There are two items of clothing I wish I had brought with me, shorts and gloves! The gloves would have been useful when we were in the snow at the top of the Troodos mountains, today was definitely a shorts day, blue skies and warm sunshine.
This morning we visited the castle at Kolossi, a crusader castle originally built for the Knights of St John as a staging post for the invasion of the Holy Land. 800 years later we are still using Cyprus as a base for attacking the Middle East, some things never change.
The castle was quite good but more interesting was the sugar factory in the grounds. This dates from the 14th century with a substantial aqueduct used to feed water to a mill which crushed the sugar cane. The factory was in use for over 300 years by which time it could not compete with the sugar from the West Indies. There are plenty of old castles but old factories are unusual and perhaps more interesting.
Next we visited Ancient Kourion, a Roman settlement in a stunning location. There was plenty to see, some well preserved mosaics, the remains of a very large Christian church and a 3500 seat amphitheatre.
We were getting hungry by 1pm as we had skipped breakfast so we drove down to the beach to a restaurant which, like a lot of cafes and restaurants in the daytime, was full of Russians. We have not come across them in the evenings so they must frequent posher places or perhaps go out later than elderly Brits.
Tonight we will probably eat in a rather scruffy but excellent local restaurant which we found on Thursday and then tomorrow we are moving to Lanaka but we may go via South Nicosia and shout rude things over the wall at the Turks.
The extreme method of getting an aerial view of the site.