When you think of shopping in Cyprus, Lefkara lace is probably about all that comes to mind. As lovely as it is, if you know where to look and what to buy, Cyprus has some gorgeous surprises in store, in both the North and the South. While Larnaka and Nicosia have some fabulous boutiques and design stores, you won't find anything you can't buy outside of Cyprus, so the best buy is traditional handicrafts. Handmade lace and embroidery is what the island is celebrated for. There's a long tradition of lacemaking using traditional techniques passed down from generation to generation, the most coveted lace being lefkaritika from the village of Lefkara. You'll also find rustic textiles, including bedcovers, wall hangings and tablecloths, made in the North (where the colors are more vibrant and the styles are more Turkish) and the South (where they tend to come in neutral colours in heavy natural wools, which is more typically Mediterranean). Other handicrafts include colourful handwoven baskets, rustic pottery, ceramics, and glassware, lovely olive wood products (including big beautiful bowls and wooden cooking and salad spoons), and chic jewellery (often contemporary interpretations of ancient Cypriot styles). Aside from the villages where traditional handicrafts are still made - Omodos, Fyti, Liopetri, Sotira, Xylofagou, Geroskipou, Koloni, Omodos and Foini are all good places to look in the South - the best place to buy handicrafts in the South is at the government-run Cyprus Handicraft Centre and in the North at the Buyuk Han in Northern Nicosia. If you're taking things from the North to the South and are unlucky to get searched at the border, your Northern goodies might get confiscated. Hopefully, as border restrictions relax, that's one rule that will be scrapped.
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Want to go to a place where you can take a stroll with some shepherds, scramble about soaring castles, fill up on a 'full kebab' and walk 'the line'? Then take a look at my story Northern Cyprus: 10 Reasons to Go Now which has just gone up on the Nine MSN Travel site to see why I think you need to go soon. The 'line' you'll walk, by the way, is 'the Green Line', the UN-buffer zone that currently separates the North and South of Cyprus. The fact that talks are currently underway between the leaders of both sides to pull down the borders and unite the country is the main reason I think you should visit soon. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for unification. But if you haven't seen Northern Cyprus the way it is now, you should, before it's too late. It will become a very different place once the country is united, for better and possibly - but I hope not - for worse.Pictured? Another good reason to go - the Turkish Delight, or lokum. Yum!
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We do a lot of driving as part of our guidebook research - rather, my partner and co-author Terry drives and I do the trip planning and navigating. So it's inevitable that some of the most memorable aspects of our trips are the roads we drive. I stumbled across Matador's The World's Most Spectacular Roads, which inspired this post. As I only write about places I've been, here's my pick of some of the globe's most jawdropping drives from the roads we've travelled over the last few years. I've categorized them by country or region, as some destinations are gifted with so many dramatically beautiful routes:1. WESTERN AUSTRALIA: this colossal island's most stunning drives are in the West. Our favorites are in the Kimberley and Pilbara regions of the Northwest, especially those through the area's national parks, including Karjini, Purnululu (Bungle Bungles), Millstream-Chichester and the Kennedy Range National Parks. Empty roads run through flat arid outback landscapes sprinkled with strange wildflowers, incredible rock formations, and mountains sliced with deep river gorges. These are also the country's most isolated roads (pictured) where you can drive 900 kilometres between towns and not see a soul, so a 4WD with extra fuel, water and supplies is recommended.
2. MAINLAND GREECE: the country's mainland boasts some of the planet's most breathtaking drives. Those we've loved best are the road from Edessa via Florina and Pisoderi to the splendid Prespa Lakes and fishing village of Psarades, near the border with Macedonia and Yugoslavia, which boasts some of the most pristine country we've come across; the narrow roads through the high country of the Pindos range with their monstrous rugged snow-capped mountains, hills thick with shrubs in every shade of green, and grey granite rock formations around Vikos Gorge; and the wild ruggedly beautiful Mani region of the Peloponnese (read more about our Greek travels on our Lonely Planet Greece Trip Journal).
