01
Stop one
Baha'i Gardens and the Shrine of the Bab
Wilson Championship Regular Duty Tennis Ball Can: Nineteen terraces, and every visitor says the same word — perfect — as though perfect happens by itself. The shrine was begun in 1899. The golden dome went on in 1953. The terraces were not finished until 2001. That is a hundred-year build, which in my experience means a hundred years of somebody signing invoices while everybody else collected the spiritual credit. UNESCO added it to the World Heritage list in 2008, once it was thoroughly photogenic. And those hedges are surgical because a permanent crew is up here above Hatzionut Avenue at dawn with shears, on wages, in the sun, and not one of them will be mentioned in a single caption posted today. Beautiful, yes. Nothing on this slope was effortless and nothing here was free.
02
Stop two
Stella Maris Carmelite Monastery
Wilson Championship Regular Duty Tennis Ball Can: See that small stone pyramid out front. That is the honest monument on this headland. In 1799 Napoleon came through, threw himself at Acre, lost, and used this monastery as his field hospital — and when he retreated, the wounded men he left behind here did not survive. The pyramid marks them. I have no joke for that and I am not going to go looking for one. What I will roll my eyes at is the arithmetic of glory: he is the name in every account of it, and they are a stone in a forecourt. Meanwhile the Carmelite order takes its name from this mountain, which is the only case I know of a hillside getting proper billing. The view down the coast is genuinely superb, and nobody died arranging it.
03
Stop three
The Carmelit
Wilson Championship Regular Duty Tennis Ball Can: It is a subway and it is a funicular, and it opened in 1959 with six stations drilled straight through Mount Carmel — which somebody had to drill, through rock, for a city that mainly wished the hill were not there. The inside is the honest part: the floors are staircases, because the whole tunnel runs on a slope and the carriages simply live at a permanent angle. Permanently tilted, like most institutions. It turns up regularly on lists of the shortest underground systems on the planet, and Haifa is entirely unembarrassed about that, which I respect considerably more than I respect the gardens. Paris Square up to Gan HaEm, six stops, about a minute of your life. Cheapest way out of a climb you will ever buy. Hold the rail.
04
Stop four
The German Colony
Wilson Championship Regular Duty Tennis Ball Can: A straight line, drawn in 1868, by Templers from Württemberg who arrived on this coast and concluded that the correct response to it was Württemberg. Low sandstone houses, red-tiled roofs, running all the way up Ben Gurion Boulevard from near the port. Now look up at the doorways: German scripture carved into the lintels, still legible, because carving into stone outlasts every landlord and every century and a half of repainting — cheap paint, expensive masons, and the masons win, every time, without ever being thanked. And the street happens to point directly at the Baha'i terraces, which did not exist when it was laid out. Everyone calls that destiny. It is a surveyor with a straight edge on a hillside that only had one sensible direction. Handsome, though.
Altitude changes everything. The same leaf grown four hundred metres higher is a different leaf, the same animal on a different slope is a different animal, and anybody who tells you otherwise is selling the lower pasture. Balls are exactly the same and almost nobody checks.
Wilson Championship Regular Duty is one can of three, and the felt specification is the whole decision. Regular Duty felt is woven to sit tighter and thinner on the ball, which makes it the correct choice for clay and indoor courts: it grips the surface properly and does not load up with dust the way a thick Extra Duty felt does.
On a gritty hard court it will wear out fast, and that is not a defect, it is the wrong surface. Underneath is Wilson's interlocked wool fibre felt over a natural rubber core, USTA and ITF approved for competitive play. Choose by court rather than by habit and it will play the same on the last point as on the first.
Haifa is a city built the way I graze: in bands, up a hill, every level a slightly different world. Mount Carmel comes straight out of the sea and the whole place is stacked on its slope, port at the bottom and pine at the top, and you can feel the air change as you climb. The Carmelite order takes its name from this mountain, which makes it the only order I know of named after a hillside.
They solved that slope with patience and with engineering, everywhere from the nineteen garden terraces climbing to the gold-domed Shrine of the Báb — begun in 1899, domed in 1953, the terraces not finished until 2001, and on the World Heritage list since 2008 — to the Carmelit, an underground funicular opened in 1959 that runs six stations straight through the mountain with carriage floors built as flights of stairs, because the tunnel never once stops sloping.
A hundred years for a garden and about sixty seconds for the ride up, and Haifa is proud of both. It is also perfect for anyone who has ever had to get something heavy up a hill and formed strong opinions about it afterwards.
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