Category Archives: cyprus

Georgia day 3: flying to Georgia

I knew today I wanted to get my walk out of the way while I was still in Cyprus. My flight is 13:40, arriving in Tbilisi 17:30 and I knew by the time I reached Georgia and got in from the airport, I wouldn’t want to go out for half an hour in the cold, whereas I had plenty of time in the morning. So I set my alarm for 8am (highly aware that 8am in Cyprus is 10am in Tbilisi and this time tomorrow I wouldn’t be waking up, I’d be getting on a minibus two metro stops away from home) and went for breakfast. It went better than yesterday. I found the butter so I made two slices of toast and while I waited for the slow but brilliant conveyor toaster I collected up mugs of apple juice, mini croissants, things of jam and a big spoonful of chocolate spread on a plate. I am fed! I am ready to go out for a walk, get a bus and go to Georgia!

I walked. I went back to the prom and walked all the way up to Larnaca beach. It was sunny and I was in a t-shirt but there was a chilly breeze that made me suspect I wouldn’t have had much of a problem with bringing my jumper with me. I got back to the hotel in plenty of time to pack up and then went down the road to the bus stop. I’m irrationally proud of managing to get on the bus – the bus stop sign was only on the other side of the road and although the map said this was the bus stop, I wasn’t certain whether it would actually stop here. I saw it coming. I stepped out past the cars and held out my arm until I saw it indicate and then I boarded!

Airport was easy enough with one snag. I had to check in for my flight at the desk instead of at a machine and then I had to go through the weird passport control with the machines. Got another police receipt. Waited in the queue. Two border guards very slowly checking passports. Then a third arrived and began collecting the receipts and waving people through. I guess everything they need to scan for is on those receipts and someone can sit and process them later? But I wasn’t sure whether that was enough. I have a Cyprus entry stamp. Surely I need a matching exit stamp? Sometimes you can “hope for the best” and take your chances. I tend to believe that’s not the right approach when it comes to borders and passports. I went back and asked “don’t I need a stamp?” He seemed to think I wanted one rather than needed one but stamped without protest and that felt better. Through security and I was sitting at my gate by about 11:20, for a flight scheduled to take off at 13:40. Yes, I could definitely have dithered longer in Larnaca this morning.

I watched the incoming flight online and it arrived about 15m late. Oddly, ten or fifteen minutes later, it still hasn’t arrived at the gate. Boarding was supposed to begin 10 minutes ago and people keep going up to the staff and asking. No, it hasn’t started. No, the plane isn’t here. Boarding will start in about 5 minutes. It’s not looking like an overly full flight at the moment but it has more than its fair share of people who don’t seem to understand how airports work. There’s a woman who’s just sat next to me who can’t figure out how the handle on her case work and there’s a man who dumped his luggage about 45 minutes ago and is walking huge circles of the terminal staring at his phone and passing by every 15 or 20 minutes so I know he’s at least still here somewhere.

The flight was uneventful but very scenic. If you want a fairly short sightseeing flight, I can recommend Larnaca to Tbilisi – two hours of white snowy mountains, ridges and valleys that my inner geologist enjoys but doesn’t have enough training to properly understand.

I was nervous about getting through passport control – I’ve checked and double checked and then checked again just in case and I do not need a visa to enter Georgia but I still worry as I approach the desk. I was a bit suspicious about how quiet and empty the airport was. We were not a full flight but I’d been among the last to disembark and yes, there was a sizeable group around the transfer desk but not 3/4 of a plane-load sort of sizeable. A handful of people ahead of me at passport control and then one single person sitting at baggage reclaim. Of course, the world sprang to life out in arrivals. Everyone is either collecting or they want you in their taxi. “Taxi?” “Nope.” “In a few minutes?” “Nope.” “Ok, in maybe fifteen or twenty minutes.” “Nope”. I knew what I was doing. I’d read this in detail. Go to the orange Bank of Georgia kiosk and buy a blue transport ticket. Go to the orange machine that looks like an ATM and add a week’s subscription to it. Could have done with the addendums “the Bank of Georgia kiosk is to the right when exiting, by the door, and they only take cash” and “it’s add a subscription, not top up transport” but other than that it went smoothly. The bus was where I expected it to be and I boarded it by the back door and scanned my new ticket. The drivers want nothing to do with the money aspect of the bus. Good.

Last, I knew I needed to take this bus to Central Station and then take the metro 4 stops south to Avlabari or jump off at Liberty Square and take the metro 1 stop south to Avlabari if I spotted it. I had my map open and watched the little blue dot and the closer we got to the city centre, the more I began to think “I don’t see any way to get from here to Liberty Square without driving through Avlabari”. And it did. So, jump off at Avlabari, don’t get on the metro and walk 300m down the road to the hotel! Could not have been easier! Good bus!

