Letters from Cyprus: Coral Bay

Sarah and Heather enjoying the Blue Lagoon.
The water is about 30 feet deep but very clear.

We've just returned from a 10 day break at Coral Bay, a small seaside village north of Paphos in Western Cyprus. The bay itself is beautiful, with clear sandy water and limestone cliffs at each end of a long sweeping beach. Our days generally consisted of a morning on the beach until it got too hot, a vague attempt at a siesta and then out in the afternoon for some sort of activity with the kids. Plenty of options in this regard, and the holiday included visits to the zoo, mountain waterfalls, minigolf, a water park and hiring a boat for half a day to look at some of the remote coastline along the Akamas Peninsula.

The holiday has been a good circuit breaker for the kids after 2.5 months(!) of summer holiday, and a welcome change for mum and dad also. It was interesting to see 'tourist Cyprus' in full swing. Despite some setbacks with power rationing across the island, Cyprus is actually having a good tourist season. The political unrest across many parts of the Middle East has resulted in more tourists coming to Cyprus instead of other nearby destinations such as Greece, Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan. We were also surprised at the number of Russian visitors. On a few of the beaches we visited Russian was very much the main language spoken, with many signs only in Cyrillic.

In terms of tourist developments, Cyprus has a full continuum of quality. There are some fine examples of tasteful development (although sometimes you need to look hard to find them), but also plenty of examples of development gone bad. 'Themed' restaurants appear to be very popular with the British tourists in particular. I was tempted to go and dine with the 'Knights of the Round Table' at a medieval restaurant but alas could not convince Sarah and the kids to join. Plenty of bad Robbie Williams and Oasis impersonators working the bars and cafes also. Coral Bay probably sits somewhere in the middle of the quality curve, but we did discover some beautiful and remote Cypriot villages in the North-West during our travels.

It was lovely to welcome Heather Robinson, a good friend from Sydney who joined us for part of the holiday. Heather is staying with us for the next few weeks, and is currently off exploring some other parts of the island.

Only one more week until school goes back (hooray), and Sam has an extra bonus in starting earlier this week, which he's not so sure about but mum and dad are quietly relieved..... The weather has finally started to cool a little also, and the light seems just a hint softer. Roll on autumn.