Monday was a tired day as I was too tired after not enough sleep last night because we stayed late to end of soccer match, which went overtime and penalty kicks!

I was concerned that gas would be a big expense but it isn’t too bad and the car is quite easy on gas. The gas prices are in Euros.

It was tricky though figuring out how to actually get the gas. You have to put in cash into this machine and key in the pump number.

Tuesday’s dives went well.

Dinner in Larnaca was at a restaurant practically across the street from where I was staying.

They even put french fries inside the gyro sandwich. And you can get pork. I’m not a huge pork eater but I had it as why not, I can’t get it in Kuwait!

The juice is great. Apple and Guava! I found out on the last day too that you can get fresh pomegranate juice which is great. Cyprus has a great variety of local fruit and vegetables.

After the diving and some rest I went for dinner with friends to a village Dhali midway to Nicosia. It is only a 20 minute drive from Larnaca as everything is close in Cyprus and the traffic isn’t too heavy. Dhali is located near Idaliam, a historic center of the cult of Aphrodite and of the Helleno-Phoenician deity Resheph-Apollo.

The dinner was a partly traditional meal of sausages. Dinner was at the Bonanza Bar and Grill named for the TV series.

We stayed late and watched the end of the Euro football match which went into overtime and free kicks. I don’t remember who played.

The diving was from Captain Paris Eleftheriou’s boat, the M/Y Kaith II.

The boat’s scheduled 9:00 a.m. start ended up a bit later with the last minute things, getting peoples gear organized etc. but the anchoring point over the Zenobia is only 1.4 km from harbor so there is lots of time.

I used my wife’s Suunto Mosquito dive computer as on the previous day I had experimented with my Suunto D9 in Gauge Mode but forgot that once used in Gauge mode it locks you out of using it as a regular decompression dive computer for 48 hours after your last dive. In the future I’ll stick with using it as a regular dive computer!

The water was comfortable on the surface at 23 degrees with a thermocline at 20 meters dropping the temperature to 19 degrees. The visibility is at least 20 meters and you can see the outline of the wreck which starts 18 meters down from the surface. There is a tourist glass bottom boat that goes out to the wreck also and a submarine but the submarine wasn’t operating.

The Zenobia is on its side on the bottom. The bottom is 40 meters down. When it sank all the cargo and trucks slid down to the bottom with a few things still hanging by the chains.

We went down and through the main cargo bay, there were semi-trailers (articulated lorries in British English) littering the bottom. Quite a sight. Once in this cargo bay you can see the light at the exit as you swim through though it is quite dark inside. It is a huge area, end to end must be 50 meters long and nearly 15 meters high. It is a tight squeeze getting out, but I didn’t have much problem, some people do.

This video gives some good shots of the wreck. I did not penetrate inside like they do. That is a whole different kind of diving.

Life starts later in the day in Cyprus than Kuwait! But still I wake up early a little short on sleep.

It was another easy drive Protaras even though I took a wrong turn on the way, I made it on time, as everything is very close.

I only pulled out once on the wrong side of the road from a gas station. So I was surprised to see the oncoming car and moved quickly to the correct side of the road. It does help a bit to have the driver’s seat on the right, though in over a week I never could get used to looking in the rear view mirror that was to my left! Mentally computing this and the image in the mirror of what was behind me was too much to adapt to in a short period!
So driving takes focus and attention.

I had lunch at the Super S restaurant in Protaras, a 10 minute walk from the dive center. I recommend this place the owner is a local very friendly and their roasted chicken is very good. The lunch cost about 7 Euros.

Today’s dives were for practicing the skills and doing drills including taking on and off stage bottles, swimming without the mask along a line and holding my breathe with the mask off while swimming along the line. I found the swimming along the line with no mask very relaxing, I nearly fell asleep. But holding my breathe without a mask and swimming along a line is interesting, you get disoriented quickly if you have to swim along the line and turn corners which I tried as a more challenging exercise.

By the end of the diving I was tired having not done much diving recently.

So then we went back and I got ready for the diving on Sunday on the Zenobia. I was taking the tanks with me so I don’t have to re-setup my equipment for the other diving.

In the evening I purchased a local SIM card for my phone for 25 Euros which included 5 Euros of phone calls and went for a walk around the area after which we went for dinner to a nearby Chinese restaurant.

Finally, I got closer  to where I thought the apartment should be and then stopped again at a betting place and they pointed me in the right direction to finally get to the apartment.

I drove to park behind the apartment and on a side street my conditionings after 30 years of driving on the right held and I swerved the wrong way when a car was coming turning onto the narrow two way street I was on. Fortunately the drivers in Cyprus are by and large not overly aggressive or fast. The hardest thing about driving on the left is intersections and side streets. Freeways and traffic circles are OK, though they all cut the across the lanes in the traffic circles.

So, I happily extracted my down pillow from its Eagle Creek compressor sack. These sacs are like huge zip log bags with a one way valve on the bottom. So you put the thing in and roll them up and all the air is pushed out making a pillow or other compressible item less than 1/4 the original size.

So sweet dreams with my own down pillow with no noisy air conditioning, and lots of clean, humid air.

I finished the day at the dive center, then it was time to drive back to Larnaca and find the apartment where I was staying.

The drive is quite nice on a quiet new  two and three lane divided freeway and is only about 50 km driving at 100 km/hr.
I drove into Larnaca and was trying to use my fancy  telephone GPS but it doesn’t have very good maps of Larnaca. So I aimed east towards the sea and ended up finally by the marina and found Makarios road which is the last road to the east parallel with the sea.

