THE FOLLOWING VIDEO accompanies the photos I posted last month from Patagonian Chile and Argentina. The footage includes the glaciers Perito Moreno, Viedma  and Grey; Torres del Paine National Park; Calafate; and the penguin colony on Isla Magdalena (slideshow of photos HERE).

www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHxCjJjNWE8

As a sidenote, don’t be troubled by the background cheering when the glacier calves off into the glacial lake: the glacier, called the Perito Moreno, is an advancing glacier so the collapsing face is a regular, ordinary event (it advances at the rate of about 2 meters per day). What should trouble you instead is the fact that Perito Moreno is one of only three glaciers in Patagonia that are advancing; the rest are receding at a faster rate than in any other region of the world.

Next month I’ll post a video from Patagonia, which includes footage of the face of the glacier Perito Moreno calving off.

CLICK HERE to view the Patagonia slideshow

To see some my other photo sets, click here

I set an alarm and awoke before the birds. The trail around the remote peninsula was about 30 kilometers so I wanted to ensure an early start. The beach was still and the three dogs were nowhere in sight when I crawled out of my tent into the crepuscular light. I packed up in the dawn silence and set off along the beach with the sea to my left as the world came into relief, the winding coastline and its mountainous interior extending a formidable distance before me in bays and ranges that receded without end in a layered haze.

The lack of trees and a tiered rocky coastline impart to the Akamas a sense of desolation but at closer look the scrubby landscape reveals its life. I had forgotten to bring a plant and wildlife identification book on the trip and so I cannot say if what I saw were cyclamens or daisies, chamomile or asters. But whatever flowers they were, there were plenty of them, defying the stony earth in victorious uproars of turquoise and violet, magnolia and crimson. I have heard that if you happen to be in the Akamas during a certain period after a hard rain, you can witness entire barren fields bloom into color within hours.

The high bushes soon came to life in a chorus of birdsong and, though the sun was still behind the foothills to my east, the morning chill had left. The turtle-nesting ground of the protected Lara Reserve is substantial, encompassing two bays and a neck of land, and a sign was posted at its northern beach outlining the rules and prohibitions. Despite the increasing recognition in Cyprus of the need to protect wildlife, it appeared there remained some vocal opponents who did not shy from expressing their reservations about turtle conservation: the steel sign had been pockmarked with shotgun blasts and in the middle was a gaping hole that looked like the work of an elephant gun.

The E4 path became a dirt road. This was a disappointment. Much of the pleasure of walking comes from escaping vehicles and from traveling where they cannot go. But here I was, in the far-flung Akamas, on a damn road again. Of course there was little traffic; in three hours I passed only one jeep and two goats. But the fact remained that I could have just as easily been in a driver’s seat with my windows down and belongings stowed in the back, seeing more or less the same sights but without the punishing load.

In frustration I soon veered off the E4 onto a side path suitable only for ATVs or farm equipment, but within a half hour the comforting band of blue to my left had grown uncomfortably distant. The Akamas does not take up much space on a map and is not the kind of place you would think you could get lost in, but its mountainous ruggedness can get the better of a cocksure hiker. I have known a number of capable trekkers who got disoriented in this peninsula. So I gingerly trailblazed my way back to the seaside road through several rocky fields, keeping a wary eye out for snakes, which were starting to awaken from their winter slumbers.

Though most Cyprus snakes are not dangerous, the blunt-nosed viper can deliver a lethal bite and I had not thought to bring antivenin with me. But in the end I only saw two snakes in the Akamas, a black large whip snake about five-feet long that coiled its way across the path ahead of me and a smaller brown one that I could not identify as it had been flattened and disfigured by a tire.

Shortly after I had rejoined with the E4 I came upon a Cyprus-style oasis: a rectangular stone structure in which potable water gushes continuously from a tap. These modern oases can often be found on mountain roads, usually accompanied by an icon, but I did not expect to find flowing water so far out in the Akamas. In an island where fears of water shortages always loom, these fountains are a strange but comforting sight—handy not only for quenching thirst but also for washing cars, assuming you keep a bucket and a large sponge in the trunk. I had no car to wash but I did give my head a good dunking and then topped off my water bottles after drinking as much as I could stomach.

