Just another day…

Working from home has its perks - oh man, does it!  Just lovin’ the fact I can work all day in my pyjamas you know!  But it also means you run the risk of never actually leaving the house!

I mean, we have Abdullah the Su who’ll come by with water and gas bottles, there’s the lovely guy in wellies who takes the rubbish from outside your door and then there are the kamikaze scooter boys who’ll deliver you any form of edible substance you should desire after just one brief phone call...so after working eight straight days without leaving the house and wondering if there was still anyone left ‘on the outside’ we decided to take a day off. 

Of course, a day off is really only an hour or so as we’re both totally addicted to our computers...but it’s a start.

We thought we’d go over to the south and get some of that lovely English white sliced bread that sticks to the roof of your mouth...Well?  It’s something to do!  So off we went in our little pink rocket, flying over the bumps, dodging the puddles and singing (on the inside anyway).

Up over the Kyrenia mountains, passed a broken down lemon lorry, passed the little steam train and down across the plains towards Nicosia.  In the summer you drive across the plains praying that you’ll not run out of petrol, get a puncture or break down.  It’s the sort of place where you see vultures circling in the hope of victims.  It gets so incredibly, hot - damn hot in fact - that it turns into desert.  The whole area is a bowl at the foot of the mountains and gets no cooling wind, no refreshing rain and it reaches temperatures approaching 50 degrees C...hostile!  But now, after the winter rains and with the continued sunshine it is quite a spectacle to behold!  It’s like the green, green grass of home! 

It’s seriously hard to imagine a desert compete with flowers, knee length grass, puddles and a sort of lushness that you normally only get in Wales or New Zealand where it rains all the time!  Well worth a visit I can assure you.

But I digress...as usual.

At the big roundabout as you come into Nicosia they’ve planted cabbages - ornamental ones, but cabbages nonetheless...and dug up the very main road to install an irrigation system.  Unfortunately they’ve gone away (no one works in North Cyprus in February) and left half the cabbages unplanted and half the very main road dug up waiting for pipes...dug up that is, without being cordoned off in any way.  So you have to drive through the holes and over the piles of dug up tarmac and at speeds approaching very fast (as is the nature of the roads here, think mini-Istanbul) otherwise you can’t actually manoeuvre across the blooming roundabout and you’re left stranded at the Ezic Chicken bus stop!

So, that knocked a few more years off the life of the car!

We finally get onto the sort of dual carriageway, sort of main road towards the border when what should we encounter but a traffic jam?  But why?  Well, you see, there were these dogs, three of them in fact.  Two in the middle of the road - exactly in the middle actually, straddling the while lines - and they were engaged in, shall we say, rather intimate activity?  The third was standing in the oncoming carriageway, in the fast lane, acting as look out?  Or maybe voyeur?  Not sure really but he did have his tongue out and it wasn’t that hot...but while the action was on-going and third dog was going nowhere fast, all the oncoming traffic was forced to swerve into our fast lane and we were all forced into the ditch really.  But that’s just another day in North Cyprus.

P.s. we made it to the south and the only other interesting things that happened were Andy nearly getting arrested and us lunching with half the Greek police force.  There we are then…