The sail up from Paphos was quite relaxing with a nice beam reach along the coast. We kept off the coast outside the yellow marker boys as we passed the British base.

In Limassol there are a couple of choices when it comes to Marinas. You have the convenient right next to the old town but very expensive (130 euros a night after a 50% discount) Limassol Marina or the way out of town but reasonably priced (56 euros a night) San Raphael Marina, which we opted for.

In Cyprus, you need to check in at every port with the Port Police. They give you a landing card and take your passports. When you leave they give you your passports back. Paros was the exception as they gave us our passports back there – which allowed us to cross the demilitarised zone into the occupied territories. No such opportunity at any of your other stops. Interestingly you don’t need a passport to hire a car here – just an Australian Drivers license.

When we were in Paphos, we drove through Limassol and checked out the old castle and the old town, both of which were pretty good and worth a look.

Dee got really excited when we spotted “A” off the beach. A huge funky looking $300M super yacht owned by, you guessed it, a Russian billionaire. We also saw it later in Paphos.

San Raphael was a good 8km ride from town along some great bike paths so it was out with the bikes to do some further exploring and lunching on the very nice beach front. We ended up riding all the way to the mall, which was right up the other end of town – a good 15km away.

The bikes were playing up so we decided they needed a good service. We found a good bike shop and dropped them off. They came back with a long list of salt-water induced problems. Time to stop storing the fenders in the same locker as the bikes! They needed a couple of days to service so we ended up hiring another car for a couple of days and driving to the East end of the island. There are some great beaches and resort towns up there but at this time of the year they were all winding down.

 

After 5 days in Limassol, we fuelled up at the very reasonable price of 1.08 euro a litre and headed off towards Larnaca.

For photos of Southern Cyprus click here.