As soon as I returned to my pack, which I had ditched on the other side of the road, four dirt bikes appeared and stopped at the fountain. The six of them (two were couples) dismounted, but instead of bending to the stream of water, they walked to the back of the fountain where they found some sort of clue. They were obviously members of the same group that Christos and I had met in the Paphos forest and it appeared they were still on their GPS treasure hunt. One of the women, who was kneading her backside from the bumpy ride, looked over in my direction. “This bike could use some new shocks,” I heard her say to her companion. “Or I could use a break from all this riding and instead walk like him.”

“Yeah, but how would you like to lug that pack around?” he replied as they mounted the dirt bike. She did not respond, but implicit in her silence seemed a recognition that, yes, despite the aching gluteus, it was still better to be borne than to bear.

My feet were beginning to hurt. In my sneakers my toes would throb, while in my sandals the soles of my feet ached. I found I could switch off between sneakers and sandals just often enough to distribute the pain equally between them, thereby keeping the walk comfortable or at least tolerable. But it turned out that I had in the end favored my soles over my toes: the nails of my big toes would later turn black.

I finally arrived at the point where the E4 veers inland towards the other end of the peninsula. But there was also a narrower dirt road that continued coastward. I set my pack down and, retrieving the map, leaned back against the post of another shotgun-pockmarked metal sign, this one offering precautionary advice instead of regulations: Danger – Do Not Touch Any Military Debris. It May Explode and Kill You (British forces once used this area as an artillery firing range). This sign also had a hole blasted out of the middle of it. It appeared that the assaults on these signs were acts of mere vandalism after all, not premeditated acts of protest. But these lawless vandals were not without an irreverent sense of humor: I had passed numerous No Hunting signs with empty shells littered at their base.

I could see by my map that the E4 cut across the peninsula well before the lighthouse, which was near the land’s end. I had made good time so far and I wanted to go as far around the coast as possible so I decided to abandon the E4 and follow this coastal road, which was not even marked on the map. As long as I hugged the coast, so my thinking went, there was no way I could get lost.

I had hoped that the path would follow the shore but the land was growing increasingly mountainous and the trail took me uphill towards the chiming bells of several dozen goats grazing on the steep slopes above me. Winding paths can be both an advantage and a disadvantage. They can be an advantage because they offer an optimistic boost that can be renewed after each bend (Yes, I’ve almost arrived, it’s just there around this bend!). Then you round the bend and glumly see only another one. But as you near that bend your spirits rise again with fresh assurance (Yes, I’ve almost arrived, it’s just there, around this bend!). For this same reason winding paths can be a disadvantage: the illusion tempts you to continue farther than you meant to go if you only intended to make a brief side-jaunt.

There was no end to this winding. Behind me the coastline unfolded in the same endlessness that I saw at daybreak when I set out, though I was now at a higher elevation and could look out over a greater distance. I was sure the lighthouse was close; it was geographically impossible for this path to continue much further. And yet it did. The dirt road had narrowed into a scraggly goat-trail but there was no way I would turn back at that point. Then I rounded the corner and… there it was. But the picturesque lighthouse I had imagined resembled a fortress, looming down over me in stout rectangularity beyond a giant ravine-like valley. But at least I could see it. Now all I had to do was follow the trail up the ridge and hike along the half-moon crest to the—

It was then that I saw my goat-trail came to an ignoble end about 50 paces away. I refused to accept it; it had to be merely a visual illusion. I followed the trail but it indeed led into a patch of thistles. Without hesitation or thought I began to work my way up the mountainside to the ridge. But it was not long before I began thinking, in fact obsessing, about blunt-nosed vipers. I was in Viperville no doubt and, at least in this Viperville, there were no hospitals.

I saw myself stumbling through the scrubby hills, pulse thumping in my throat, my t-shirt tied below my knee to reduce the flow of poison to my heart until, recognizing the futility of my effort to reach help in time, I fall to the ground, retrieve my Leatherman with shaking hands and, under the delusion of campfire lore, begin to saw into my calf around the bite mark, sweating, screaming, my leg recoiling from my merciless hand, not realizing in my fear and passion how far I have sliced into my leg until it becomes pointless to even try sucking out the venom since the blood is flowing so freely, but I do try nonetheless, my face soon resembling that of a hyena feeding on a baby antelope, and that is how I die, there on the blood-soaked brush, under the gaze of goats, a slow loss of consciousness as my life oozes out of me, although I am at least spared the awful recognition in these final moments that the snake that bit me was not the blunt-nosed viper but the non-venomous coin snake.

