I’m sitting in a dressing gown, already feeling a little vulnerable, when out strides Svetlana, a tall, grey haired Russian woman who looks like a stern maths teacher. She is to be my masseuse today. Despite the way she looks and sounds, she does a good job avoiding the areas I asked her (knee, feet) and sending me into a half dream when she works on my bulbous heid. Unfortunately, when she announces that “Ve are finished” like she’s just created some kind of monstrous war machine for the Red Army, I am very much snapped back to reality.
After a relaxing hour like this, I don’t much feel like driving, but don’t have a great deal of choice in the matter, so I pack up, check out and hit the road. ZZ gave me a list of points of interest on the drive to Paphos, where I am to spend my final couple of nights.
The first of these is some largely unremarkable ruins at which I spend most of my time playing hide and sneak with a gecko.
After a relaxing hour like this, I don’t much feel like driving, but don’t have a great deal of choice in the matter, so I pack up, check out and hit the road. ZZ gave me a list of points of interest on the drive to Paphos, where I am to spend my final couple of nights.
The first of these is some largely unremarkable ruins at which I spend most of my time playing hide and sneak with a gecko.
The next, though is Kourion, an amphitheatre on a hilltop overlooking the ocean. It’s a pretty place and a great setting for live performances. Currently they’re showing Shakespeare. Even the drive up there, though, is something to behold. It’s a sad sign of how far expectations fall in Dubai when looking at a bale of hay becomes something remarkable.
Next comes the spot where legend says the goddess Aphrodite was born after a guy cut off another guy’s balls and flung the nads into the sea. Seriously – that’s what they say happened. After the water stopped frothing, out came a goddess of supreme beauty. We all have to start somewhere I suppose.
The rocks are stunning though – weirdly out of place, they look like they’ve been tossed there by some enormous catastrophe, which I guess they probably were. Today they look so humongous, so solid, that nothing could ever move them, especially not the tiny tourists who swim and climb and sunbathe all around.
The rocks are stunning though – weirdly out of place, they look like they’ve been tossed there by some enormous catastrophe, which I guess they probably were. Today they look so humongous, so solid, that nothing could ever move them, especially not the tiny tourists who swim and climb and sunbathe all around.
When I rented the car, I was given a full tank of petrol and told to return it empty. This, then, is precisely what I mean to do, but after a while longer of driving up and down hills, and around enormous bends on the ocean road, I realise I’m in serious danger of running out before I get to Paphos. Between taking the long route and stopping every few minutes for photographs, what could have been a 40 minute drive along the highway has taken nearly three hours.
I arrive in town and through a combination of blind luck and the help of a local find the hotel. I pull in with the fuel like blinking angrily, satisfied I’ve got my money’s worth.
I dump my bags and immediately head out of the hotel, along to the harbour in Paphos. It’s all sleazy waiters and sunburn and all day English breakfasts; tacky and tatty and if it didn’t remind me of Ibiza so much, I’d be totally disgusted by it. The shit they sell at the stalls is amazing – I mean, who honestly buys this crap? Pensioners from Birmingham by the sound of them.
I head along to the fort at the water’s edge. Surprisingly the security guard lets me for free in when I lie that I don’t have any money. I take some pictures, but they aren’t very good or interesting, save one.
I head outside and tray again, but really I’m a bit bored. There’s nothing to do and no one to talk to, and while Paphos is a bit of a dump.
As nice as the new hotel is, the tight bastards aren’t giving me dinner for free either. I eye up a couple of restaurants, and promptly decide that McDonalds is the safest, cheapest option. Like most places in Paphos, the place is overrun with eastern Europeans, Russians and Ukrainians, not that it’s any the worse for it. Amid all the harsh, tall blondes though, there is a small, disturbingly cheery Pinoy woman. She must be at least 55 and watching her work leaves me feeling flat and uncomfortable. How does it come to that? How can someone spend so much of their life with the nose to the grindstone and 40 years later find themselves standing next to guffawing teenagers babbling in a language they don’t understand, serving low-grade beef to strangers?
Full of salt, calories, grease and guilt, I head back to the hotel. There’s not much to do and it’s still quite early, but there are at least some episodes of Lost to watch on the computer – and like the hotel before it, this one has provided a complimentary bottle of wine, which is nice.