A Costa Rican Recce, the plan

January and early February will see us for the first time in Costa Rica, indeed this will be our first time in Central America so this blog is by way of an introduction to this increasingly popular tourist destination. The vast majority of visitors are either eco tourists in search of the wildlife or surfers in search of the waves. Nearly all of these come on pre organised packages. I have put this package together with a combination of research, guesswork and help from friends with local experience. Time will tell if the guesses are correct and the online local bus timetables are not works of fiction.

But first, meet Costa Rica. Named in Spanish meaning "rich coast", perhaps because indigenous people were spotted wearing gold or maybe as propaganda, a little like Greenland.  Christopher Columbus was responsible for the Spanish connection with his visit to the Eastern shores during his final journey of 1502. The territory was colonised by the conquistador Gil Gonzalez Davila who arrived via the West shore in 1522. It was always somewhat peripheral to the Spanish empire, perhaps because there were insufficient locals to create a decent slave workforce. The result was that it was largely unappreciated and overlooked by the Spanish monarchy. Perhaps this is one reason why it developed into a more egalitarian state than its neighbours.

You can see above a nice map of the country and its context in Central America. Although distances look modest,  journey times are lengthy due to the poor road infrastructure. Roads are not easy to build and maintain in a tropical rainforest.

Some more geopolitical facts; it has a population of about 5 million nearly half of whom live in or around the capital San Jose, it's known for its stable democracy and highly educated workforce, most of whom speak English. It spends 6.9% of its budget on education (cf world average of 4.4). In 1949 it abolished its standing army after a civil war and remains one of the world's few sovereign states without one.

Costa Rica performs consistently well in the UNESCO Human Development Index being placed 69th in the world, the highest of any Latin America country. It has impressive "green" credentials. It is the only country to meet all 5 of the UNDP criteria measuring environmental sustainability. New Economics Foundation identified it as the greenest country in the world in 2009. By 2016 98.1% of electricity was generated from green sources. It plans to be carbon neutral by 2021. Finally it has a higher proportion of its landmass designated as protected National Parkland (and sea) than any other country in the world. The diversity of its biosphere is immense. This is why you go to Costa Rica for the wildlife.

In order to follow the rest of this blog, you need to open the link below and you can follow the itinerary in more detail.

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A Cyprus Sandwich with a Lebanon filling Karpass peninsula

If Cyprus is an oblong frying pan, then the Karpass (Karpaz) peninsula is the pan handle pointing north east. Winston Churchill described the Karpass as a dagger pointed at the soft underbelly of Turkey. Whether you regard it as a threat or a refuge it is certainly a delightful area that time has largely left behind. Having now seen most of the areas of Northern Cyprus I have no doubt that this is my favourite. I like quiet all 80 kms of it. The biodiversity is brilliant with indigenous species being augmented by migrants many of which pitstop here whilst undertaking longer journeys.

Here's a typical view of the north coast at the start of the peninsula. There is a little tourist development but it is very low key and for the locals. Although a new road has improved access as yet it has had little impact on the lifestyle or development. Arable farming occupies the better land

One development that the new road has allowed is this brand new marina. There are berths for up to 300 yatchs and all the facilities you would expect from an international port of entry marina.

We enjoyed a tasty lunch at Hemingway's Restobar. Everything else was in place, the gym, chandlers, club house, ATM, repair dock, and swimming pool. The only snag was there wasn't really anybody else about.

We drove on up the peninsula through the little town of Dipkerpaz where the Greek and Turkish Cypriots live side by side. Indeed the mosque and the Orthodox church are next door to each other. Here below is probably the most famous and best beach on the whole peninsula. In its present state it is arguably the best beach on the Mediterranean. It is 3 kms long and you can see how busy it is.

 Meet the indigenous wild Cyprus donkeys. Like all animals in their position they have learned exactly where the food comes from and it's certainly not the sparse vegetation at their feet.

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Inside the newly restored monastery of St Andrew. Well it has never really been a monastery, more a place of pilgrimage. There are several versions of the story but this is the most frequently repeated one. Andrew was sailing by, they had run out of water on board,  Andrew jumps ashore here, strikes a rock with his staff (as you do) and a fresh water spring bubbles up. They all have a good drink, fill up their water vessels and sail off to spread the word elsewhere. Fortunately the water has healing powers! Of course somebody had to let it out so now all the wretched pilgrims come. Whilst we were visiting, the priest and his lady friend were doing that chanting singing that they do. It was probably better than the kareoke we went to that evening.