I carefully but quickly made my way back to the goat trail. Resting against my pack and in view of the lighthouse, I finished off the salami and Anari cheese and ate my fill of bread, tossing the remaining slab of loaf down the mountain, as if to assert to myself and to the Akamas that, though these mountains may have gotten the best of me, there was no way in hell I was spending the night out here. Food was for overnight hikers, not day-trippers.

It was not even 2 pm but if I were forced to retrace my steps to the E4 then I had a substantial trek ahead of me. I had spent a good part of the day cursing the accessibility of the E4 and trying to escape it through side paths; now I wanted nothing more than to return to its familiar predictability.

The Akamas gods seem to have misinterpreted my act of hubris (discarding the bread) as an offering because I did not have to retrace my steps far before I met with a side path. It led me up over the mountains and down to the northeastern shore of the peninsula where I joined with the E4.

I kept my rest stops brief; if I paused too long my feet would relax, allowing them an opportunity to register pain, and upon resuming it would take a minute of hobbling before they were tolerably numb again. By 5:30 I had arrived, ragged but triumphant, at my destination, the Baths of Aphrodite parking lot. There I successfully accosted a British couple for a ride to Kato Arodes, which was on route to their Paphos hotel.

The fortune I had ascribed to my bread sacrifice did not end there. That night after dinner I prevailed 5-1 over Christos in our backgammon match. He tried to keep a stoic face about it, but it was clear by the flush in his cheeks that he was fuming under the loss, especially as I flaunted my victory with deep sighs of contentment and patronizing utterances of moral support.

“I wouldn’t mind some hash browns with the eggs tomorrow,” I said, leaning back and interlocking my arms behind my head. The terms of competition were the same as that of our Wednesday game: the loser had to prepare breakfast.

Christos was staring into the fireplace with mute frustration. “Let’s play one more match,” he finally said. “Loser does all the house cleaning before we leave tomorrow.”

“You know what this means?” I said. “If I win, then you will not only cook breakfast, serve it to me on the patio and then wash the dishes, but also scrub, sweep, mop, and close up the house.”

“If you’ve got the guts,” he said, his mood lifting as he saw I was going to take him up on the challenge.

I again dispatched him 5-1. This time there was no need for any eyebrow tossing or soft-spoken advice on backgammon strategy to goad him on. I had satisfactorily avenged myself for my 5-2 loss on Wednesday and for his subsequent gloating.

But as insufferable as he had been in victory, so was he gracious in defeat. The next morning while I read on the balcony, not only did he serve me up the hash browns I requested but, like a veteran butler, even brought me a blanket with which to drape over my aristocratic shins, tenderly exposed as they were to the harsh elements of a sunny Mediterranean spring morning.

But my patrician morning soon came to an end and just before midday, after Christos had finished mopping (yes, cousin, my taunting knows no bounds), I was once more a rucksacked plebeian. Our goal for this final day of our trip was straightforward: hitchhike to the Honda, which we had left in the church parking lot at Kaminaria and then drive back to Nicosia.

By 2:30 we had only made it to the Stroumpi gas station, not even 20 minutes from where we had started, and that only thanks to the goodwill of a British carpenter from Devon who drove five minutes out of his way to drop us off where we might have better luck catching rides.

We then changed strategy. In Cyprus self-serve pumping at gas stations does not exist, at least not during working hours. So Christos and I approached the four attendants seated outside the convenience store and asked if they could, while pumping gas, see if drivers would not mind giving us a ride.

They were happy to oblige and we bought some drinks from their store and sat with them. Twenty minutes passed. “So you’re going to Kaminaria,” said the old man sitting next to me. His mustache and tufts of ear-hair were a striking white. “I know those villages well.” He smiled, showing a gap where his front tooth had been. “We used to sell pigs up there. Each house would buy one and then raise it till Christmas.”

After 10 more luckless minutes, Christos and I decided to return to hitching. We thanked them for their effort and crossed the road. But it was no better on the roadside. Car after car drove by, most drivers ignoring us, others shrugging their shoulders and raising their hands in a “what can I do?” gesture, sometimes even when there was no one else in the car, as if to say “sorry, but you may be psychopaths.” It was in fact becoming a faint possibility. We no longer patiently sat as the cars drove by: we entreated with our palms up, we muttered at them, gesticulated, cursed them. The worst were the young men speeding by in their sparkling cars, unmoved behind their dark sunglasses and thumping bass. We were soon shouting at them as they drove by. “Stop and pick us up if you’re such a tough guy!” “What’s wrong, butterboy, scared of us?”