3. CRETE: yes, we know Crete is an island of Greece, but Crete has so many amazing drives with spectacular scenery it deserves a listing of its own. The high roads of the isolated southeast coast skirt the mountains offering virtually birds-eye-view sea vistas, scenic routes snake through the elevated rural plateaus of central Crete offering picturesque views of villages and farmland, while the views from the windy roads of the west coast are so awe-inspring you'll find yourself stopping at every turn to take photos.
4. CALABRIA: Aspromonte, Sila and Pollino National Parks in Calabria, Italy, offer breathtaking scenery. In all three national parks, high roads snake through thick forests that form canopies over the roads - the drives are spooky in parts (very dark and moody) and the air fresh and fragrant. But once out of the woods, the views are almost always stunning, whether it's a vista of a hilltop village cascading down a mountain or a field blanketed with wildflowers.
5. CYPRUS: good narrow roads criss-cross the central Troodos mountains through thick aromatic pine forests dotted with Byzantine fresco-filled churches and splendid monasteries, the most impressive being the serpentine road through Cedar Valley; in the northwest, from Pomos to Kato Pyrgos, pretty fishing harbours bob with boats while around Kato Pyrgos the road rises to majestic heights, where it's just the mountain goats enjoying magnificent coastal vistas; and in Northern Cyprus, the road through the Karpaz Peninsula takes you through pristine country where wild donkeys graze on green meadows, by pretty turquoise coves watched over by crumbling Byzantine churches, and to one of the island's best beaches, a wide stretch of sand backed by high dunes.
Read part 2 here.
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The world's most jawdropping drives, pt 1
Posted by BEST TRAVEL GUIDE on Thursday, August 28, 2008
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The June-July issue of Jazeera Airways' J magazine features a few of our articles and Terry's fab photography. If you're not flying with the funky no-frills airline this month (or next), then you can read the stories online, although we love the layout and design of the printed magazines more. Check out Cyprus: Beyond the Beach, our guide to the top ten off-the-beaten-track things to see and do on the island (along with my update of the Cyprus destination guide); The Empire Strikes Back, about Istanbul's hip t-shirt brand Ottoman Empire (we did an interview with the lovely Ayse Bali, one of the owners, to be published in various forms in the future, which I'll keep you posted on); and Room with a View: the W Istanbul, which we quite literally wrote in our hotel room there just hours before the glam opening party I told you about. (Terry should have got a credit for writing that story too actually, but somehow his name got left off... these things happen occasionally unfortunately.) The May issue of Gulf Marketing Review featured a Tourism Sector Analysis (sounds dull I know, but it was fascinating. Really.) with my piece 'Low Cost Hospitality Comes to the Gulf', on the explosion of budget and "limited-service" hotels in the Gulf (sounds dull I know, but I tried to make it fascinating. Really.) If you're lucky enough to stay at a Ritz Carlton hotel next month, look out for a wee little piece from me on Doha's Islamic Art Museum as part of their global summer arts coverage; if you're taking a super-swish Seabourn cruise (the only cruise ships you'd ever get me on) you can read my 'Old Dubai, New Dubai' story in their on-board magazine; and if you're checking in to one of the Radisson-Carlson hotels, you can take a look at my guide to Dubai in Voyageur magazine.Pictured? Not Cyprus, Istanbul, Doha, or Dubai. Instead, I thought I'd share another image from our recent trip to Calabria. I took this from the belvedere at Scilla, overlooking the castle and old town. Sublime, isn't it?
