Category: Cyprus

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.

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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.