GOING PLACES: Ruadhán Mac Cormaic bypasses Cyprus's tourist strips and takes a tour of its mountains and myths instead.
It's one of the paradoxes of travel that the true pleasure never comes with being there. What renders us capable of coveting something ordinary somewhere else and glorifying it, is no more than the mindset - the bug? - that we travel with.
This is what transforms a baggage carousel from a slow, lumbering strap of rubber to a harbinger of freedom and good times. This is why we treat the onboard meal with the care and curiosity worthy of our last (to the afraid-of-flying, of course, it is). This is why we're much more likely to buy what we don't need in an airport shop, and why the sight of the flickering departure screen can momentarily inject us with the wildest shot of exhilaration, even if we're only scanning it for the 10.15 to Farranfore. And this is why questioning the merit of travel is like questioning the merit of having an elbow.
The point was famously made by Xavier de Maistre in 1790 when he took a journey around his bedroom, entitling the account of what he had seen Journey Around My Bedroom. De Maistre's book (and its sequel, Nocturnal Expedition Around My Bedroom) did not live up to the promise of the title, but it sprang from the astute contention that the satisfaction of travel is not in the destination but in the mindset with which we take the journey. What you expect, you'll find.
With Cyprus, I experienced the opposite. I fully expected not to be seduced by an island synonymous, to my mind, with thumping high-rise tourist strips, expat retirement villas and the widely strewn detritus of decades of incursion and strife.
The prejudice was not entirely invented. Since 1974, Greek Cyprus has wrought an economic miracle. But the price paid during the 1970s and 1980s is everywhere to be seen. The brisk development of the southern coast for mass tourism was blithely let past by the absence of serious zoning restraints and the provision of big financial incentives. The unbroken strips that hug the coastline around Larnaca, Limassol and, most blaringly, Ayía Nápa (that all-singing, all-dancing corner of Cyprus described by my euphemistically heroic guide as "different"), stand as emblems of the formula's success. Today, tourism is by some distance the island's biggest foreign-currency earner.
But the plastic coastal resorts are also pivotal to Cyprus's allure. Those who come for sun and sea tend to clasp the beach towns during their stay, leaving the greater part of the island, from the hauntingly barren Akámas peninsula in the north-west to the rambling Tróödhos mountain range, gloriously clear of wanderers.
Since Cyprus passed out of Byzantine control in the late 12th century, the western end of the island has been the most remote and least developed region. This holds true today, although growth is steady, with the busy town of Paphos earnestly cultivating its own industry and earning its strip. Look beyond the phalanx of villas on the outskirts of town, though, and the countryside opens up, unstirred.
MYTHIC MOSAICS
Old Paphos itself, where the goddess Aphrodite first stepped out of the rock-encircled waters, is rich in clear waters and ancient legacy. In 1961 a farmer, ploughing his fields near the harbour of Paphos, heard the blade of his ploughshare grate over level stone. He had struck the most beautiful ancient mosaics in the eastern Mediterranean.
Visitors to this Roman villa - the House of Dionysus - walk along wooden platforms and gaze at these panoramas, still vivid and beautiful. Apollo pursues Daphne, while her father, the river-god Peneios, reclines below; on another panel is King Ikarios, legendary first manufacturer of wine, with a bullock-drawn cart of the new elixir; and on the far right two lolling, inebriated shepherds are labelled "The First Wine Drinkers". In the unshown sequel, friends of the shepherds, thinking them poisoned, murdered Ikarios.
HERMIT'S HELL
Twenty minutes north of Paphos, at the head of a wooded canyon, lies the monastery of Áyios Neófytos. In the middle of the 12th century, the hermit Neophytos fled to this stunning wilderness, leaving a bewildered family and an insulted fiancée behind him. Aged 25 and already weary of humanity, he carved a grotto for himself in a cliff-face, seeking solitude.
Things didn't go to plan; his eccentric piety attracted imitators, who invaded his seclusion and started (what else?) painting frescoes over his bed. Irritated beyond endurance, he escaped them by burrowing a cave still higher in the cliffside, reached only with a retractable ladder. The saint's cell still contains a stone bench and table, along with the cavity he carved for his remains.
Despite Neophytos's instructions that his quarters be walled over at his death "that none may know where I have been buried", his words were predictably disregarded in 1756, when the sarcophagus was emptied so that the saint's bones might serve as relics. Far from an eternal secret, his burial-place is one of the biggest tourist attractions in Cyprus. A car hire company is named after him. Pilgrims can kiss his skull.
GETTING HIGH
Neophytos should have made for the Tróödhos mountains. "Do you know," says my guide, "geologists believe that without the Tróödhos, Cyprus would be a desert?" I wondered at this. It's like declaring that without the land, Ireland would be a nation submerged. Tróödhos, rising to nearly 2,000 metres, claims a quarter of the island's surface. Uniquely in Cyprus, the independent traveller has an advantage here; most guest houses accept walk-in visitors.
The range is dotted with small villages tucked into pockets and valleys among the foothills, some rich in apples and vines, some higher up smothered in bracken and pine. Kakopetriá ("Wicked Rock Pile": so named, intriguingly, after a rash of boulders that once crushed a pair of newly-weds), for instance, retains its character with the help of the river it straddles and the protection law it observes. Snow covers Tróödhos for part of the year. One restaurateur told me how the last season had been so cold that most of his fruit trees had perished. "But it's ok," he says. "Now European Union will give me money for that, you understand?"
FLIGHTY APHRODITE
The omnipresent Aphrodite tails the visitor in Cyprus. After a while, you speak of her as matter-of-factly as the Cypriots do. "She came and married here," they say, as though she was a sister. The Elusive One never stayed long in the one place, it seems, but rather left her imprint strategically at various points on the island's tourist trail. Here she walked. There she sang. In that café she took a latté. Deep in the stunning hills of the Akámas peninsula, the most desolate region in Cyprus, are the baths where, in legend, the goddess retired before entertaining lovers. It is now a flagstoned area beside a shallow pool, the headspring of the irrigated oasis below, fed by rivulets off the rock face of a grotto smothered in wild fig trees. Signs forbid Aphrodite's imitators.
CYPRIOT WAVES
The protected Akámas peninsula is largely deforested, but there are springs and tiny streams tucked into fairly lush hollows and gorges. In this isolated corner of the island are some of the most beautiful beaches I've seen anywhere.
The author Lawrence Durrell travelled in Cyprus in the late 1950s, and the place he described has largely vanished for ever. But if you stand at the water's edge between Akámas and nearby Polis and listen, his words can be yours. As he promised, the passage of decades is reversed by "the oldest sound in European history, the sighing of the waves as they thickened into roundels of foam and hissed upon that carpet of coloured sand." Xavier de Maistre should have got out more.
Ruadhán Mac Cormaic travelled to Cyprus as a guest of the Cyprus Tourism Organisation, 01-6229269