Goodbye Cyprus

Well that's it, Cyprus done and dusted, just a mention of a couple more highlights and promise that we'll go back (perhaps to do a race - the only event we could find while we were there was a possible 5K in Nicosia, I e-mailed the organisers but got no reply and it was a long way to go on the offchance.)

We've already mentioned the monastery that we visited on top of a mountain. Cyprus is also good for churches, we went to Larnaca to see the church of St Lazarus's together with his bones and the Church of the Holy Cross in Lefkara, which also has a piece of the Holy Cross. (There's a fair bit of this Cross been divvied up round Cyprus.) But quite remarkably, up in the hills on one of our long long walks, we came across a very well maintained but remote chapel dedicated to St George within a tumble down abandoned village. This is Drapeia, it had quite  a haunting feel to it and no one in Kalavassos or on Google was able to tell us anything of the history of this forlorn deserted site.

This picture doesn't really give you an idea of the extent of Drapeia - it's a little like one of those deserted villages on Salisbury Plain that were taken over by the military many years ago, the inhabitants being relocated lock stock and barrel, probably to a council estate in Swindon.

Having been faced with the choice of Keo or Carlsberg for many days we were thrilled to find that there are a couple of other breweries on the island. One of them is way up the other side of Paphos. this is the Aphrodite's Rock brewery and judging by the website it looks well worth a trip, http://www.aphroditesrock.com.cy/

however it was a bit late in the day to arrange to go there. But we did locate some bottles of Prime beer made at Apia Napa. We sampled the Gold, Pale and Amber, all at 4.5% and all very tasty after going round in circles in Limassol to find the bottle shop.

Finally we have to recommend the Library Hotel! We hadn't done much homework on this - we just wanted somewhere away from the big beach hotels and we certainly found the antithesis of the package holiday deal. With only a dozen rooms and plenty of personal attention form the three lovely sisters who run the place (Anna Maria, Katherina and Lydia - hope I've spelt these right girls!) we thoroughly enjoyed staying here, would recommend it highly and would certainly come again!