Lost in Cyprus

Or the misguided quest for beauty

“Every woman looks her most beautiful in this spot’ – my guidebook of Cyprus called me like a siren.  I had to visit this spot and take lots of photographs.

It was 1997 and I had just surprised my boyfriend with a trip to Cyprus for Valentine’s Day.  He was a Greek-Cypriot East ender and we were living together in Leyton. I knew his parents (his mother’s cooking was so mouth-watering that I had put on about a stone in the few years I had been visiting them twice a week for meals), I had yet to meet the rest of his family.  A trip to Cyprus seemed just the thing.

Gobsmacked was not the word for it when he opened his Valentine’s card and saw the tickets. This may have had something to do with the fact that his present to me was a small mirror worth about 11 quid, whereas my present had cost me £350 on flights.  He managed to shrug this off fairly quickly and we began to make plans for the trip.

Fast forward to day 4 of our adventure and we decide to visit the Akamas Peninsula on the North-West part of the Island.  My memory has faded a bit with time, so I can’t remember where we parked or what else we saw that day, but I do remember us setting out along a dusty ochre path towards the Fountain of Aphrodite.

The Akamas Peninsula

To say I had a spring in my step would be no understatement, I was virtually skipping.  I have a feeling we expected the walk to be about an hour-long, but we had brought no water, food, sunscreen or hats.  I can only surmise that my excitement at looking gorgeous had rendered me unable to plan.

There was an initial wooden sign and we set out confidently, however, twenty minutes down the track there was a branching with no signage.  We took the path that looked well-trodden, figuring that swathes of tourists would have beaten the way before us.

Two hours later and I was bright pink (my father is ginger and I have inherited his ability to go pink and burn as soon as I look at the sun) and my tongue felt as if saliva had never met it before.  My boyfriend looked at me with some concern.  Shall we go back, he asked?  My response was an adamant no.  I needed those photographs. 

We rounded a bend, and the heavens were smiling on us, there in the middle distance was a man in khaki fatigues.  We approached him eagerly, all caution thrown aside in our eagerness for water.  He was a British soldier on manoeuvres and he had a canteen! Could we share some of his water, we asked him.

Yes, he said, but he didn’t have water, he had Ribena. My heart sank. I’m an omnivorous eater and there are only a handful of things I don’t like, but blackcurrants and anything blackcurrant flavoured is on that list.  Still need must, so I pinched my nose and glugged back some of the Ribena.  He had obviously been standing there for some time because it was more than lukewarm – it was near the temperature of bathwater. 

We waved our thanks and carried on but there were no more signposts and at three hours we realised that it was going to take us most of the day to get back.  I was stumbling and my boyfriend was holding me up and I had a sinking feeling that I wouldn’t make it back.

I considered telling him to save himself and reclining gently into the sparse vegetation to die, but at that point, we had wandered close to the coastline and there about half a mile offshore was a small boat.  We had to flag it down.

We climbed down the rocky slope to a small cove, less proficiently than day-old goats, all the time hooting and waving at the boat.  Would they see us?

The boyfriend took off his t-shirt and waved it over his head and then, thank the heavens, someone on deck noticed us and started pointing in our direction. The boat turned towards the shore – we were saved.

Except we weren’t.  There was a myriad of rocks in our little cove and the boat stopped about 100m away and couldn’t get any closer.  They gestured they couldn’t get to us and pointed in the water – telling us to get in and swim.

The rocky coastline

We had our backpacks with our passports. We had two cameras, one an expensive camera with a zoom lens. What else could we do? We lowered ourselves into the water and tried to swim the 100m holding our backpacks and cameras over our heads.

Have you ever tried swimming with your arms out of the water? It’s not easy and it took about 15 minutes for us to cover the 100m to the boat.  As we neared it two of the men jumped in and headed towards me.  Let my boyfriend fend for himself, I thought, yes – come and save me.  I was relieved of my belongings by one chap and the other decided I needed to be dragged to the boat in lifesaving mode with his hand on my chin.  I gave myself up to the indignity at this point and let him.

We were pulled aboard and I lay on the deck, looking (I think) quite like a quivering mass of jellyfish.  A bottle of water (delightfully cold) was pressed into my hand and I was encouraged to move to the shade.

It turned out the boat was a glass-bottomed boat for tourists that were on a mini-cruise from Paphos.  It would take only half an hour or so to get back.  The tourists were celebratory – they could tell the story, when they returned home, of the time they saved the lives of two suicidal hikers. 

There was a moment of panic about paying for our place on the boat, as we had no money, but the kind boat owner waived any charges and we motored back to Paphos enjoying the view through the glass bottom and being pampered by our rescuers.  After profuse thanks and much hugging from every person aboard, we trudged our way towards the town taxi rank to find a way back to the car we had left quite a few miles away.

Glass bottom boat

I never found the Fountain of Aphrodite, but I do have this story – I’ve told it many times over the years and enjoyed the eye-rolling at our stupidity and the relief at our rescue.  I wonder if somewhere else in the world there is an ex-soldier and a hoard of tourists who tell the time they met a mad English couple who set out in the midday sun and had to be rescued.