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Our latest travel writing: in print and online
Posted by BEST TRAVEL GUIDE on Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Becoming ‘a citizen of the road’ is a big part of the appeal of caravanning. For the 8 million American households that have a recreational vehicle, or RV, ‘it’s not just a vehicle, it’s a lifestyle’. And taking to the road on a permanent vacation has never been more popular despite the rocketing fuel prices, according to the recent USA Today article: RVs Beckon Baby Boomers Despite Fuel Costs. In Australia, caravanning is also experiencing something of a revival (see yesterday’s post and the Sydney Morning Herald story: Paradise Fills Up Fast for Nomads), where some 300,000 RVs are registered and up to 80,000 are thought to be touring at any one time - not a small number when you consider the country's tiny population. In the USA, the idea of ‘full-timing’ (as the RVers refer to permanent travelling) is increasingly appealing to a population fed up with airport hassles and flight delays. So much so that the industry predicts a boom in sales as a generation of baby boomers begin to make retirement decisions. ‘Home is where you park it’ was the slogan on a t-shirt spotted by the USA Today reporter at a recent rally where RVs ranged from humble, collapsible, canvas-walled camping trailers (known as ‘pop-ups’ in Australia) to luxurious 45 foot motor homes equipped with king-sized beds and state-of-the-art entertainment systems, and price tags from US$15,000 to $1.5 million. The owners of the old vans parked on this simple camping site (pictured), splendidly situated on a fertile cliff top on the Arkamas Peninsula in Cyprus, certainly weren't concerned with cutting-edge sound - and who would be with the soundtrack of the ocean for background music? - but I bet they'd proudly wear those t-shirts.
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Home is where you park it – for citizens of the road
Posted by BEST TRAVEL GUIDE on Sunday, March 23, 2008
Here are three more fragrant, flower- filled places you should spend some time in this spring. See my previous post for three more heady destination ideas and the post before that for my criteria for selecting these aromatic spots:3) SYRIA – in the mountains behind the seaside town of Tartus, on the way to delightful Safita (itself a village of twisting lanes and cobblestone alleys dominated by a splendid Crusader keep) and Mishtayeh (with its handsome stone buildings), you’ll find quintessentially Mediterranean scenery of olive groves and citrus orchards, woods of pine trees, ramshackle stone houses with terraces shaded with grape vines and gardens grown wild with tangles of bouganvillea, jasmine, oleander, and cactus.
4) SICILY – in spring the interior of the island is blanketed with wildflowers, especially in the wild Madonie mountains near Cefalu where you can inhale the aromatic air as you walk old shepherd’s routes. As you drive through the picturesque landscapes around Siracusa and between the hill towns of Ragusa and Noto, with their beautiful baroque architecture, you’ll see an abundance of flowers by the roadside.
5) CYPRUS – the whole countryside is stunning, covered with fields of yellow mustard flowers in spring, but you’ll see kaleidoscopic colours in the more remote, pristine Karpaz peninsula (in Northern Cyprus), home to bucolic farmland and windswept sandy beaches, and the beautiful Arkamas peninsula (in the Republic of Cyprus) with its pine-covered hills and rocky coastline.
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It's time to get out and smell the wildflowers! Pack your walking boots, grab your picnic basket, get on a plane, and prepare to drive through breathtaking scenery. See my previous post for the criteria for selecting these sublime spring destinations:1) CRETE – the isolated eastern coast is dotted with tiny seaside communities of summer cottages peeling with paint and pristine sandy beaches; behind them colossal mountains cradle lush, fertile farming plateaus with quaint stone villages. In March the area is dotted with flowers, but in April there's an explosion of colour here and also on the equally isolated and mountainous western coast.
2) MAINLAND GREECE – the deep blue Prespa lakes and sleep fishing village of Psarádes near the Macedonian and Albanian borders, Meteora with its magical mountain-top monasteries (pictured), the magnificent Pindos Mountains and Zagoria villages where traditional grey stone houses cling to the hillside, the Pelopponese with its remote Mani, fertile Arcadia and wild Sparta, the dramatic Parnonas Mountains, and because I can't resist including one island, fragrant Corfu. For more ideas, see our Greece trip journal written during a Spring 2006 research trip for Lonely Planet.