The medieval chapel that marks the saints landing spot. There are lovely safe and sandy bays either side of this point where he could have made an easy landing, but I suppose he had to do the rock striking bit.

This is the outside of church we were in two pictures ago. Now somewhat over restored, the structure originates from the C19.

It is another 8 kms to the very end of the Karpass along a bumpy track, but worth every minute of the journey because when you get there you feel like you're at the end of the world. We are in fact just by Anne's right shoulder.

Just in case you weren't sure, this is the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, with its own flag and the flag of the only other country that recognises its exsistence.

So that's goodnight from us and the end of this series of blogs from Cyprus and Lebanon.

A Cyprus Sandwich with a Lebanon filling 7th Oct Sidon and Tyre

South from Beirut today to visit the ancient cities of Sidon and Tyre. Conveniently it is 40 kms to Sidon and then another 40 kms on to Tyre. The route is down the coastal highway. This is a well paved though very busy road, not a motorway as we would understand but by Lebanese standards pretty good.
Sidon is Lebanon's third largest city and its name means fishing-town. You come off the highway and approach the town along the promenade fronted by a fine sandy beach as you can see below.

Here we are paying for parking and tickets to the castle, but look carefully at the two little messages of peace on the kiosk.

The castle is built on and from an old Phoenician temple on top of which is a Roman temple. Got that? Just to complicate the issue archeologists think that the whole lot was built on top of a palace.

This picture shows rather well the way that the Crusaders used the exsisting Roman columns. The local rock is a rather soft sandstone but by bracing it with the granite columns, the castle could resist not only attack but also several earthquakes over the centuries.

For those of you for whom the Book of Genesis has some relevance the following information may be of interest. Sidon was the first born son of Canaan, the son of Ham, thereby making Sidon the great grandson of Noah. Moving on to lower things, the souk area was across the road from the castle in the sea, so this was our next port of call. This was a fascinating market area both inside and out. Outside was mainly food, with butchers, fishmongers, fruit and vegetable stalls interspersed with car repair workshops. Inside you could buy clothing, jewellery, hats, shoes and pretty well anything else you can think of.

This elegant house is above the famous Soap museum. Beaten into third place by the Keswick Pencil museum and the Rekyjavik Penis museum for the world's most fascinating single subject museum, this place still manages to pull the punters in. It is based in a C17 soap factory although parts of the building date to the C13. The museum was set up by the Audi Foundation (Lebanese political and banking family, not the German car makers). Audi, a former President lived in the house in the picture. The museum has a mission of health education as well as to sell olive oil based soaps.

We didn't visit the St Louis land castle, which was built by French Crusaders in the C13, because it was closed for restoration. I do hope that they don't overdo this one.

We drove on towards Tyre. The highway ran out and we swung east on a rather inferior road. The numbers of military checkpoints seem to increase and the amount of political propaganda was proliferating. We have now entered Hezbollah controlled territory. Descrection being the better part of valour and the fact that we are heading towards the Isreali border influenced our decision to turn around and make for the coast again.
We eventually arrive in Tyre and park up near the harbour on the peninsula. See the photo above. Tyre is 12 miles from the modern border with Isreal and 25 miles from the Syrian border so we getting into a conflict zone.

On the harbour headland is the Maronite Catholic Church of Our Lady of the Sea where we enjoyed a shady walk around. On leaving the church we chanced to bump into another UK tourist. After a brief conversation he turned out to be Paul, the barista from the Tearoom in the Woods, Woodall Spa. Small world! Paul was travelling alone and had come down from Beirut that day on the dolmus. His friends from Woodhall didn't expect him to return either. Best of luck Paul, we'll look you up next time we are in Woodhall Spa.
The chapels that you are looking at above are built into the ruins discovered during excavations in the western courtyard of the church. The chapels are completely out of historical context. The stones you can see are from the Hellenistic period ie 300 to 400 BCE, well before the birth of Christ or the Maronite Church. I'm not sure what the church is up to building these chapels.

