Cyprus (plus links to Egypt and Belize)

Cyprus is a country that due to its strategic position numerous peoples have wanted a slice of, and many of them left a lot. The Brits are still playing war games and sending a million tourists a year. We decided to avoid the “Little England” mass-market resorts: since we thought this was hardly experiencing a different culture. Our digs were in the little village called Tochni inside the Cypriot Republic. We were lead to our village house by an Aussie Greek Cypriot who talked to us about his Sydney property dealings at length. The village had amazing rough stonework, numerous friendly and probably flea ridden cats and a Greek Orthodox bell ringer active at 6:30 on Sunday morning.

OK, we admit, we went all that way and we ending up spending TWO days in water fun parks. Under the hot sun, we enjoyed the amazing variety of rides, certainly the best we had ever experienced. Some great / unusual rides:
· The "Kamikaze", a long, straight slide with a huge steep drop at the start for one person, with lots of water at the end to slow you down. Think “enema” (thankfully we had our legs crossed to avoid this) and having to extract your bathers from your body. Jen baulked repeatedly before taking the plunge.
· The "Fall of Icarus": think skateboarding ramp with water. Two people in a inflated tube get launched down one side on an angle, then go up the other side almost vertically before spinning out of control down a separate section. Apparently we went to the only place in the world that had this.
· The "Aeolos Whirlpool": you spin round a flume before dropping through the hole in the middle into the pool below. Think water down a plughole or those coin donation contraptions.

There isn’t much scenery in Cyprus in late summer. The Troodos Mountains are commonly agreed to be picturesque. We walked a trail around the highest one. Talk about monotonous: it was one of the longer 7km of our lives. We got to see a lot of trees growing on piles of rocks.

The primarily Roman Archaeology was impressive: ancient mosaics better than we had ever seen before; impressive burial sites; amphitheatres and temple remains.

Generally, the Cypriot built up areas were pretty ugly and showing the worst excesses of modern development (including a lot of the tourist destinations and Nicosia). A couple of highlights were:
· Omodos; a pretty village which happens to be the national wine capital, and the place where Jen was amusingly coerced into riding a donkey by an overly affectionate Greek man of retirement age.

· Fikardou; hidden away in the hills and truly tiny but well worth the effort. We arrived late in the afternoon and the light was wonderful on the Ottoman period houses:

For the active tourist its pretty hard to fill a week, without crossing over into the Turkish occupied northern part. So on Thursday we did what the vast majority of tourists never do, having carefully studied the Lonely Planet advice. The only crossing is in the capital Nicosia (that’s the capital for both the Greek and Turkish “countries”). As we got closer we walked past barbed wire and signs advising “no photography”. The U.N. patrolled “no-mans land” was clearly visible and because of the Eucalyptus, ubiquitous in Cyprus, it was easy to imagine it was a ceasefire in a civil war in some mythical northern Australian city. The Greek police checkpoint had prominent and ominous pictures of people killed by the Turks in recent years. After signing for our day pass, we stepped around the concrete barricades into the “no-mans land”. We walked past the Ledra Palace Hotel, where the U.N. is rather comfortably holed up. Then we got confused: it was not immediately obvious where we were supposed to walk to next: not exactly comforting. So we decided to keep walking slowly along the road. It was a relief to see the Turkish checkpoint and sign in.

I needn’t have been concerned about transport on the other side because the taxi drivers know the drill. Mustafa persisted until he got to drive us around (for his troubles he got about £40 cobbled together out of a variety of currencies at the end of the day). Our first impression of the North was that it was considerably quieter than the South, and the Turkish military presence is everywhere: during the day we drove past four different camps. Thankfully, tourism is on a much smaller scale in the North and we enjoyed our best sightseeing. Some memorable moments:
· the lung sapping panoramas from St Hilarion
· swimming with locals in the sea under the impressive fortress guarding the beautiful port of Kyrenia.

Finally we returned to Ledra Palace to beat the 5pm Greek Cypriot curfew: there can’t be many people that have crossed a U.N. peacekeeping buffer zone in their bathers.