Misadventures in Cyprus

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First off, a bit of history. Cyprus was a Brittish colony up through the mid sixties, when it became independent. Of course, the island has loads of history, but modern day Cyprus is basically ethnically split between the Greeks and the Turks, with the turks mostly in the North of the island, and the Greeks mostly in the South.

I don't know all of the details, but apparently in 1974 the Greeks did something that the Turks didn't like so much. The Turkish government sent in the troops, and basically took over half the island. The troops are still there today.

The Turks now call it the "Operation for Peace", while the Greeks call it an unlawful "invasion". You say toe-may-toe, I say toe-mah-toe.

Some of this might have been handy to know before arriving there.

Perhaps the best way to relate the Cyprus saga is to just tell the story.

The pre-lude

Pugner looked online and found ferry schedules from a bigish-looking city called Mersin. He found prices and schedules for over-night ferries that would put us in the Turkish North part of the island. Sweet. We were the coolest travelers ever.

We spoke with a travel agent who sold us a bus ticket to Mersin. He tried, but failed, to convince us to head to another near-by port town, and catch the ferry from there. He said that there were no ferries from Mersin. We SAW the schedules, man. Mersin bound we were.

So the 4 hour bus ride to Mersin actually took 7 hours. At least I got to watch a movie called "The Transporter". In Turkish. You know a movie is bad when you can find massive plot holes, and you don't even understand the language that the characters are speaking... But, it had lots of action.

We arrive into what we think is Mersin, and get off the bus. We sure hope we are actually in Mersin, cause the bus leaves. Pugner and I were in the middle of an epic (travel) chess game, so we had to postpone our conquering of the Mersin scene until we setup and finished the game on a nearby bench. We were quite the sight with our over-sized bags and our under-sized chess set.

I bribed some of the locals with cookies to give us information about how to get to the port. Apparently these local yokels thought that Mersin didn't have a port. They kept trying to convince us to go to the same town that the travel agent said. We saw the schedule, man. It has a port.

We found another travel agent. Who didn't speak english. He did speak Turksih, Kurdish, German, and possibly Dutch. Not super helpful to me. I asked if he could speak Spanish, and wasn't really sure what I would do if he said yes. Erik asked if he could speak Chezch. Nope.

We finally managed to convey our desire. Port. He was kind enough to take us to a taxi, and help us negotiate a price. We jump in.

Mersin, we have conquered thee!

The cab drives us literally across the street to the port, and we jump out. The cab ride saved us about 20 seconds of walking. Whew, what a relief!

After a couple of pointless trips to the passport police, we manage to convey to the ticket guy that we want tickets to Cyprus. Tickets in hand, we again feel like the conquerors.

We wander around looking for a pharmacy, so that we can pick up some anti-sea-sickness pills. We find a super friendly duo of kids that take help us find one, and translate the request for us. To be fair, we tried to convey what we wanted, using the recently learned words for "nausious" and "ship". The kid jumped in to help us after the exaserbated pharmacist couldn't understand our efforts to mime the effects of sea-sickness. Good thing he translated for us, because we could have ended up with whatever...

We sit down for lunch. And got gauged. After our waiter arbitrarily inflated our bill by $10, he blatantly asked us for a tip.

Mersin is a really nice town, by the way. I really liked it. It is super pretty.

The ride

So we finally get on the boat. After giving our passports to a sketchy looking guy who said something about needing it for security. Or possibly to sell them on the black market.

In any case, the 8 hour trip took 14 hours. Highlights:

1. The staff passing out anti-barf pills BEFORE we left. We had our own, but thought the fact that they were handing them out seemed to foretell badness.

2. Badness ensued. We hit the waves. Big time, man. I was fine. I had taken an anti-barf pill, and generally don't really get sea-sick. This poor woman behind be was NOT fine. She spent about two hours hanging her head over a waste bin, crying "Allah, Allah". I don't know much about other languages, but this is one word I can recognize. We all felt bad for her, and felt worse that there was nothing we could do to help her.