Every passing car seemed an insult. It is much easier to be easygoing and upbeat when you are on the comfortable side of life. When you are hard up, you grow irritable and bitter more easily, for you see how the world is organized along class lines to your disadvantage. It is much easier to be aware of class divisions when you are poor. The divisions recede when viewed from up high where life—at least the material side of it—is more airy and cushioned. The cries of the rabble do not usually penetrate the palace walls. Christos and I were, at least for the moment, part of the underclass, and therefore had no place in the lives of those well off enough to disregard us from within their luxury vehicles.

But it was not just the Mercedes and BMW’s ignoring us; the old pickups and rusty clunkers were also forsaking us. So I directed my resentment towards all of them—whether rich or poor or any shade in between—they were all insensitive bastards or wussies. I also began to make vast generalizations. Sweeping overstatements always serve to improve my mood by offering the impression that, as payment for my travails, I have struck upon a piece of universal wisdom. My great insight at that moment was that the wealthier a society becomes, the more frightened its population, whether because it has more to lose or because it has become so accustomed to such a high degree of security that the slightest ripple in its guarded routine creates a wave of fear. And so in this case, Cypriots, and especially Greek Cypriots, whose standard of living had skyrocketed over the past two decades were less prone to pick up hitchhikers.

In retrospect my generalization—or at least the part about Cypriots not picking up hitchhikers—may not have been so off mark. It was two Pontians who finally stopped for us, dropping us off in Paphos at the entrance to the Limassol highway. We had given up on trying to get to Kaminaria, which was only accessible via remote mountain roads. It would be enough to reach Nicosia.

But even the capital was increasingly looking like an unreachable goal. We baked on the concrete for over an hour with thumbs extended. An Apoel – Omonoia football game was to take place at the Nicosia stadium in several hours and fans were already on their way, the team colors billowing in streamers from the windows. Had we thought of it earlier, we could have bought two green-and-white Omonoia flags and draped ourselves in them, something that would have surely won us a ride at once. It was finally a pair of young Russians in a gutted pickup who stopped for us and took as far as one of the Limassol roundabouts. They cracked beer after beer, passing them back and forth as they smiled and whistled at every attractive single female they overtook.

Christos had made a few phone calls during the ride and finagled a taxi van service line bound for Nicosia to pick us up at the roundabout. Our goal for the day had been to get to Kaminaria—or, considering the change of plans, Nicosia—without spending any money. But we had proved adaptable so far this trip and this seemed no time to buck the trend with inflexible ideals.

And so in fitting unromantic fashion we traveled back to Nicosia in a van with eight others for five pounds each, the best five pounds I spent all trip.  We glided off, leaving behind us the bulge of the Troodos mountains, where the Honda would spend one last night in the Kaminaria church parking lot and where the red sun was now sinking with—in what seemed from my air conditioned perspective—a sighing serenity. And as I sat with my sunburned forehead pressed against the cool window, recalling all the faces and places of the past six days, all my roadside wrath and gnashing at Cypriot drivers melted away with the mellowing light, as all fury eventually does in Cyprus with a little time and comfort.

Constantine Markides

*To see a slideshow of all of my photos from this E4 walk click here

ONE OF THE REASONS travelers endure hardship is because they expect to reap something for the trouble – perhaps an insight, a sense of accomplishment, a tougher hide, or even just a good story to self-depreciatingly boast over later. But sometimes the hardship you fetch upon yourself brings nothing except head-shaking bemusement when you look back on how senseless it was.

Reflecting now upon day three – the day following our forest fiasco – of what was supposed to have been a hiking trip along the E4 European long distance path, I can say that trudging 20 or so primarily uphill kilometers on the concrete shoulders of roadkill-littered routes while loaded down with a rucksack packed for backwoods hiking offers few kicks and no compensation. The only occasional thrill consisted of an alarming gust of air as a 18-wheeler blared by, not exactly the stuff of adventure travel. A roadside trek had not been part of our anticipated route, but having strayed the previous day from the E4 path, plans had changed. We were so far south of the trail that we just decided to walk directly to our final destination, Kato Arodes, the village where my cousin Christos had provisional residency rights to a Turkish Cypriot house. This alternate route meant we would be finishing our hike a day or two earlier than expected, but Kato Arodes was on the outskirts of the protected Akamas wilderness and so there would be plenty of roaming possibilities nearby.

