Cyprus Pafos

Thursday night it snowed and snowed all around London. It was a tad colder than in Bristol but we felt the chill as well, as we stood with only a few other hardy Bristolians singing Christmas Carols around a fire.  The singing was led by a group of men that looked as though they had just come from participating in a scene of the Adams Family (black cape and black top hat all seen by a flicker of flame) but they did have nice voices which stopped the imagination flying about too much.

Friday afternoon we left early for our Christmas week in Cyprus and as we hurtled along the M4 we wondered if we would get to the hotel and then whether the next day we would be playing in the snow around London or sitting in the sun in Cyprus.  It was a five o’clock start next morning and the snow continued to look pretty but it hadn’t snowed any more so our plane was scheduled to leave fairly much on time. The airport was buzzing, as most of the flights from the previous two days had been rescheduled.  There were queues everywhere of Britons anticipating their Christmas holidays and it took over 2 hours to check our luggage in and then another 40 or so minutes standing in line for the customs check.  A few tempers frayed (like the woman who wasn't allowed to take 4 plastic shopping bags of clothes through security and threw them down in a tantrum - the security guard looked unamused and told her to pick them up and dispose of them appropriately or she wouldn't be allowed on to the plane - sense did prevail in the end). The flight went fairly uneventfully (except silly old me started to feel unwell and went straight to bed when we arrived at the hotel). I did manage a bit of navigating around pot holes and Harry successfully navigated around them in our little Chevrolet Matiz - the potholes which were rather large were a bit hard to see in the dark as the only thing that marked them was a witches hat placed in the middle of the hole. Anyway, after a good sleep for me and a fish and chip dinner for Harry we were all ready to go next morning. The hotel was a self catering place right on the beach - nice and new and clean so no complaints there.  Even had an invention which we haven’t seen before - the dishes sit in a cupboard, with a drip tray underneath it – so you put the dishes away wet, they come out dry – I guess that’s a good idea since they didn't provide tea towels but even so ours got dried with a hand towel before going into the cupboard - some habits die hard. And like some other places we’ve been to there was a notice saying ‘for your health and convenience please place the toilet paper in the bin and not the toilet’- yes that is the used bits!! It doesn’t feel like a particularly hygienic practice to us but after seeing a few blocked toilets along the way (they use narrower pipes over here) we changed our minds and decided we would continue to do as requested!!

It wasn’t a great idea to arrive Saturday night, because on Sunday most of the supermarkets are closed. We were vaguely organised with our muesli and breakfast bought from England, but nothing else. After a bit of searching we found a little supermarket to buy some essentials and from a ‘chilly’ store we bought some frozen Indian for dinner and vegetables.  The latter need an oven or microwave but we hadn't done our homework and when we returned to the hotel these bare essentials were no where to be seen.  Stir fry in one pot was the only option. After loading our food into the fridge we took off for our tour of Pafos (Paphos to the English). We wandered the streets and were a bit disappointed with the town especially the municipal gardens which were barren and flowerless. The local newspaper (yes it is in English presumably for the large expat community over here) said that the local church was suing the mayor for agreeing to pull down a wall in the gardens – not sure what wall it was – maybe it was down already. Anyway, after that little wander through some unexciting streets, we drove to the port and had a great walk around Kato Pafos – an archaeological park excavated in the 1960’s by a Polish group. It is rather special as the houses discovered are reasonably intact and there were some mosaic floors to admire - all in one piece (or lots of little pieces) and the colour and pictures are quite spectacular. We have been spoilt with seeing lots of ruins in many cities and find they have to now be rather unique to be memorable to us.  These mosaics were. The houses that are thought to be around 2000 years old look towards the sea in one direction and the hills and new city in another. There is a little lighthouse that doesn’t seem to fit between the ruins and the modern city and a fort that overlooks the port (which used to guard the town against Arab pirates in the middle ages). The port is little, with fishing boats and leisure boats moored side by side. There were boards advertising parasailing and jet boat riding but not many were open and there weren’t many tourists wanting to take up the offers (but on Boxing Day it was a different story - the place really buzzed with tourists wanting to eat and take rides in glass bottom boats). There is a few touristy shops that sell cheap souvenirs and postcards, some reasonably nice looking restaurants with mainly fresh fish on the menu (we tried one in the sun on our last day and the food was as good as it looked) and a couple of icecream vendors. There was a fresh breeze and the table cloths were pegged to the tables to keep them in one place, but not all the umbrellas, bill boards and portaloos managed to stay standing.

Question: How do you tell a local from a tourist? Hint: It has nothing to do with cameras, looking at maps, driving a rental car (which have special red number plates), looking lost.
Answer: Locals are wearing thick clothes, jackets, furry boots and hats – the tourists are wearing shorts or light trousers and a summery top or teeshirt. Yes it is 22 plus degrees here and we are enjoying the warmth after leaving a snowy minus 1 degree the day before. I do wonder what the locals would wear if they come to the minus temperatures currently in England.

 

It’s great having a rental car because we can just stay as long as we like and when we have had enough we just hop in and go somewhere else. Much better than a tour when you can only spend a certain amount of time somewhere and not somewhere else. We took off for Chlorakas which the guide book says is "on the road to Pafos and where the Church of St George is" well we found a church but it wasn’t St George's (we found that one another day when we weren't looking). We then went to the Mavrokolympos reservoir. The guidebook says "above the car park is the Adonis Baths and a 32 foot water fall". Think we’ll return this guidebook back to the library with pleasure when we return to England.

We wandered for a bit around the reservoir and found what we thought was a water fall (well it would have been one if there was some water) and no sign of the Baths and then drove back down the roads past lots of banana plantations (with all the bananas wrapped in blue plastic bags to protect them from the tee shirt weather we were having). After heading down the hill we found Coral Bay where we sat and had a nice cup of tea (green tea with milk cos someone who shall remain nameless didn’t keep the black and green tea bags separate) sitting on the beach and very glad it isn’t summer when "all summer long it is covered by rows of sunbeds for hire, and there is a wide choice of water sports" oh for the peace of winter!