3. Did I mention that this boat was really catered towards cars, not people? 14 hours, no berths. Just benches. I tried to sleep outside, but found that whenever I did, smokers and loud-talkers would somehow congregate within what seemed like inches of my no-sleep-having head.

I eventually managed to get some sleep, due to the extreme kindness of a Jordinan whom I befriended. He gave up his side of the bench, and I was able to stretch out.

The arrivial

We finally pull into port, then wait for over an hour and a half for the cars to empty off. We then get into the passport control line, and are astonished at the lack of "line" culture. Apparently here, when one wants to get services from a counter, one just elbows and pushes through the sorry chaps that think an orderly line is the way to go. We eventually learned the tune, and developed the defensive elbow.

So I should have known something was strange when passport dude asks me if I want a stamp. Yes? Stamped.

We walk out of the port and into Cyprus. Our first destination is an ATM. Here we find a duo of youths going through a whole wallet full of what appear to be stolen ATM cards. It could have been legit, of course. I just thought it odd that the guy 1 had a list of pins that he'd read off to guy 2, who would systematically give each pin a go for each card. We just sat there, partly wondering if we should call the police, but moslty annoyed that they had so many cards to try. We just wanted our own cash, man.

Did I mention that we had no idea what the currency was in Cyprus? We figured that the mystical oracle called ATM would tell us. Happily, it dispensed Turkish Lira.

We next wandered into a travel agent´s office. She told us that we pretty much needed a car to see anything good.

A Car! No way Jose! She also told us how to catch a bus to Lafkosa - the capital of both the north and the south. Apparently there was a wall dividing the city (think Berlin).

We got to Lafkosa aka Nicosia aka Lafkosia without further incident. We booked a room in what had to be the worst pension in existence. To be fair, it was cheap. But picture this...

We were on the third floor. We had a balcony, but the crafty owners had converted half of the balcony to a bathroom. The sliding glass door served as the partition between the room and the outside world, along wıth the crapper. You couldn´t have a breeze and a Pee at the same time. Also, we counted 5 out of 5 pieces of plumbıng that were broken and non functional (hot and cold water in the sink sprayed water everywhere except for the sink - like on your leg. Hot and cold water in the shower dig absolutely nothing. Toilet didn´t work and probably last worked sometime ın the early 80´s. And the springs from the mattress had a very spikish feel to them. At least there were no bed bugs.

The crossing

We decided to try our luck at crossing into the south. We wandered about trying in vain to find the border, untill we happened across a helpful irish chap. He thought we were the dumbest people alive for not having a guide book. He opened his "Lonely Planet" backpack to pull out his "Lonely Planet" Cyprus guide and opened to the paragraph explaining how it was totally impossible to cross from the north to the south.

He also explained how he thought the north was ass backwards and that they should really go about modernizing the place. He told us how cosmopoliton the south was because it had TGi Friday and Starbucks. He also told us how he had crossed over from the south into the north - which apparently was no problem.

We thanked him for his advice and went about trying to cross the border. He again warned us not to - apparently they would just shoot you first and ask why you were crossing second.

So we crossed the border with no problem at all. No one stopped us. No one asked what we were doing. We wanted to find the irish guy so that we could laugh at him. It turns out that Cyprus recently joined the EU. One of the ramifications of this move was that the border between North and South is a bit more sane now. Of course there are still scary looking fences and dudes with guns everywhere. On both sides. But you get the sense that all of this is more out of habbit than any sense of impending danger.

The South

Right away, we noticed a subtle shift in the scenery. We saw banners plastered everywhere that proclaimed the injustice done onto the south at the hands of the Turks. They complained about prisoners still missing and for tons of unlawful beatings, tortures, and what not. Not knowing anything about the situation, it was hard for me to know what to believe. The banners seemed to make a convincing case.

We wandered about for a long time, looking for inspiration. it turns out that the place was fairly large, and walking wasn´t the most efficient way to explore. Of course this didn´t stop us from walking anyway...