3) TURKEY - all along the Mediterranean you'll find flowers blooming everywhere, especially in the countryside surrounding the beachside villages of Olimpos, Patara and Cirali, around the tomato-growing town of Kumluova, and in the woods around the ruins of Kaya. On a Sunday you'll frequently see empty cars parked on the side of the road - their owners, families of locals can be seen picking flowers in the fields or picnicking in the forests. You'd be wise to follow their example.
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The Cypriot village of Lefkara, pictured here and in the previous two posts, is an old village of stone buildings that have been beautifully restored. Known for its lace, its tiny hilly streets are lined with shops selling the exquisite handmade embroidery (along with imported, manufactured reproductions.) The road leading to town is lined with enormous tacky signs saying telling you to “Park here!” and Come inside and watch old women make lace!” If you ignore the signs and drive on, you’ll most likely be confronted by touts furiously waving to get your attention only to tell you it’s impossible to drive your little car through the extremely narrow streets of the village and that you’re better off parking here – conveniently, outside the entrance to his restaurant. Ignoring him, you’ll push on, finding out that the lanes are no narrower than those of any other Cypriot village, but discovering that the old ladies are just as aggressive at encouraging you into their stores as the touts are, making shopping for lace suddenly unappealing. On your way out of town you’ll look back with disappointment, until you notice the picturesque village vista and won’t be able to resist parking to take a photo. Once out of the car, however, you won’t help but notice the abandoned junk scattered about the place (rusty fridges are common) and the trash sprawling down the hill, as if dumped there daily by the local garbage truck. This is a typical sight outside villages in Cyprus that you definitely don’t read about in guidebooks. The first time you see it you’ll be disappointed and you’ll probably find yourself getting angrier each time you see it after that. But what do you prefer to read? The romantic version or the reality?
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Romantic representations in guidebook writing: case study #2
Posted by BEST TRAVEL GUIDE on Monday, March 17, 2008
Romance or reality: what do travellers really want to read in guidebooks? Cyprus is dotted with delightful villages of winding lanes and atmospheric stone houses sprawling down hillsides in woody valleys. Sturdy old ladies can be seen carting bundles of wood down the street on their backs and old men ride donkeys through town, the guidebooks tell us. And it’s true. But unfortunately many of the villages are now ghost towns, their ramshackle old stone houses boarded up, their gardens unkempt, junk crowding their yards, and trash dumped down hillsides on the outskirts of town. The young people have moved to the cities or overseas to work and the few residents that are left are over 60, enjoying their last years in the village they have loved and known all their lives, and struggling alone to maintain their traditional way of life. Well, they’re not so alone. It’s not uncommon to see a wrinkled old lady in headscarf and apron sitting in her doorway, taking in some sun and watching the passing traffic – and next to her see a bored young Filipina or Indian woman, perhaps employed by the guilty son or daughter as a companion-cum-maid to watch over their abandoned parent. You don’t read any of this in the guidebooks.
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We came across these sheep sleeping by the side of the road in the isolated north east of Crete and we spent some time simply taking pleasure in their peace. We’ve done this a lot recently, as we’ve travelled around Crete and Cyprus, pulling the car over to watch some ducks paddling across a creek or goats clambering up a hill, spending some moments taking in a bucolic landscape, a field blanketed with mustard flowers, or falcons gliding over a limestone gorge. The effect has been soothing, calming, even uplifting, and invigorating. In the Art of Travel, Alain de Botton writes about a trip he took to the Lake District, England. While the reasons for the journey were personal, he tells us, they belonged to a broader eighteenth century historical movement when city dwellers started to travel to the country “to restore health to their bodies, and more important, harmony to the souls.” De Botton ruminates about nature’s ability to heal and inspire, and about English Romantic poet William Wordsworth who would sit under a tree with a sublime landscape before him, writing about daffodils dancing in the breeze and other odes to the restorative power of nature. Admired for his ability to reveal the poetic beauty in the everyday, Wordsworth believed that nature was a requirement of happiness, and, as De Botton discovers, that birds, streams and sheep were indispensable in correcting the damage inflicted by city life. That nature helped us to seek out the good in life. According to De Botton, Wordsworth found instances of sanity, purity and permanence in nature, flowers were models of humility, animals the paragons of stoicism, and went as far as to invite readers to look at the world through animals’ eyes. De Botton also finds himself coming face to face with some sheep on his trip. It’s interesting to know that Wordsworth’s poetry (like films today) attracted travellers to the places that inspired it, so that, as De Botton tells us, by 1845 it was thought that the Lake District had more tourists than sheep.
