the dan & carrie show

For those of you who are geographically challenged, Cyprus is the island in the upper right hand corner of the Mediterranean Sea that looks vaguely like the USA as drawn by a person from Maine. Ok, so it doesn’t look anything like the USA, but it should help you find it on a map.
Some of our good friends here used to live in Cyprus and so had some suggestions for us as far as sight seeing, where to stay, etc. We stayed in a camping area near the village of Trodoos. I use the term village loosely as even Ellsworth, where Carrie grew up, is much larger.
The camp was a small grouping of canvas “safari” tents, each furnished with cots, a small kitchenette, table and chairs set up on a concrete pad. It was more of a canvas cabin than a tent, what with the electric lights, and all.
It was very nice to be able to lie in bed at night and hear the sound of a car, a single car, distinguishably a single car, driving on the nearby road. The sound, or rather lack of sound, of the forest at night and the crisp air made for good sleeping. We spent most of our waking hours hiking in the forests near the camp and spending time with each other, instead of just being in the same place.

We hired a car, or rather a Kia “Pride” (try marketing that in the US), which is essentially a stripped down Ford Festiva (which I didn’t think was possible until I saw a Kia Pride). It was nice to have our own set of wheels, even if they were tiny roller-skate wheels, although the right hand drive made it that much more adventuresome, and more than once we found ourselves on the wrong side of the road.
We didn’t let the fact that we were driving a faded red roller-skate keep us on the paved roads. No, we assumed that a road labelled “loose surface all weather” would be fine. As it turns out a “loose surface all weather road” in the mountains of Cyprus looks rather like the Jeep trails in the UP, only with more hairpin switch backs and less mud. Looking back we should have anticipated the road conditions, as even the paved roads were narrow, and often full of switchbacks.

All things considered our Pride performed quite well, or at least it never left us stranded. We took one day to drive down to the coast and visit wine country.

Actually most all of Cyprus is wine country, but some areas have more vineyards than others. We visited two different wineries and bought several bottles to bring back to Egypt. We also took some time to go swimming in the Mediterranean and visit the “Baths of Aphrodite” which is a natural grotto with a pool and water trickling down the rocks where they say Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and beauty, used to bath. It was very pretty but not what we were expecting for a place called the “Baths of Aphrodite”. A more fitting name might be “Aphrodite’s Bath Tub”.
While it almost never rains in Cyprus during the summer we did find four different waterfalls to stand under to simulate the feel of rain.

There are only a few rivers in Cyprus that have a continuous flow, and our camp was near to two of them. Again "river" is a subjective term. Back in Michigan a stream of this size would not be on any maps, except perhaps the USGS quadrangle maps, and most certainly would not be called a river. In any case, the small mountain streams, affectionately called rivers, were indeed a source of refreshment for us. While the majority of the forest in the area is black pine, and quite sparse, along the banks of the rivers there are Oak, Maple, Sycamore, and many other deciduous trees and undergrowth, including black raspberries, that make up a “riverine forest”, much like the forests we are familiar with.
We enjoyed some of the foods that are hard to come by here, such as bacon with our eggs, pork chops, ham, and sausages (again with pork in them), and BLT’s. We also enjoyed the Cypriot specialty, Halloumi cheese, which is a goat & cow cheese which tastes somewhat like mozzarella and is generally served fried. We enjoyed fresh milk that actually tasted like milk, good wine that was cheaper than bottled water, and of course the pork.
Even though Cypriots speak Greek, or rather a dialect of Greek, it was a good change. Actually most of the Cypriots who we had contact with spoke very good English, but more than anything it was good to spend time in a place where traffic rules were obeyed, there was mowed grass in the roundabouts, people actually drove without honking their horns, and where there was plenty of wide open GREEN spaces.