The room is pleasant enough. There’s a building on my street – next to the hotel – that looks like a bomb hit it. It might be semi-demolished and then abandoned but it’s definitely got something of the look of having been hit by a bomb a couple of decades ago. The moment I saw it, I knew my room would overlook it and it does but you kind of have to peer over the high balcony wall and if you look to right or left, you see the lights of Tbilisi. I’m looking forward to seeing this city by daylight – from the highway on the bus, it looks like a city of lights spilling down a narrow valley in a mountain and maybe that’s what it is. Find out tomorrow. It’s a big room with a big shower tiled in interesting patterned/textured tiles and it has a full-size fridge but it also has a huge step up and then back down into the bathroom and I will fall over it and smash my head in during the next week. There’s another big step out to the balcony and the room itself is up a step from the door. I’m a little nervous that there are sofas and a TV right outside my door – I don’t want to listen to people socialising out there! – but on the other hand, I’ve seen nor heard no evidence that there’s anyone else in the building so far. Not that I’ve been here long. I left my luggage and went straight back to Avlabari to figure out the metro on my way to the big shopping centre and the big supermarket at Liberty Square. Familiar Soviet-style metro, complete with brown plastic-looking escalators, a babushka in a glass box at the bottom and an LCD countdown telling you when the next train is coming. Easy peasy. Irrationally glad my travel ticket working on the bus wasn’t just a fluke too.

I bought bread rolls and butter and juice and chocolate and plastic cheese slices for sandwiches and an actual block of cheese to eat with a baguette (had to stop off at the Carrefour City up the road; Goodwill is a pretty good supermarket but by 7.30pm, it was out of fresh bread) and then I came home and ate my body weight in bread and cheese, unpacked so I could be sure everything had made it after taking three days to get here and now… I think I’m going to not do much until bedtime.

Georgia day 2: in Cyprus

It’s been a mixed day. It started with some good apple juice and some good toast, made with a conveyor toaster – but no butter. Dry toast, apple juice, a bowl of cereal and then out to see Larnaca’s famous salt lake, which the guidebook said looks white. It doesn’t. It looks like an ordinary lake. It’s a great sight, with mountains in the distance and Larnaca on its edge and a mosque at the other edge and if you zoom in with your camera, the white speckles you assumed to be seagulls turned out to be actual pink flamingos. But it was hot. It’s January and based on the temperature of the open walls I found while attempting to depart the fourth floor via the stairs instead of the lift, I thought I’d want my hoodie. I did not. I definitely didn’t want my big boots but that’s all I brought with me. I’m expecting Georgia to be cold. I was expecting Cyprus to be warmer but I wasn’t expecting it to be hot. I spent a while admiring the lake but my plan to stroll some of the way round it wasn’t going to happen. Back to the hotel. Maybe spend the afternoon in the pool.

Actually, the hotel is quite cool and so is the balcony, mostly because it’s not facing into the sun. I was quite chilly, in fact. So I forgot how hot it is outside and decided to go back out into Larnaca. It was a lot more tolerable. I don’t know if that’s because I headed south and walked along the seafront, cooled by a sea breeze or if the temperature really did drop. I walked along the same prom I did last night, saw the sea sparkling in the sun, saw how shallow it is and how clear and wished I could put my feet in it and walked up until I found Larnaca town. I had a quick visit to the castle, which is mostly interesting in that you can go up on the ramparts and look out at the beach and the sea from up there. Then I went looking for a supermarket. Google Maps and Reddit between them seem to suggest there are only two decent supermarkets in all Larnaca. One is just around the corner from my hotel – but closed on Sundays. The other is Lidl, just out of the north of the town. I’m staying just out of the south of the town. The mini supermarket in the centre of Larnaca didn’t have bread. Fine. I still have Pringles and half a bar of orange Rittersport that I picked up at the airport. I can live off that (I can’t live off that). But there was a Burger King. I shouldn’t go in Burger King when I’m away adventuring but I was hungry. I ordered chips & Sprite and then was punished for going in Burger King by having to wait forever because the drink machine had broken. Orders were piling up, trays were piling up, burgers and chips were put on their trays and then taken away and put on the warming tray because the machine wouldn’t work. The audacity of one customer – when it finally began spitting out liquid, two staff began making the drinks to go with about ten orders, getting them out as quick as possible, and this moron looked at this drink that he’d been waiting at least 20 minutes for, at the staff trying to pour as many drinks as humanly possibly from a malfunctioning machine and went “… I don’t want ice in it”. I think I would have said quite firmly “Today you do”. I was out in a t-shirt because it’s warm but you can spot the tourists, they’re the only ones who think it’s warm. The locals are all in jumpers and most of them with coats or jackets over the top. It was cooler than first thing in the morning, or cooler than it was by the lake maybe, but if I had three layer on, I’d probably die. I have no idea how I”m going to get all my warm clothes to the airport in the morning if I can’t wear them.