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In the tiny village of Büyükkonuk in Northern (Turkish-speaking) Cyprus, we recently got to hang out in a paddock with a shepherd and his sheep, clamber through perfumed bushland to collect wild herbs (thyme, oreganos, sage, myrtle, and fennel), and learn how to make local feta and olive bread with the village baker. In the cosy sandstone home of our hosts, Ismael and Lois Cemal, we warmed ourselves by a pot-bellied stove and ate a delicious dinner of baked rabbit with vegetables, both from their own garden. The couple are the architects of a project that has established eco-tourism in Northern Cyprus and turned little Büyükkonuk into the area's first eco-village. Driven by a desire not to see Northern Cyprus go the way of the South with its ugly mass tourism development, and disappointed by the readiness with which their compatriots are selling their farms to developers, Lois and Ismael devised a plan. First they turned part of their property into a B&B, providing simple accommodation in a traditional stone house. Next they trained as tour guides and offered a range of activities intended to give people a taste of life in a working village, from donkey treks through the countryside to olive picking 'tours' followed by picnics in the groves. After winning a scholarship at the University of Turin to develop the project further, Ismael set about bringing the rest of his community on board. He encouraged his neighbors to rebuild their crumbling stone houses, transforming them into B&Bs, and applied for funds to reconstruct historic town buildings for community use, like the restoration of an old olive press and the creation of a public square, which Ismael is overseeing. The hope is that if the villagers can see how they can make a living carrying on the traditional way of life they have for centuries then they won't sell out to big business and their village life won't disappear. A stay at Büyükkonuk is a must if you're the kind of traveller seeking more authentic experiences and the opportunity to participate in the everyday life of a working village - or if you've ever wondered what it is exactly that a shepherd does. If you're flying Jazeera Airways over the next month, take a look at our longer feature story on Lois and Ismael's eco-tourism project in J Magazine, the airline's in-flight read.
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Strolling with shepherds and olive-picking picnics: an eco-tourism experience in Northern Cyprus
Posted by BEST TRAVEL GUIDE on Saturday, March 8, 2008
Brown cafes are ubiquitous in European cities like Brussels, Bruges, Antwerp, and Amsterdam. These traditional bar-cum-eatery-cum-coffee shops, with their big picture windows, rickety wooden furniture and cigarette smoke-stained walls, have an atmosphere and warmth that no modern cafe can match. Slide into a tattered old leather banquette, order a local beer, and simply sit back and soak it all up - hanging out at one of these is a wonderful way to while away an afternoon or evening. The problem is that after you experience enough of them, their endearingly faded charm spoils you. Wherever you travel, you'll be looking for equally atmospheric experiences. As we do. In Cyprus, unfortunately, we've been hard-pressed to find them. There's no denying that cities such as Lemesos and Nicosia have their fare share of stylish cafes and contemporary bars but finding a characterful, old-fashioned coffee shop or traditional taverna among all of the tacky English pubs, Irish bars, betting shops, and fish and chip joints, has been a challenging task. And in the villages they all seem closed - for the winter or for good, we're not sure. Which is why we were relieved when we discovered The Mill Hotel in the village of Kakopetria in the Solea Valley of the Troodos Mountains. On the top floor of this renovated old hotel is an unpretentious eatery that oozes traditional charm. Picture rustic wooden furniture, rough stucco walls, paintings featuring local village scenes, and a big fireplace in the corner of the room. The food is as tasty and hearty as the surroundings, and the service is warm and hospitable. If only we discovered more delightful places like this. Any tips?
