Ya-Sas Cyprus

Laundry room with a view @ Club Aphrodite

Our last stop in Cyprus included more ruins and our free timeshare resort week. Ancient buildings repurposed many times, now deserted; toppled stones; relics from previous eras; villas passed through many hands over the years; rudimentary plumbing; signs of a previous bathing pool- that was the resort.  Club Aphrodite!  Only difference from the local ruins was the resort villa had a bowling green next door.  The ruins, while seeming to be not as old or poorly constructed as our resort, were pretty spectacular.

Club Aphrodite was indeed the last resort as it was at the remote end of an 80's style housing development a good mile from anything.  It would not have looked out of place in most American suburbs with the exception of the ubiquitous (and still sour) citrus trees lining the streets plus severely pruned trees and, of course, cats.

Q-tip trees growing around Club Aphrodite

Our days in Limassol, continued our established Cypriot routine: staying at ruins, walking to ruins, wandering through ruins, walking along the coast and going to the market.  Due to Limassol's urban sprawl and the location of ruins, this also included a lot of bus rides (with a lot of unnecessary confusion).  Unfortunately, buses did not reach all of the ruins and required long walks on a thin ribbon of shoulder on very busy streets or freeways. 

First stop was Kolossi castle where Richard the Lionhearted married Berengaria of Navarre  on May 12, 1191. Destination wedding!  Later in the year 1191, Richard sold Cyprus to Robert de Sable (the master of the Knights of Templar).  Robert then flipped it the next year to Guy of Lusignan beginning the three century reign of Cyprus by the Lusignans until the Ottomans began their three century reign in 1571. The country continues to be up for sale,  with housing construction all over every city with real estate billboards everywhere.  We just read that Cyprus is entangled in some of the Russian laundering which has surfaced in the Manafort conviction (Club Aphrodite time shares?).  A Russian oligarch whose name has surfaced in the case owns 9% of the Bank of Cyprus (should we have not used that ATM? )

Kolossi Castle

The church

Wedding Pics?

Second set of ruins  was Khourion, the remains of an entire city with more beautiful mosaics, striking still-in-use amphitheater- how could you pay attention to the the performance with this view? 

Khourion was an early adopter of gentrification with new civilizations building on top of the previous because location , location, location. 

View from Kourion

View from Khourion

Another day,  another bus ride and walk- this time to the Molos (the beach promenade). We wandered through  the city which like other Cypriot cities was a mix of eras, churches and/or mosques. A combination of improvement and decay.  

The Molos

Our search for wildlife continued in Limassol when we went to another salt lake. This is where many of the migrating flamingos first stop to wait for sufficient November and December rains before going over to the Larnaca salt lake. We took two buses to get out to the Limassol lake. The area is actually part of British occupied land with a RAF military base.  There were still of few groups of wild flamingos, the lazier ones perhaps, that still hadn’t made the 40 mile flight over to Larnaca. 

The area was very marshy so not walkable to the beach, but we were able to see the birds with the aid of telescopes at the environmental center.

We then walked 2 miles over to St Nicholas Monastery of the Cats, which was a functioning monastery with a small church and, well, lots of cats. No false advertising here.

Wolf spider aka Cyprus Tarantula 

No other brushes with wild life in Limassol except what was encountered at Club Aphrodite.  Waiting for the bus with cats, black mold growing in the corner of our bedroom at the resort, (following our Cypriot traditions, they changed our room the next day) and a giant wolf spider the size of a mini tarantula that Nick noticed crawling on his shoulder toward his neck, but knocked off just in time (with a handy package of corn thins before smashing it on the kitchen floor).

      

Cyprus's cities and towns began to merge together in our minds becoming almost indistinguishable  from each other. 

"My Mall", something for everyone? 

Nondescript buildings, neglected old town squares, beautiful but simple old churches and mosques, identical and ornate newer churches and mosques, massive beach front hotels and condos, souvenir shops, and big malls with the same unsavory American eyesores of Cinnabon, Taco Bell, KFC’s and Pizza Hut, more so than any other European area we’ve visited. 

Coast with big hotels

Fusion

Not just American encroachment but there seemed to be as many Russian and British markets as Cypriot.  What was unique about Cyprus, other then halloumi cheese, was our inability to feel a concrete gestalt- there was this nebulous identify.  We never saw a Cyprus flag by itself, it was always accompanied by a Greek flag in the south, of course no Cyprus flags flew in the north instead a Turkish flag with a very similar looking Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus flag.  

Our last day kind of sums up our Cyprus experience.  Breakfast of halvah and halloumi. Walking miles past new condos, old stone houses,  renovated tourist areas and vacant city center buildings to reach an oddly placed intercity bus stop. Bus ride past war-memorials and beautiful coastline. 

Appropriately, we ended our Cyprus experience at a beach side promenade eating an all-you-can-eat Asian buffet with American Style Philadelphia sushi rolls washed down with British beer.

This week's photo of a topless old man looking out window contemplating his life... 6-9 months timeshare