Tel Aviv, and
light years from the stresses of the previ-
ous day. I felt soothed by its enigmatic
stillness. I looked across at my Rose of Jeri-
cho. Last night’s tight tangle of brown
fronds, now softened by a mossy trans-
lucence, had unfurled like tiny butterfly
wings. It was a poetic analogy — we’d both
made a miraculous recovery.
The hotel, on the other hand, is merely
a remarkable feat of engineering. Con-
struction took nine years because its
owner, the Israeli entrepreneur Ronny
Douek, was adamant that the architecture
should not impinge on this lunar land-
scape but sit more or less submerged with-
in it; a determination that skyrocketed the
cost way north of £100 million. The first
three years were spent carving out a slice
of towering cliff near the artists’ enclave of
Shaharut; the next three were devoted to
grinding the resulting rubble into sand for
cement and hand-carving the larger
stones into a tactile jigsaw that could be
used for cladding. During the final three
years the resort was embedded as sustain-
ably as possible into the desert.
Its design is breathtaking, a contem-
porary tribute to the nomadic structures
that the ancient Nabataeans might have
seen as they drove their camel trains
across the Negev more than 2,000 years
ago, following the incense route from the
Persian Gulf to the port of Gaza. The area’s
honey-coloured stone has now been
caressed into sensuous curved buildings
reached by sweeping avenues and con-
templative courtyards opening on to
panoramic terraces. Instead of neatly
clipped lawns, there are the Middle East-
ern version of Japanese karesansui raked-
sand gardens, with neat sprinkles of stones
enclosed by lavender borders and punctu-
ated by the occasional wind-whipped tree.
Interiors display less-is-more restraint:
airy salons have walls and floors finished
in silky tadelakt plaster in a shade between
sand and champagne. Intricately carved
doors and ceilings have been custom-
made from reclaimed teak, and under-
stated leather and wooden furniture is
covered with rich Bedouin-inspired fab-
rics. The bar has a turntable and vinyl col-
lection featuring Greek and Israeli bands
mixed with world jazz and blues albums,
and the Midian restaurant is decorated
with vintage Bedouin brass pots and bul-
bous green bottles by local artisans.
French windows at the restaurant
constantly tempt guests outside. That
evening, as I ate cauliflower tab-
bouleh and Golan Heights beef with
root vegetables and lentils,
I gazed over an extraordinary inter-
section. I could see the twinkling
lights of Aqaba in Jordan and Taba in
Egypt, and the occasional headlights on
the road to Eilat and the Dead Sea.
At something like three or four hours’
drive away, Petra and Jerusalem are also
manageable day trips.10 milesISRAELJORDANSAUDI
ARABIAEGYPTEilatRed
SeaNegev desertKibbutz
LotanTzukei Shayarot
Nature Reserve
Six Senses
ShaharutA Panorama Suite at Six Senses ShaharutLuxury in the desert
Plan
ahead