We ımmediately noticed that the currency was pounds, which meant that this land was expensive. We wondered at how the currency was the pound (at this point we didn´t know about the former rule by the brits). We also wondered at how lazy a country must be to not even bother with their own currency. If you have read enough of my journals, you already know that this remark came back to bite us in the arse.

We noticed right away that stuff was expensive. A Frapacino at Starbucks cost 3 pounds, for example. Imagine our joy when we discovered that the Cyprusians weren't lazy at all on the currency front. They had their OWN version of the pound. Worth a lot more than the Englısh pound. In fact, each Cyprus pound is nearly 2.5 US dollars. Ouch!

We a nice gal at the local Holiday Inn to arrange a share taxi for us to get to Paphos (where we heard topless super-models tended to congregate on the beach). The shared taxi only cost us about 25 dollars each - a whopping 12 times the amount we paid for a similar distance in the north.

Our taxi dropped us in the "center" of Paphos. It was a good thing that neither of us knew ANYTHING about Paphos (aside from something about a popular summer destination, and the vague rumor of topless supermodels). We found ourselves in the middle of a town with NOTHING going on.

We walked 2 miles (carrying all of our stuff) to what we thought to be a cheap hotel. It was certainly cheap by US or European standards for a hotel, but it was by far the most expensive lodging that I have had to date on this trip.

We explored Paphos. We found the lively area - a short 3 miles from our hotel. We sure were glad that we didn´t have a car! No topless supermodels though. Or supermodels of any sort, come to think of it. Imagine that.

By the next day, we had decided that we had seen enough of Cyprus. We wanted out of there. Fast. Paphos had an ınternational airport, but 5 people told us that we couldn´t fly out of it since we crossed over from the North and all. Apparently the government in the south doesn´t recognize the airports in the North as valid entry points into the country. So if you have a stamp in your passport from the North, they assume you are a spy and shoot you or something. Strangely, it would be OK if we hadn't gotten a stamp at all. Here, the government assumes that you magically appeared in the South, and pose no security risk.

Part of me wanted to test these rumors. But we had been wrong a bunch of times already, so we decided not to risk it.

We ended up in another budget shared taxi heading to the North. These shared taxis are a great idea. Every half an hour they leave towards the major cities, carring people and cargo. Everyone wins. The taxi company gets a full van. The passengers get picked up from where-ever they are, and get dropped off where ever they want to go. What a great system!

Great, that is until you realize that you are getting dropped off LAST, and every other person in the van seems to want to go to the opposite corner of the earth from ANYONE else. This fact meant that an easy 2 hour drive turned into a 5 hour ordeal.

I think our getting dropped off last had something to do with the Greek guy in the van who was going to the same place as us, and continuously insulted our driver. Maybe not though.

Well this is turning into quite the entry. Perhaps I'll just cut it off now. To make a long story short - we got back into the North. We stayed in a place that was a LOT worse than the first that I described earlier. We caught the next flight back to Turkey. We were done with Cyprus.

I feel like I should say that Cyprus is clearly a beautiful country. I can see why people go there. It has loads of mountains and beaches. It reminds me a bit of Hawaii. It also has loads of ruins all over the place. If you decide to go there, get a clue, then get a car. It's not the kind of place to explore ıf you don't have any sort of plan, and certainly not the sort of place to explore by foot.

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Photos

Erik the conqueror
Erik returning from doing his business

Comments

[deadsea]

Cypriot Pound
Rather than arrive in a country and not know what currency they use. I suggest looking it up on coinmill.com Here is the handy calculator for the Cyprus Pound which you might have found helpful: http://coinmill.com/CYP_calculator.html

[american]

don't be an ignorant traveller
I would recommned visiting a few websites prior to your trip so you can appreciate your experience. Had you have done so you would have known that the supermodels hang out at Ayia Napa, not Paphos. Guess you really pissed someone off to send you there - perhaps because you were so insensitive about the invasion.