this little piggy didn't have turkey

Uploaded 02/09/2009

I can't remember exactly where this was; somewhere on the west face of Cyprus... most importantly it was nowhere near the hotel with the crowds of southern English package-holiday oaves eating turkey dinners and harassing the hotel bar staff in stereotypically characteristically imbecilic ways.

As the car-hire place hadn't had any extremely small cars left we'd ended up with a battered 4WD thing which seemed ideal to drive up into the hills, over the top of some more hills, back down the hills to a beach for a quick picnic lunch, over another hill to get to the north coast then along a motorway back to the hotel before it got too dark. Interesting to note that despite my usual (and increasing) fear of driving on streets I was fine with going up and down rutted, gravelly slippy tracks even when we slid sideways a little way or had to piss about with the various wheel-modes to find ways of achieving traction. On busy roads, other people are the largest risk. A tree stays where it is and would in many cases have been the only thing stopping the car sliding off the side of a mountainside track and plummeting. The hairiest moments (until we got back into traffic) where when we were heading uphill and encountered someone trying to descend an uneven 10% slope in anything other than their lowest possible gear.

Neither of us are beachy people but it was an entertaining alternative to the usual having to sit indoors eating for most of the day as is usually the case. After spending the 2000 winter festive season by ourselves in Edinburgh as we'd just moved flat a week earlier we started rotating between each set of parents, taking every third year off. Cyprus wasn't a particular target but had turned out to be cheap to get to, though almost everywhere was infested with the British to the extent that there was a branch of M&S and Next in Paphos.