Let’s take a break from the ruins and antiquities and delve into the villa I stayed in in Cyprus.
A villa is brand new territory for me. I admit, I’m very much not a fan of the hostel – I can’t be doing with sleeping in a loud room with a dozen loud strangers – but I go for the kind of cheap hotels that my mother fears I’ll get murdered in, and I don’t care at all about sharing a bathroom. I’m also reasonably happy to camp. I mean, I’m happy to go for a more expensive hotel room but I don’t want to pay that expensive, so I’ll endlessly scroll comparison sites in the hope of stumbling on a bargain – like that one night in Reykjavik I spent in the Hilton.
But a villa? This is decadence and luxury beyond my wildest imagination.
My parents did look for something more hotel-like but there wasn’t really anything suitable and travel agents were adamant when they mentioned “our two daughters” that they meant small children rather than two grown adults and kept suggesting sofa beds and camp beds. But in the end, we went for this villa.
We knew it had three bedrooms. We knew it had four bathrooms; three with showers. We knew it had a pool. We knew it had three balconies. We’d looked at the pictures and the floor plans and hunted for reviews. What we didn’t really grasp was the scale of it.
So we arrived on Sunday afternoon, opened the key box and let ourselves in and then stood – actually literally – awestruck in the hallway. It was huge and tiled and white and echoey. The kitchen was twice the size we were expecting and it had a dining area attached to it. On the other side was a utility room connecting the main house to the car port – we called it the garage but it didn’t have a front. I knew there was a shower room there but this spare shower room in the corner was getting on for twice the size of my bathroom at home. And of course, the living room was bigger than we were expecting.
We ventured upstairs. Here at least, the rooms were mostly the size we were expecting – two rooms with double beds and one with a pair of twin beds (mine, obviously, because my sister is a princess who can’t possibly sleep in a single bed, you know that!). The upstairs bathroom was also pretty big, with bath and shower and two sinks. And then there were the balconies. The master bedroom had one on the front and one that wrapped around the side and the back and the other two rooms shared a balcony on the other side. It took a long time to figure out how to open the balcony doors, which were covered with the biggest roller blinds I’ve ever seen – so big that Mum struggled to roll them up.
And finally, there was the pool. Our very own outdoors pool, 10m long by 5m wide, with a sharp drop in the middle to make a deep end deep enough for at least jumping in. Last year, when we went caravanning in France, my sister bought that Instagram Primark inflatable unicorn but we couldn’t take it in the campsite pool. Well, we took it in our own private pool. It’s incredibly hard to ride on and very easy to fall off and it acquired a slow puncture – a small hole exactly where you might expect to find a hole, which meant that every morning when we got up, it looked sad and saggy and had to be reinflated.
There were downsides. The big one, the dealbreaker for me, which no one had mentioned because apparently everyone already knows, is that Cyprus doesn’t have working plumbing and all toilet paper must be placed in a bin beside the toilet.
The second was that there were ants and we needed to put anything edible or sweet or sticky in the fridge.
The third was how echoey it was. I had a bath on the first night and while everyone else went round closing the blinds, I wondered if we were being invaded by an enemy armed with tanks. The blinds had heavy weights along the bottom to keep them flat and they crashed against the wall with the slightest movement.
Fourth was the water. Most household water in Cyprus appears to be solar-powered – which means there’s no hot water after dark. Many a night I got in the bath only to emerge a couple of hours later with incipient hypothermia.
And fifth was the heat. It was far too hot to sleep with the doors and windows closed. But if you opened them, the breeze made the blinds crash (and I got bitten in a nice triangle on the back of my left hand by mosquitos). There was air conditioning but I’m not used to sleeping with something whirring and beeping. On the other hand, it had a small control panel in the wall. For easy functioning, just press the button to switch it on for an hour or two or four. This panel had a single blue LED in it. I’m very light-sensitive and this light was ludicrously bright. I could do shadow puppets on the blinds by it. Between the light and the heat, I genuinely didn’t sleep until the sixth night, when I built a tower out of luggage and shoes and washbag to block this tiny little blinding light.
We soon got into a little ritual of getting up, putting our feet in the pool before breakfast, going out for the morning, coming back for a swim before lunch, going out for the afternoon and then coming back for a second swim before going out for dinner in Coral Bay – well, everyone else did. I’m not so good at eating in restaurants.
As for the setting – we were about seven minutes north of the Coral Bay strip, on a smaller road that runs down to the sea caves. Two of the balconies had sea views – sunset views, too. I took a lot of sunset pictures while home alone of an evening. We were also about a mile (as the crow flies; the road winds round and back on itself) from Pafos Zoo, which explains the mysterious shrieking peacocks I heard on the second night.
Our landlord lived in a smaller house right behind the big villa, most likely on the same plot of land and occupying the same house number and mailbox. He grows prickly pear cactuses in his garden and the entire east side of the street is lined with banana groves. The Pafos area seems to grow a lot of bananas. I always thought they grew on something that looks a lot like palm trees but they’re actually quite short stubby trees with permanently peeling browning strips of bark or leaf and the bananas themselves appear to be engorged stamens, which are wrapped up in blue plastic bags, whether to protect or to act as a greenhouse, I don’t know. We took great interest in the bananas. The villa on the other side of the road had orange and lemon trees in the garden. We had a fruit tree of some kind but it was smaller and none of us could identify the fruit.