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Cyprus: the search for traditional charm
Posted by BEST TRAVEL GUIDE on Wednesday, February 13, 2008
As a child, my parents dragged me around Australia in a caravan for five years. My dad had been diagnosed as having kidney disease and in those days the option was dialysis machine or die. He didn't want to be hooked up to a machine, he told us. If he was going to go, he said, he wanted to see his country before he died. So we sold up everything we had in Sydney, and we took to the road. We had a caravan so massive that it deserved the title 'mobile home', as they call them in the USA. It had separate bedrooms for my parents at one end and my sister and I at the other, with a dining-living area and bathroom in between. Wherever we went people stared and when we pulled up at a caravan park or camping ground, they'd come over for a chat, the blokes asking my dad technical questions ("how much juice does she chew?") and the women asking mum, enviously, if they could stick there head in for a snoop. It wasn't the kind of thing people towed around the country in those days (the late 1970s to early 1980s), but that's exactly what we did, travelling the length and breadth of Australia in those five years. We lived off my parents savings and investments, and Mum and Dad picked up work when opportunities arose... grape picking, shark fishing, and so on. My sister was a toddler but I did correspondence school, eagerly collecting my assignments and library books from prearranged post offices, having 'holidays' when we were on the road, and working hard to make up for the breaks when we settled down somewhere for a while. But the travel itself was the best education of all. We met so many different types of people every day and were confronted with such wildly different kinds of lifestyles. I had to quickly learn how to adapt to fit in. We stopped at places we liked for as long as we liked, and we moved on when we had experienced enough. Or simply missed being on the road. Because we all loved the road, Mum, Dad, my sister, and I. We loved the whole ritual of packing up and hooking the van on to the car and just taking off... we even had a theme song, Willy Nelson's 'On The Road Again', and Dad would pop in the tape as soon as we hit the bitumen. There's something so appealing about traveling in a caravan as I was reminded when we came across this quaint old van parked on an empty paddock in the Arkamas Peninsula, Cyprus. After so many five star hotels with their tedious check in procedures, the well-appointed rooms to inspect, and the expansive buffet breakfasts to try, for the first time in many years, I found myself craving a far simpler traveling experience, that by caravan...
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I’m reminded of how appealing traveling off-season can be, as we travel around Cyprus updating a guidebook. There’s something about clambering across archaeological ruins devoid of tourists, hiking along an empty nature trail through silent scenery, or sitting at an al fresco café by the sea on a cold, windy day, the wild sea crashing on the sandstone sea walls of the port. Generally seen as a summer destination for English tourists, the little island of Cyprus is undergoing a travel revolution of sorts. In the south in Greek-speaking Cyprus, there are chic new boutique hotels, fine dining restaurants, fascinating new shops, and stylish cafés and bars. While some beach resorts are closed for the winter, it’s a great time to book into a boutique hotel such as the Londa Hotel or more plush accommodation such as that of the Four Seasons, and experience the island’s urban delights with the locals – and without the masses of tourists. The south is also home to some truly spectacular countryside, from the pine forests of the Troodos Mountains to the isolated Arkamas Peninsula (pictured), the former of which we’ve criss-crossed half a dozen times during our research, often not seeing another car for hours, and the latter which we hiked early one morning last week. In the north in Turkish-speaking Cyprus, a welcoming trend is toward eco-tourism and sustainable travel and in the village of Buyukkonuk, near the Karpaz peninsula, Lois and Ismail Cemal offer guests at their small B&B a chance to experience the everyday life of this working village. You can take a walk with a shepherd as he takes his sheep out to graze on the lush grasses under the olive trees, go on a walk along the ridge of the craggy limestone mountain range and pick wild herbs, or learn how to bake local olive and halloumi bread with one of the village bakers. It’s a fabulous time of year to simply hire a car and make your way around the small island at your own pace. The weather is mild, the air crystal clear, and the light crisp and clean, defying the fact that it’s winter.
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