Pughnited Kingdom: Cyprus Excursion

Our travel agency sent along an agent the day after we arrived to have a special informational meeting for people who wanted to know what to do around there and book day tours, etc. I dragged Ed along, but really, we shouldn't have bothered. It took like half an hour while we were hungry for lunch, and there was enough tour info posted on the walls to make a decision. We did learn useful things like where the closest beaches were and whether there was a fee, and how to use the local transportation, but we could have asked about that at the desk. Oh, well. Anyway, we decided to just book one excursion that would cover three sites that would otherwise be a hassle to get to--St. Hilarion Castle, Bellapais Abbey, and the Blue House (actually, who gives a shit about the last one. It's just some nice house that a mafia dude had built and the military now controls it as a tourist trap.).

The first stop of the day was the Blue House, although now that I look back at this establishing shot, I see it's white. Hm. It was built in 1957 for this mafia dude named Paulo Paolides, and he had it built into the mountains specially so that no one could see the house or grounds from below, but he had a view of the whole surrounding area. You know, for security. You're not allowed to take photos inside, so I just have outdoor stuff. Here's the front of the house, and you can allegedly see both the sunrise and sunset from that balcony.

I take it back. Here are two pictures of the inside that I found on a website. The first one is a kitchen, which had tables and chairs of different colors, which matched the colors of the bedrooms, so everyone knew where to sit. Jeez. The second one is a milk bath, where people used to take baths in milk, I guess. The tour guide said Paolo would watch a bunch of chicks playing in there and base his night companion decision on what he saw. Heh.

In the way back of the property is a tunnel where illegal acquisitions were transported.

Here's a view from the cliff nearby on the property:

The gardens

This is a little amphitheatre where Paolo would stand in the blue circle and practice his speeches (he was a lawyer by legal trade). I recall getting different stories on this thing. Our tour guide from the travel agency said, I think, that when he stood facing away from the house, his voice would echo back to him, but no one else would be able to hear him below in the town. But the guide from the attraction itself said that he would face the house and his voice would only travel directly to the house, and not go astray, so his security would remain intact.

They seem to have added a little juice or ice cream stand for the employees and tourists...

Wishing fountain:

Here's the pool. It has a bunch of little water streams squirting out from the side wall, which you can barely see.

You can't use the bathrooms in the house, of course, so they have an outdoor WC. I decided marching ostentatiously back to the bus would be a good idea, but I lost my balance. I don't remember if I was faking it or not.

Next stop was St. Hilarion Castle, which was visible from our hotel, and pretty much everywhere else nearby. It's up pretty high. You can see a glimpse of it in the next photo. The bus stopped specifically at this point so people could take pictures from far away.

It's said that Walt Disney used this castle as inspiration for the castle in Snow White, but since most of it is gone and what remains is in utter ruin, it's hard to verify. That's some imagination. The castle is from around the late 11th century, they guess, so it's had a while to fall apart.

I like floor plans.

There were quite a lot of stairs to climb during this part of the trip. And there were quite a lot of old people, but surprisingly they didn't complain too much. There were three levels to the castle, so you could choose to stay at one of the lower levels if you didn't want to climb. The tour guide said she can get from the bottom to the top in about 20 minutes, since she does it so often. We were given maybe an hour to spend there, and I took about 40 minutes to get to the top, stopping here and there for photo ops.

This is nice. I don't know what it is, though.

You could see the whole city, some more cities nearby, and the ocean from the castle.

This is called the Queen's Window, where whatever queen was in residence would sit and do embroidery or something and watch the world below.

So I guess the peak is 732 meters high, but I can't say I climbed all that way, since we drove up a giant hill to the base of the castle. D'oh.

View from the top:

For lunch we went to a place called Lara Beach, but there wasn't time for swimming, and it would have made the rest of the tour feel kind of icky.

The beach restaurant had a resident kitty. Our tour guide told me she had some kittens, but I couldn't find them.

After lunch, we had our last stop at Bellapais Abbey. Here's a ceiling and a chandelier:

This is a popular spot for weddings, since it's pretty and big and stuff. The guide said it cost something like 10,000 pounds or dollars, I can't remember, to book it. Either way, that's a bit pricey.

In this room are many concert performances, and our guide, who had already been singing to us on the bus (blargh), graced us with yet another performance here, "to show us house good the sound is." Ed was so mortified by this behavior that he had to duck out as she started singing.

After her song, we got some time to walk around, blah blah. This was a funny tube, which turned out to be the ceiling of a staircase below. It doesn't really fit in with the rest of the architecture. You'd think they could have dressed it up a bit.

It's really pretty in the surrounding area, with the green hills and such.

I climbed up the stairs. The sign says, "It is dangerous to climb these stairs," but I didn't see anything that suggested I shouldn't do it, so I did.