This is the west side of the peninsula with a small rocky swimming area. Tyre is another UNESCO world heritage site, mainly because of the superb Roman remains. There are also remains from the Phoenician, Greek and Crusader periods. Back to the Roman stuff, Tyre has the largest surviving hippodrome in the world and probably the second best overall remains, beaten only by Baalbek which is another Lebanese world heritage site.
Time unfortunately didn't allow us to see much of Tyre's Roman heritage and nothing at all of Baalbek.

The journey back to Beirut was more stop than start but we did eventually reach the hotel for our last night in Lebanon. A number of factors beyond our control conspired to delay our journey to the airport, return of the hire car, the checking in process and, the last straw, passport exit control. The end result was we missed our plane. We did however manage to book onto a Middle East Airlines flight which could take us out eight hours later. As of the present time we are still in dispute with Cyprus Airlines.

A Cyprus Sandwich with a Lebanon filling. Jeita grotto and Byblos 6 Oct

Today we will head north out of Beirut and try to visit two of Lebanon's significant tourist destinations. It might sound odd to say this but finding them will prove to be a challenge. The problem is that signage is almost non existent. I think the vast majority of them go by organized tours or taxi.
The first objective is the Jeita Grottoes. These are a limestone cave gallery system. The system was first discovered by the Western world in 1836 by an American missionary having a bit of downtime. In fact there is plenty of evidence of human habitation in prehistoric times. The cave system was in the top 14 finalists in the New 7 Wonders of Nature decided by poll in 2011.
There are two levels open to the public, an upper which you visit on foot and the lower where boats are used.
From the visitor centre there is a cable car to take you up to the first gallery. In their wisdom the organisers have banned all photography within the caves which makes promotion of the place by the visitors rather tricky. No flash I can understand, but this rule seems a little short sighted. The result is that these images you are looking at have been obtained by a rather nefarious route.

A pair of downloaded documents I'm afraid and both of the lower cavern. They are more colourful than we experienced, however the caves were undoubtedly very impressive.
At 8.2 meters the upper gallery claims to have "one of the longest stalactites in the world". As they reportly grow at the rate of between a quarter inch and an inch every century, let's do some maths on the biggy. 8.2 meters = 322.854 inches. Let's say 323 for the sake of simplicity and let's say it's growing nearer to the faster rate of three quarters of an inch per century, then to reach it's present size it will take 431 centuries or 43,100 years. All that was assuming a constant growth rate and I don't suppose it did but our three quarters inch average should iron out the variations. Conclusion, not long in geological time, I guess but I'm still pleased that we didn't take a hammer to one. Any geologists out there who want to comment?

We had one of those road train thingees to transport us down from upper to lower caverns.
The shot below gives a better idea of the colours. There's some colouration present due to the different salts in the water. This is the upper cave where a concrete pathway has been built in to improve visitor access.

The whole trip took a couple of hours and now it was time to head north to Byblos. Just before we reached Byblos we turned off the highway looking for a beach and lunch break. Serendipitously we found this little beach bar that suited our purpose very nicely.

Let me tell you a little of the background to Byblos, which is incidentally one of Lebanon's UNESCO world heritage sites.
It's recorded history goes back 7000 years, it was known as Gibal in Biblical times when the Canaanites traded from here. The Phoenicians inspired by Egyptian hieroglyphics invented the first phonetic 22 letter alphabet which was adopted by the Greeks in 800 BCE. This later became the foundation of the Roman alphabet. The name Byblos refers to the papyrus trade from this dock.

Surrounded by Roman debris.

Roman and Crusader ruins add to the picturesque nature of the view.

Beer festival on Roman street. I bet the Romans would have loved it.

Apart from the ancient archeological sites you can see, Phoenician, Greek, Roman, Crusader and Otterman ruins. There is a pretty little harbour with outside bars and restaurants and the old souk area is now selling souvenirs. Ironically there was a German beer festival taking place during our visit which was just warming up as we left. Now there was just the challenge of driving back to Beirut and finding the hotel again.