Since we had out of necessity splurged on a hotel, we had vowed the previous night to indulge in a luxurious idle morning and so we did not begin hiking until after midday. It had been only minutes after we set off that it began to rain lightly. Our previous night’s sodden misery was still fresh in our memory and so this harmless sprinkling affected us as screeching tires might affect a recent car crash survivor. After a few failed attempts to flag down a passing pick up, the driver of a mid-sized truck pulled over for us. It would not be until a few days later that we would discover how lucky we were to have so easily caught a ride on a busy road, and from a Cypriot at that, as we would be spending the hottest hours of Saturday with upended thumbs on the roadside, groaning and swearing as innumerable drivers sped by us.

The driver was surprised when Christos spoke to him in Greek. He was even more taken aback that we had started our hike on Monday in Kaminaria. “And why?” he asked. “Ten or fifteen kilometers I could understand, but from Kaminaria?”

Our conversation turned to the subject of Cyprus’ accession in the European Union, and our driver expressed an opinion I often heard among the Cypriot working class: “The EU just makes the rich richer. It’s destroying our farmers.” This was no backwater ignorance. I had recently spoken to numerous Cypriot farmers who claimed they were facing financial ruin due to the flood of cheap agricultural imports from European mega-farms now that Brussels has demanded that Cyprus lift import restrictions on other member states. The centralized top-down approach of European Union decision-making, similar in many ways to the British colonial model that Cyprus experienced in the first half of the twentieth century, has not sat well with those accustomed to local control, even if those holding the local reins are irremediable scoundrels and bunglers.

The driver drove us 15 km to the Polemi gas station, about a kilometer downhill of the town Stroumpi. He then continued on his southwesterly route towards Paphos while we set off along a torturous uphill in a northwesterly direction towards Arodes. The uphill was to persist unrelentingly for the rest of the day. We had caught a ride along the day’s only stretch of downhill. As it had stopped sprinkling and as we did not want to make an utter pansy capitulation of our day’s hike, we did not attempt to flag down any more of the pickups appealingly zooming by us. But in the end, we turned out to be not pansies but fools, our feet sore from hours of impact on concrete, our minds numbed from the mulish roadside trudging. It was not as bad as highway hiking, but it was tedious. By the end of the day we would be craving a desolate trail just as badly as we had been craving a busy road while lost in the woods the previous evening.

After passing through Stroumpi, we stopped at a coffee house where we ordered two “Kypriaka” (Cypriot) coffees, an espresso-like drink that one sips down to the sludge. A 40-cent coffee can offer not only a caffeine perk but also a window into one’s future. If a willing fortune-teller is on hand and offers her services (coffee soothsaying is, in the Delphic tradition, a gift bestowed upon women) the cup is then upended onto the saucer so that the coffee rind can seep down the sides of the cup in seemingly random patterns that to the discerning coffee cup reader will reveal future trips, traps and, if one is single, trysts.

Upon setting the coffees before us, the waitress pointed at a man sitting two tables over. “The coffees are on him,” she said. We had exchanged a few words of greeting with him upon entering, but no more. Yet it was not surprising that he paid for our coffees. We had been treated in this manner several times on our trip. The tradition of island hospitality has not been snuffed out by the increasing materialism of Cypriots. And hospitality also serves a utilitarian function: it is a conversation opener. We thanked the man, whose ample facial features gave him a remarkable semblance to the President, Tassos Papadopoulos. He had seen our packs propped up against a stone wall outside the coffee house and asked what we were doing. Upon hearing that we were on a multi-day hike he nodded with the single utterance “Malista.” When used as a response, the word ‘malista’ indicates that the other person’s statement has been unambiguously understood and – if asserted vehemently enough – even approved of.

“People have grown soft in Cyprus,” he said. “Now everyone has cars with air conditioning, eight gears… everything has to be easy… they can’t be bothered with anything else, can’t go to any troubles at all.”

Christos is not garrulous, but on this trip he struck up conversations as affably and easily as an experienced talk show host. This enabled me to sit back and participate merely through attentiveness and occasional nods. It seems that every pair of travelers consists of a talker and a listener, regardless of whether or not they are equally gregarious in temperament. It must be some intrinsic traveling requirement, just as a functioning battery requires a positive and a negative end. On this trip, it quickly became apparent that I was, to my great pleasure, the battery’s minus sign, the listener.

