Maldive Islands from the air
Last year when I went to Nepal, my journey strangely took me from Manchester to Copenhagen, Copenhagen to Istanbul, then Istanbul to Kathmandu, taking some forty hours in total. This owing to the limitations and convolutions attendant on international travel during the protracted Coronavirus pandemic at that time. The knock on effect has continued into this year given newly emergent oddities of travel still owing their origin to Covid 19. Whilst certainly freer, at least in theory, travel to India has become more difficult, a combination of new tourist visa restrictions on length of stay and limitations imposed specifically upon UK citizens, who now cannot apply for the standard e-visa. This in retaliation for our own border control’s unsympathetic treatment of Indian citizens trying to enter the UK during the then emergence of the Delta (formerly India) variant.
I had originally wanted to travel directly from Kathmandu last November, but it wasn’t to be, so I returned to the UK instead to wait for travel to become less restrictive. By February the promised easing of limitations entering India still hadn’t emerged, so I decided to move anyway and find somewhere to sit it out. And so it was I found myself on a plane from Leeds Bradford to Paphos in Cyprus, where I thought I might pass a few weeks until the situation changed.
Why Cyprus? Prosaically a combination of knockdown budget airline prices, and it being a midpoint (nearly) to India via Dubai, with reliable flights by the main carriers. I imagined spending time inland there in the mountains, perhaps visiting the old Byzantine monasteries the region is famous for, but it wasn’t to be. Cyprus is an odd place (apologies to Cypriots), expensive being a member of the EU and cold at this time of year, and this on the coast. Like many of the coastal regions of Spain and Turkey, it has become massively developed for tourism, overwhelming much of the original cultural feel of the place. Extensive developments of tourist apartments stretched soullessly along the coast line around Paphos, with big modern highways and attendant urban development that reminded me more of the US than the Mediterranean. Occasionally there were remnant pockets of former countryside with a few cedars, olive trees or small vineyards.
In the end I stayed a week, making my way to Larnaca where I could get a flight to Sri Lanka, which, although still not India, was nevertheless in the same cultural climatic region, inevitably warmer and certainly a lot cheaper. So thence I went.
I will remember Cyprus for oddities like it’s large population of urban cats which, given generous feeding by locals and tourists alike are everywhere.
Also, as a registration point for the many newly arrived refugees from Africa, trying to find a new life for themselves in what must seem like such a strange and alien culture. Down the road from my first hotel in Paphos on the shoreline was the famous Tomb of the Kings archaeological site, dating to the Ptolemaic period some 400 years before common era (BCE). Massive rock cut tombs, some with spectacular collonades, extended along the shoreline. I imagined how it must have been more than two thousand years ago when the funeral processions made their way from the city as it was then to the burial grounds, bearing some new member of the city’s elite. Little did they know that in the distant future, this region would come to look and be as it is now in a world so changed.