A Cyprus Sandwich with a Lebanon filling Thurs 4th Oct

Beirut or bust today. We really don't know what's going to happen. We do know for a fact that people are refused boarding at the boarding gate because they have an Ecan stamp in their passports. We don't have an Ecan (the TRNC airport that is considered an illegal entry port by Greek Cyprus) stamp, but Anne and David have them aplenty.
We drove out of the "Dark Side" down to Larnaca Airport. This embargo is one purely instigated by Cyprus Airways and is nothing to do with Lebanon immigration policy.
So we park up and proceed to check in, where we immediately run into problems. We are OK but phone calls are being made about Anne and David. Anne counters this by threatening to phone the British High Commission, the UN and God. I'm not sure which threat carries the weight but the boarding passes are issued.
We're not out of the woods yet because remember it's the boarding gate where the problem may occur. Look at the picture below and you can see the end of the Karpass peninsula, ergo we are on the plane to Beirut.

The next picture shows the first of Lebanon

Our nice new only a quarter full aircraft landed on time at Beirut international airport. Immigration proceedings went smoothly (we were lumped in with Foreigners and Arabs) and then it was off to collect the hire car. After a bit of a wait they handed over a brand new Kea saloon. I signed that I understand the cost of repairs (scratches $65 plus the same for labour etc etc) and with some trepidation I drove out into the city.

A word about driving in Beirut. On a scale of 1 to 10 I would rate Delhi at 10 and Reykjavik at 1, I would rate Beirut at 8. More than half the streets are one way and always not the way that you want to go. Signposting is minimal, streets are rarely named and the traffic flow, which is continuous, comes from all directions. The usual arrangements for giving way and priority don't exist. However most drivers are considerate and do their best to avoid collisions. So I managed to drive nearly to the hotel several times, I think. We had two street maps with directions written on them, but when the ground and the maps don't agree, you're in trouble or at least not where you thought that you were. In this kind of situation there is really only one thing to do and that is to agree a price with a taxi to lead you there. This we did, the only snag being that he very efficiently took us to the wrong hotel. Unfortunatley we didn't discover this fact until we had unloaded the cases and were trying to book in.  Fortunately the one we had booked was left, right and right again. Easy.

          I was ready for a drink.

So you can see what I failed to find in all of Northern Cyprus was available in the first place I went into in Beirut. In case you can't read the bottle, it's 0% beer.

Above is the restaurant where we ate on the first evening. It was in our somewhat superior sister hotel that the taxi man took us to by mistake. The food was expensive and not really what our western palates were used to. An elegant ethnic experience but not one that we would care to repeat.
Below is the foyer of the same hotel.

This is our hotel and shows a nocturne study of our infinity swimming pool reflecting on the city skyline.

The next morning dawned bright and for the first time we were able to take in the view from our balcony looking north towards the sea and harbour area.

This half empty block is across the street from our hotel. It's worth expanding the picture to see how the building is being used. I don't know the history of it, but it may well have been started as the 1975 civil war broke out and has remained this way ever since. This is certainly the case in a number of the buildings near here and were used as sniper locations for various militia forces. Some are still occupied by the  army.

Hookahs are ubiquitous in Beirut's cafés as they are throughout the middle east, however it is only in Beirut that you will find your hookah stand is a gold-plated Kalashnikov. It's plastic really, not a Kalashnikov and in a one dollar shop.

We passed the shop on our way down to the promenade hereabouts called the Cornishe.

Helen looking elegantly alone on the prom, prom, prom.

There are some attractive survivors. Here is a handsome gothic villa from the end of the C19.

And some which would like to rise again. You are looking at what is left of the St George's yatch club. A landmark building constructed in the 1920s and destroyed in the civil war. The assassination of Prime Minister Hariri in 2005 further damaged the building. There is a statue of him close by. It was his vision to create the Solidere company to reconstruct downtown Beirut. However, as you can see there is considerable disention twixt club and company. All our friends thought that we were a little mad going on holiday to Lebanon and Beirut in particular. The standing joke was don't forget your bulletproof vests.
The  truth  is Lebanese people are very friendly and go out of their way to be helpful. I felt safer in Beirut than I have done in most European cities. Beirut is a trilingual city, ie Arabic, French and English so communication is easy.

The only way to really see Beirut is by sea. So we chartered a very natty vessel from the marina and sallied forth. Passports had to be shown to the Harbour Master before we could get out of the marina, but after that, well you can see for yourselves.

I rather like this picture of Helen with the north coast of the peninsula and the Cornishe running round.
We are rounding the corner and sailing down towards Pigeon rocks, where our pilot Ali and does his trick.