The conversation between Christos and the President’s potential stunt double turned to the subject of the ceaseless construction razing the island. Thanks to accommodating politicians, real estate developers in Cyprus have gone a long ways in actualizing their dream to convert every stretch of untouched verdure into a strip of profitable concrete. In their carefully controlled paradise the only greenery consists of prudish hedges and lawns that resemble a soldier’s buzzcut, which is not surprising since real estate developers and militaries generally tend to operate in similar ways, though wreaking their violence upon different subjects. The northern Paphos, the region that spans outward from the island’s northwestern Akamas heel, has seen the least construction south of the Green Line, and it is claimed, especially among Paphites, that this breeds a people who are a step more rugged, vigorous and heels-in-the-earth than other Cypriots.

“But they’re going to ruin this area too,” Christos said.

The man pointed at Christos and nodded. “Bravo, my son,” he said. “That’s it, you said it.” He looked out the window and his body heaved with a sigh. “Malista.”

We continued our ascent. After winding up seven or eight kilometers past vineyards and a few solitary olive trees the road leveled off and came to a T. I retrieved some dried figs, koulouri (dried sesame bread ring) and a jar of peanut butter, while Christos lay down on his back, propping his legs up on the metal guardrail. A family car soon drove by, the young faces in the backseat crowded against the window, their heads pivoting and eyes riveted on us as the car drove by.

Christos looked up into the now-cloudless sky: “Those parents are telling their kids: ‘Don’t become this when you get older.’” He mused over a piece of koulouri as he continued in the voice of the parents. “They come to our island and don’t even spend any money in our restaurants, the bums.”

Two hours before sunset we arrived at the town of Pano Arodes, only a kilometer from Kato Arodes. There are two groceries in the village. The one Christos usually shops at was closed so I went down the road to the other grocery store, which Christos avoids. I could see why. Here they did not even bother wipe the layer of dust off the canned food lining the shelves. I bought only the minimal foods necessary for a decent dinner and breakfast but it was no easy task. The old blackclad woman behind the counter began to follow me around.

“Where are you staying? Kato Arodes? With whom? Who? I don’t know him. What are you looking for?” I told her I was all set. “What are you going to cook?” I reached for some pasta. “ Oh, spaghetti, well then you should use this sauce…” She tried to hand me a can of pasta sauce but I declined with a smile and fled to the other end of the store. I thought my locomotive advantages would buy me enough time to get a few potatoes from a dingy cardboard box on the floor and then get to the cash register, but she was unnaturally swift, especially considering her humped form, and she was soon hovering apparition-like at my side, even the white hairs of her sparse beard sticking out intrusively towards me. “Put some more potatoes in that bag, they’re good I tell you. Go on put more, more. Here…” She reached down, barely having to bend, and grabbed a clawful of potatoes. “Okay, okay,” I said, trying to muzzle my frustration, which was mounting into desperation, and tossed a few more potatoes in the bag. I hoped this would appease my trailing harpy but her ability to influence me only strengthened her tenacity to volunteer herself as my personal grocery consultant. I finally resigned myself to her. “Is this bread fresh?” I asked, motioning at several loaves on a bread rack. “Yes, that’s good bread,” she answered. “But is it fresh?” I insisted. Avoiding my gaze, she grabbed the bread and took it to the counter. “You’ll like this bread, you will.”

I found Christos waiting for me outside the other grocery store, which was now open, with several bags of groceries at his feet. Christos had knocked on the owner’s front door and the man had obligingly unlocked the shop for him, a common enough practice in the villages. A number of other customers had already gone in and out of the store. Christos told me he had overheard one woman whispering, “You mean, they speak Greek?” Only soldiers and foreigners wield backpacks in Cyprus; the mere act of carrying a backpack had transformed Christos into a stranger in a place that he has been visiting about once a month for the last decade.

A pickup truck with the engine running was parked on the road outside the store. “Where are you from?” the driver asked us, leaning on his elbow out the window.

“Nicosia,” Christos says. “I know, not many from Nicosia do this sort of thing.”

The man shrugged. “But there are Paphites who can’t even walk from here to there,” he said, motioning to the store. We walked off towards Kato Arodes, amused, as the man sat in his truck, waiting for his wife to finish buying the groceries.

