This week's travel dream: Walking in the footsteps of Jesus

Leave it to Israel to manufacture controversy out of a great tourism idea, said Brad Wetzler in The New York Times. Two years after a pair of hiking enthusiasts created a 40-mile trail that “more or less” retraces the steps of history’s most famous Galilean, the country’s Ministry of Tourism opened a rival trail of its own. Though the government-sponsored Gospel Trail is three miles shorter, I mostly stuck with the older Jesus Trail when I recently took up the challenge. Created with the help of a nonprofit nature group, it hits more historic sites by passing through a greater number of Arab villages. “As I walked, stories from Sunday school flooded my mind.” Even so, not all was as I’d imagined it.

The trail officially begins in Nazareth, at the Church of the Annunciation, but the nearby Fauzi Azar Inn, owned by one of the adventure’s co-creators, has become the walk’s most popular starting point. Passing through a cobblestoned alley so narrow I could “almost touch the houses on either side,” I came to stairs that climbed hundreds of steps before our first great reward: a panoramic view of Galilee, “a hilly quilt of pastures and olive farms” far different from the arid terrain of my imagination. “Soon we were walking through a valley filled with wildflowers,” headed for the villages of Zippori, Cana, and ultimately Capernaum, “the place where Jesus is believed to have done much of his teaching.”

We covered 30 miles the first three days, seeing Roman ruins, the town where Mary is believed to have grown up, and the curio shops in Cana that peddle “miracle” wine to commemorate Jesus’ most storied wedding trick. On the third night, we stayed at a small guesthouse on a farm where the jovial proprietors greeted us with a dinner of lamb, veal, and homemade sherry. At the Church of the Beatitudes the next day, near the site where Jesus supposedly turned a few loaves and fishes into a feast, we ran into a sizable tour-bus contingent, including an American preacher leading his flock in a hymn. Personally, I hadn’t “found” Jesus, “but I had discovered a beautiful part of the world.”

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At jesustrail.com, an $849 package can be booked that includes five nights in inns and guesthouses along the trail.