Anyway, by the time I’d eaten my chips, there was a big black cloud forming over Larnaca. The sky was still blue over the Med and further down the prom but there was a coolish breeze and I began to feel like I’d better get home because it was going to end up as a race between me and the rain. I won, and I took a few minutes out of the race to make friends with a cat. There are hundreds of cats here and this one stared at me and meowed and then came over and rubbed itself on my legs and then nearly came home with me.

And that’s about all I’ve done today. I’ve planned breakfast, I’ve planned to do my walk in the morning and I’ve planned what bus I need to be at the airport on time. I’ve planned to go to either the Carrefour between the metro and my hotel in Tbilisi or the Spar across the river if I arrive after 8pm and I plan to eat my body weight in bread tomorrow.

Georgia day 1: flying to Cyprus

Here I am in Larnaca, most of the way to Georgia. I got up to Heathrow without any major problems – just when I got to short stay T4, I followed the Parking Meet & Greet lane only for the meet & greet barrier to be closed off, which meant I had to drive through the (ANPR-controlled) drop-off zone and go back round to go into the car park. Dropped off the car, strolled into T4 very happily, looked up at the departure board – and my flight wasn’t on there. It took a good moment for to realise that’s because I’m actually flying from T5 (I’m flying back into T4 at the end of this and I’d rather have the hassle of going between terminals when I’ve got plenty of time on the way than when I just want to get home afterwards). I found the trains – was expecting a Tube train or maybe a special Heathrow shuttle but in fact, I was having my first ride on the Elizabeth Line. That took me up to T1&2 (or is it 2&3?) and then I had to change onto the Heathrow Express (another first) to get to T5.

Security was no problem. Breakfast was. The only place that would do toast was Giraffe and that had a huge queue outside because it’s the first place you come to when you emerge from security. So I got a meal deal and sat at an empty gate for the best part of an hour. The board said my plane would be at the A Gates, which meant I didn’t have to jump on the transit across to one of the other buildings and when it finally came up, I was only sitting two gates away.

The flight was long but uneventful – long for someone who’s never done a flight longer than London to Moscow, anyway. There was a lady in my seat because assistance had plopped her there but actually, she was supposed to be in window seat on the other side. Then the man sitting in the aisle seat was asked if he’d swap so a girlfriend and boyfriend could sit together. He considered it, right up until he discovered he’d be swapping his aisle seat for a middle seat. Nope.

We flew over mountains. I thought I recognised Achensee and Pertisau and Flight Radar 24 says I was correct. I think Ljubljana was the place where the mountains unexpectedly stopped. Well, it happened somewhere, anyway. We also went over Skopje and Sarajevo and out into the Aegean near Thessaloniki. I guessed that one – I could see that the mountains had finally stopped and we were going over the sea. Google Maps obviously didnt work without signal but I could see a blurry part-loaded view of the Greek coast and the islands I could see below me seemed to match one off the coast east of Thessaloniki, with a second weird-shaped island seeming to confirm that. Flight Radar 24 confirmed it for definite. It very suddenly got dark over the Aegean. By the time we landed in Larnaca at just after 6.10pm, I was wishing I’d been able to find time earlier for my daily walk. Passport control was easy – UK passports were allowed in the machines, I scanned my own passport and received a kind of police receipt with my photo on it, which border control glanced at before stamping my passport and sending me on my way.

There’s a supermarket near my hotel but I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to get there before it closed so I got enough snacks for the evening at the airport and went looking for the bus. The signs said it was out the far side and there were buses there – the pre-booked shuttle bus, tour buses etc. No sign of an ordinary bus. Literally. No bus, no sign, no bus stop, no timetables, nothing. Undeterred, I looked up what bus I wanted to get and took a screenshot. Then I heard a bus! Up to my right, on a cliff! There was a glass walkway sticking out of the airport and crossing to the top of that cliff, which was apparently where the car park is. So back into the terminal, go upstairs, look for the walkway. Bus! I found the bus! I showed the driver my screenshot so he knew where I wanted to alight and I bought a ticket the old-fashioned way, with cash. 15 minutes later, I was jumping off into the Cypriot night and strolling 300m up the road to my hotel!

I didn’t particularly want to go out in the dark in a strange place on my own for my walk but I also didn’t want to break a streak that’s only three months off hitting four full years. So I strolled down the road towards the beach and discovered a well-lit promenade with just enough people walking on it to feel happy. Lots of fish restaurants, a full moon reflecting perfectly on the water, just cool enough that you want the hoodie but don’t feel the need to take it off, perfectly flat and I was back, 2km and 28 minutes later. Now I could actually look at my room, discover that I have a balcony and that the pool is closed and covered right outside. The photos make it look like it’s on the roof but it’s absolutely not. I have white towels for the shower and blue towels for the pool, which suggests it’s open. Whether it’s a suitable temperature to swim in, considering it’s January, I may find out tomorrow.