For some time now I’ve felt that I’ve lost my adventurous touch; I get up in the mornings, go to work, get home, watch movies, get drunk now and then, work on hobby projects, spend some time with friends occasionally - and so on. Nothing may be static per se, but everything still felt a bit stagnant right now. So I took some of my vacation days and went on a spontaneous trip to Cyprus – the lovely divided island where Europe and the Middle East meets. I booked a flight but refused to look for hotels beforehand; instead I relied on Lonely Planet’s excellent guidebook. My trip can be summarized like this:

• Seven nights, four locations. I grew restless pretty quickly.
• Countless beers.
• Countless miles traversed in buses, taxis, by bike or by walking.
• 213 photos taken.
• Only one person in all of Cyprus knows how to make a good White Russian.
• A dozen ancient sites ranging from medieval forts to Roman and Ancient Greek excavation sites.
• I’ve learned that cute bartenders from Belarus who wear skirts short enough to leave nothing to the imagination are impossible to drink under the table. And she even got me to pay for the drinks. Bitch. This was probably the first time I saw a girl with tattooed eyebrows.
• Stray cats everywhere.
• I got stuck on a cold and misty mountain at nightfall in the middle of a pouring rain, and the police searched for six hours before they found me. I left the hotel at 11 AM thinking that I’d be back before evening; the police located me around midnight. Thank the gods that I had a fully loaded cell phone and that the Lonely Planet book had the emergency number listed.

But since a picture says more than a thousand words, I might as well offer over 38000 words instead of writing a novel about all of this:

Yay, I’m going to Cyprus! And I got the crappiest seat ever!

After I arrived in Larnaca I decided to go check out Ayia Napa for a while. What do I do in the city of decadence; the city of debauchery; the city of sin? I rent a bike, pack my bag full with beer and go exploring.

  
It may not be the yellow brick road of Oz, but it sure leads me somewhere strange. Hey, that cape out there looks interesting! I’ll go check it out.

What the hell happened to this path? Things got much worse before I found a decent road again.

 
The other side of the cape! I found this gorgeous beach with Caribbean-like water. Go me! I wonder just how far I’d biked.

  
This monastary in Ayia Napa was gorgeous! I’m not sure if I liked it better in the dark or in daylight. It looked pretty mysterous at night.

Time to go to the next city. Limassol (Lemessos) here I come! A lovely seaside place with a medieval fort, archaeological sites nearby, a few meh-like beaches, lots of shops and many many bars.

  
The fort was dead close to the old harbour, and the cafes nearby took full advantage of the fact. Cheesy, but nice suit of armour. I think I’m the only one ever interested in the old olive press reconstruction they’d set up next to the fort.

   
   
Outside of Limassol there are three interesting archaeological sites. First there’s a generic medieval fort (the first pic). Then comes a wonderful site filled with finds from different periods: an old amphitheatre (reconstructed above), a Roman agora, a Roman villa, a gladiator training house, old Christian structures and on and on. All right next to a marvellous seascape; my louse pics don’t do this place justice at all! Almost as an afterthought there’s also an old religious site nearby, where a cult dedicated to Apollon started hanging around. It was built on top of the site of an even older religious cult. Religion was thick in the air. But I’m not pondering theological questions in the pic on the lower right; the shadow shows me wondering just how these pillars were constructed. Why are there holes in the middle? Is it from the excavation? Is it some natural tendency of this stone? Was it deliberately done by the builders – did they use a center of a harder stone for stability? I have no idea.

I eventually got bored with this as well and went to Platres instead – a village up in the Troödos mountains. I felt like I needed a day away from alcohol, and wanted to stretch my legs.

Here’s the village in all its…pride. The Romanian woman working at the hotel was not very impressed with neither the place nor Cyprus; she advised me to go to Spain on my next vacation.

  
A lovely nature trail led me up to the Caledonian Falls. God damn, it was cold. I only wore a thin shirt since I wanted to spare my jacket for when the rain stopped; I figured I’d need something dry by then. After the waterfall I continued upward along one of the few roads available. Man, I don’t know if that’s mist or clouds. Long way down either way.

  
Eventually I found myself walking a misty mountain trail trailing trailingly off into the endless trails in the Troödos mountains. I thought I was taking a scenic route back to Platres, but oh no. Note the picture on the right. This is all the information present on these trails. Bloody Cypriots. By now it was raining hard, I had lost my wet shirt and only wore my now wet thin jacket, and I was laughing out loud at the ambiguous signs everywhere. “Yeah, you can go…this way! Or that way! What, you want to know what lies in what direction? Screw you! It’s all going in a loop anyway.” I was not laughing about an hour after this when I was tired and cold and it was getting dark and I had walked for I don’t know how many hours.

I’m actually extremely grateful for the helpful police; many people worked together to find me, and they told me how lucky I was that I had a mobile phone. I still think that I could have found my way to a road eventually, and that it would have led me somewhere. Eventually. But after they found me it was still half an hour’s brisk walk with flashlight to get to the very closest dirt road, so I shudder at thinking of how many more hours I could’ve walked around in the mountains, embraced by darkness and thick mist that didn’t let me see more than 20 meters ahead. Oh, and did I mention that I lost my passport up there as well, somehow? It’s a wonder that I got back to Sweden at all – the customs officers watched me veeeery suspiciously.

After this little adventure, I just spent the rest of the time in Larnaca.

   
Larnaca is pretty nice; beautiful buildings, weird tavernas, beaches and submarine trips. I really ought to have taken a trip in that sub! By the last day I realized that I’d forgotten to take the obligatory see-how-much-fun-I’m-having-on-my-vacation pics where I posed against things, so I took a sombre and pretentious pic of myself in the hotel room instead.

All in all, it was a wonderful trip! The weather was pretty nice for November, and lots of cool things happened. Yay! But I felt really sorry for some of the stray cats – there were cats everywhere!

 
 

Oh! And this must be the fattest, laziest pigeon I’ve ever seen. He couldn’t even be arsed to move away when I came closer. Beachlife is way too good for the birdies.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 8th, 2006 at 2:44 pm and is filed under Travels. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.