Above: People dining on Farenomeni Square. Today we return to “the south” or the Republic of Cyprus.  We departed our lovely apartment in Gazimagusa’s old city around 0930 for the 1h drive to Ledra Palace Crossing. We managed to find parking without too much difficulty or circling around.  Once parked, we waited for the car […]

Ancient city of Salamis Our plan for the day was to go to the ancient city of Salamis as early as possible, then swim in the evening.  Information on Salamis’s opening hours were hard to find but I guessed it would be 0900.  Getting there soon after 0900, I noticed that it was 0800. While […]

Above:  Abandoned hotels run for kilometres along the waterfront where we swam. Moving to Gazimagusa We wanted to leave our Dipkarpaz accommodation late morning so that we’d get to Gazimagusa and not have to wait to enter our next accommodation.  However, a power outage at breakfast meant that we’d be without any fan or air-con […]

Kantara Castle Today we move on to Dipkarpaz Peninsula, which is the north-east tip of the island.  Google Maps suggests that it would be a 30 min side-trip to add-on the Kantara Castle but we already knew that they’re too optimistic with travel times on the windy mountain roads. We had taken things easy this […]

St Hilarion Castle We have two sights planned for today.  I thought we’d do one as early as possible and the other at the end of the day.  That way, we would avoid the worst of the day’s 36 degC heat. After an awesome breakfast on the rooftop, we headed out about 0845 on the […]

Getting from Larnaca to Girne Today we move to Northern Cyprus or the Turkish-occupied part of Cyprus, depending on your point of view, for a five-night stay. We had a choice of the 0845 or 0915 bus to Nicosia, in order to make it across the “border” to collect our rental car at 1100 on […]

Trooditissa Monastery Today was available for some exploration beyond Larnaca to places that we aren’t going to later on in the trip.  I had hoped to get a rental car with the backup plan being going to Limassol by bus. We managed to get a car reasonably cheaply at EUR40 for the day.  We had […]

Attending to essential chores I continued to lie in bed till nearly 0800 despite my 0700 alarm.  Wary of the nearly 40 degC heat that’s expected today, I quickly motivated myself to get up and go while Kim continued to sleep. First priority was to get some EUR.  The city is dotted with many third […]