Here is Ali, showing off his much admired assets and driindr the boat towards Pigeon Rocks. The youths will dive from them to show their bravado and the likes of Ali will zoom through the narrow cave. I put it down to the practice he gets on the roads.

David checking for bandits off the port now.

The Skipper took the team photograph on our return.

After a good walk back up to the hotel and a stop off for a late Lebanese lunch, it's time for a little down time before venturing out to the Bagatelle Restaurant for dinner.

A Cyprus Sandwich with a Lebanon filling. Sun/Mon 30/1

Sunday, the day of rest, so we did. There were a few things we had to do however. The swimming pool needed testing and I noticed that a couple of the sun loungers badly wanted lying on. It was also the climax of the Ryder Cup golf so that had to be attended to as well.
David and Anne needed to go out and I had a blog backlog as usual. All in all it was beginning to look like a pretty busy day going nowhere.
Fortunately everything went swimmingly, about 40 lengths actually. The sun loungers stood up to the strain well and we all know what happened in the Ryder Cup. The blogs got published.
We need to get dressed up a bit because we are going out to eat in the 867 bedroom 5 star plus Elexus Hotel and Spa. The place is massive with enough marble to refill the Carrera quarry. There are lots of restaurant options but we had opted for Chinese.
The table d'hote menu consisted of 4 courses, with several dishes to represent each course. Fine quality alcoholic drinks were included in the price of about £25 per head. Basically you got as much to eat and drink as you liked. The quality of the Chinese food was the best that I have ever tasted. We went for a postprandial walk to look out the back at the aquatic facilities.

This is the beach area.

Looking back at two of the wings of the building.

More of the beach area.

The biggest swimming pool I have seen.

Now we're back in Kyrenia and having a wander around some of the sites. First of all we are exploring the castle which guards the harbour entrance.
The castle probably has its feet in Roman origins which the Byzantine conquers extended ready for Richard I to take the island whilst on one of his crusading holidays. He passed it on to the Crusader Lusignans. They held sway for the next 300 years until the Venetians arrived in force. In 1570 the Otterman Empire took all before them including Cyprus. There was a British period between 1918 and 1960 when the castle was used as a police barracks and prison.

 It's a fine walk around the top of the walls with great sea and town vistas and scant regard given to health and safety.

The view over the old harbour. Our restaurant of two nights ago is the large white building across the centre of the harbour.

 Within the castle is the shipwreck museum. You will have heard of the Mary Rose and maybe the Vasa in Stockholm, well this is similar, a time capsule from 2300 years ago. It was a Greek trading vessel about 14 meters long and 4 meters across. She had a crew of 4 sailors. The route can be calculated from the contents of the hold. She visited Rhodes, Samos and Kos before floundering 1.5 kms off shore in 30 meters of water. The crew seem to have survived. This is the oldest ship recovered from the seabed in the world.

The picture above is the original ship enclosed within a glass box for preservation. You can see some of the nearly 300 amphorae of wine from Rhodes in the picture below. There were also 29 millstones from Samos.

 Thousands of almond nuts were found that are thought to be food for the crew. Some of these have been successfully germinated.

South east and up the hills from Kyrenia is the village and Abbey of Bellapais. This is a very beautiful location which was occupied in Roman times but the Abbey itself was started by Augustinian monks early in the C13. Later they were joined by a group of Norbertinians, who have Spaldonian connections.

"The mellow beauty of the abbey was not the natural bedfellow of asceticism" as an early visitor observed. The monks took not just one wife but two or three, and would only accept their own sons as novises. By the time the Genoese arrived in 1373, the abbey was ripe for pillaging and much of the treasure was abducted. The Otterman invasion destroyed more of the abbey but they did leave the church for the Greeks to use. They continued to do so until 1974.

The whole area now is a mixture of archeological site, art exhibition space, concert hall, upmarket restaurant and place of worship and celebration. The whole mix works very well the varied activities complimenting each other rather than causing distraction.

This is the old refectory, whose superb acoustics are now exploited as a concert hall. You might notice that the piano tuners are in. Spot the old pulpit so the monks could not have a meal without the word of God. Pretty good rose window as well.

 Here's the view from the outside

Finally, you know that I like to end on a sunset. This is the sun going down over Kyrenia. In the foreground is the Stone Castle Restaurant where we ate last night.