Then I stopped and asked directions and the people were helpful even phoning for me on their mobiles to get better directions.
I wasn’t able to find my destination so I stopped the car on the side of the road by a shop sign that said no parking. I was standing next to the car looking out over the street to see if I could see where to go.

Then I saw a full size motorcycle coming towards me going the wrong way on the road. A large guy wearing a dark t-shirt and with some black pouches on his waist stopped by me and indicated aggressively that I couldn’t park there. I said I was merely stopping to look for an address.

Then moments later a black SUV pulled up and at least four men got out and came over to me aggressively saying where are you from, what do want. I said, I’m from Canada and I’m just looking for an address.  They were not being nice that’s for sure.

 
Well it had been a very long day for me. This was after flying to Cyprus the night before and not getting much rest. I was tired. So I got back in my car and moved on and they left.

So  did I get to meet the local mafia?

I have a photo of the business I discretely took a couple of days later but I will not post it as  I’m not risking libeling the mafia!!!

Arrived at Dive-Tek. It took a bit of searching as the place is set back from the road. But I enquired at another dive shop and they pointed the way. So the course started with the usual paperwork, looking at my dive certifications and dives I’ve done. There was some concern about how many deep dives I’ve done but the nature of diving in Kuwait does not allow many and I do all that I can. Well, no worries in the end.

So the classroom sessions went on for the morning and then in the afternoon we went out to dive. It is about a ten minute drive from the dive center to the dive site.

The people above are not diving with us. They are doing a shore dive. I didn’t bring the regular camera gear, this is taken with my phone camera. Yes that’s a boat pulling a parasail with a couple of tourists on it in the background.

The first dive to get the weighting right and get used to the tanks and carrying an extra tank for decompression on my side and for them to see if I’m any good at diving. The diving was easy, no currents or waves to speak of and 40 meter visibility. In fact the instructor told me I was diving too closely to him and I said I’m used to only a few meters visibility so I had to give more space.

There is not much to see only a few small fish. This is because they over fish and even fish with dynamite to get everything in the water.

The dive went OK despite it being quite a while since I’ve dove in my dry suit. On the dives I did my first valve drills. That is where you reach back and turn the valves on and off to the regulators to practice in case some day you have a leak or a free flowing regulator you can shut it down and isolate the tank so worst case you would only lose half your air, and you normally plan for such an incident. Safety first. Then it was time to drive back to Larnaca by the fast way on the freeway.

I flew to Cyprus via Jazeera airways. Jazeera is a private low cost airline operated out of Kuwait using a small fleet of A320 airplanes. They have a good online booking system which enables you to change flights easily. Though they do sneak in a credit card charge for any changes you do. Their fares start very low well in advance and then go up as the flights fill.

The flight left Kuwait around midnight and I arrived in Cyprus at about 2:30 am. I had prebooked a rental car online at Advantage. I use Expedia normally to check who’s the cheapest and then go directly to the car company’s site to book as Expedia is the same price.
I was met by the Advantage representative at the airport. He said I was upgraded to a better car than what I booked. I had booked the lowest priced automatic with air conditioning. I did not what to try to shift gears with my left hand while learning to drive on the left side of the road. So I got a Ford Focus with about 40,000 km on it. It was a nice car.

Aside: I did realize a few days later on that I was driving a car with no paperwork. Maybe that is standard for rentals as they do have special license plates?

So in the middle of the night I headed out to drive to Protaras about 50 km to the north of the airport where the diving center is located to start the course at 9:00 am.  I kept thinking left, left, left as I was advised as I’ve never drive on the left hand side of the road. And also, to remember left when entering traffic circles which are frequent in Cyprus. What a delight to be in fresh humid air, no dust and seeing the stars!

My plan was to take my time driving and pull off somewhere quiet and sleep a bit on the way there.
Cyprus has a well developed freeway system which I followed and then pulled off on the way there into Agia Napa out of curiosity and as I had the time. Regarding driving on the left side of the road, I did notice that after passing a parked truck on the left of the road I realized that I amost ripped off the left side of the car being too far to the left as I was being very cautious about going to far to the right into the oncoming traffice. After over thirty years of driving sitting in the seat on the left side of the car, it is a change to the space perceptions.

Well, at 3:00 am, all the young partiers in various states of inebriety were walking, on motorcycles and quads were making their way home. That is, making their way back to their hotels. Agia Napa is a party place to say the least.

 
I pulled off near the beach and tried to rest but there were quads and cars coming and going so I moved away from the beach and got a bit of sleep.

Upon waking I was hungry so on the road I stopped at a bakery for some food. I was parked around the back and as I went to the car I noticed a young foreign couple seated closely face to face on a quad bike looking overly amorous and though they aren’t going to do that are they. Well yes they started. I should of taken a photo, but better judgement said just leave.

So that’s Agia Napa for you. And later on I asked a Cypriot and they said all of this is typical for that area.
Arrived at the dive shop after a bit of driving around and enquiring at another dive center. There are many dive centers in Cyprus but Dive Tek is the only dedicated technical diving center in all of Cyprus.

Larnaca Beach, originally uploaded by Mister Ian.

Note: You can click on the photo to see the full size version on flickr. I’m getting ready to start blogging the full story of my trip to Cyprus complete with photos and exciting stories! Really it will all be true.

It certainly was nice to get out of the heat and dust of Kuwait and spend time in clean and humid air, postcard blue skies and clear sky nights. I only went to this beach once to take some photos I was at the other end of Cyprus most of the time diving in the clear waters. More later.