Before 1974 Turkish Cypriots lived in Kato Arodes. But the ’74 coup by the Greek junta and the subsequent Turkish invasion led to the separation of the island’s two main ethnic communities, with Turkish Cypriots relocating to the island’s north and Greek Cypriots to the south. Those homes south of the Green Line that formerly housed Turkish Cypriots were offered provisionally (meaning until a political settlement took place) to Greek Cypriot refugees, but because most refugees settled in or around cities, many Turkish Cypriot homes in the remote villages like Kato Arodes remained empty. Those Greek Cypriots willing to put a certain sum towards repairing a house were for a minimum monthly fee then permitted access to it until there was a political settlement. It was through this process that Christos now possessed the house key. It was not him who had originally paid for the renovations, but a middleman, who then sold the provisional rights to Christos for more than he paid for the renovations, illegal but hard to prove and common practice. The property issue in Cyprus is an intractable mess and where there is a mess, there is money to be made; and where there is money to be made there is a Cypriot with a feverish resolve.

When he bought the provisional rights to the house, Christos knew that should a settlement take place the next day, the house would have been returned to its Turkish Cypriot owners but not the fee to him. It was a gamble, but considering the past record of officials on both sides involved in that schoolyard spat euphemistically called “the negotiation process,” the odds were overwhelmingly in his favor, or at least would be for many more years.

It was my duty the next morning to cook breakfast because I had lost to Christos in backgammon the previous night (he won 5-2). We had bet that the loser was to prepare and serve breakfast for the winner, as well as wash the dishes. Christos reveled in his victory, both that night and throughout the breakfast of fried halloumi, sausage and eggs. I did not hold it against him, since obnoxious gloating is the supreme purpose and prize in betting against a close family member or friend, especially a competitive one. I vowed to avenge myself upon him next time, but it would not be tomorrow. It was perhaps in order to lift myself from my sulking regret at my backgammon loss that I decided to descend in the morning to the southern end of the Akamas peninsula.

We had arrived at Arodes two days earlier than expected and so I would still have time to camp on a beach tomorrow night and then, rising at daybreak, round the peninsula and hitch back to Kato Arodes in time for dinner and backgammon revenge. I also felt I had to use my tent at least one night after lugging it so far. Christos had been in the Akamas a number of times and he wanted to do some yard work so he decided to stay in Arodes, though he would hike with me for the day down to Lara beach.

So after breakfast we set off for Lara, me with the full backpack, Christos with a water bottle. While passing through the neighboring village of Ineia, I stopped in at the general store to buy food for my hike. There was no one else in the store except a boy behind the cash register. “How long have you been working here?” I asked as he tried with difficulty to add up my few purchases.

“Since last year,” he said.

“How old are you?”

“Twelve.”

It was a Thursday morning and school was in session. It was only after I left that I realized I had been charged only two pounds—just over four dollars—for my three large plastic bottles of water, a package of dried Anari cheese, and several carrots and apples.

Our hike down towards Lara was uneventful except for a solitary renegade sheep that came charging and baaing up the road towards us, only to come to a standstill 20 feet away. It eyed us with contempt for several courageous moments and then, overcome by its genetics, bolted off in terror up the thistly hillside.

Though we were hiking down an old paved road, only about one car per hour passed us by, mostly tourists. These were desolate regions, at least by Cyprus standards. Christos had planned to catch a ride back upon getting to Lara but as it was afternoon he was growing concerned he may not find someone driving back up this way and wondered whether he should have caught a ride with the last car.

“This reminds me of a joke about the man who feared nothing because he believed God would come to his aid in times of trouble,” Christos said. “There was once a massive flood and the surrounding river waters threatened to submerse a town. Police came from neighboring communities to assist in the evacuation. But one man refused to go. He told the policeman, ‘I don’t put my faith in men, but in God. If I need help, God will come to aid me.’ He was the only man from the town to stay behind. The waters rose, submerging the houses on the lower elevations. This time police returned in a rescue speedboat and motored to the man’s house, where the water lapped against his front door. ‘This is the police,’ they boomed through a megaphone. ‘Your life is in danger. You must evacuate this house immediately. Come with us now.’ The man stuck his head out from his upstairs window and shouted back: ‘I put my faith in God, not men. God will aid me if I need help’ and with that slammed his window shut. Soon the waters submerged the entire house except the roof, onto which the man had climbed. A state helicopter came clipping overhead and an amplified voice boomed out: ‘This is the government. We are ordering you to leave this house. If you stay, you will drown.’ The man shook his head and waved them away with irritation, yelling inaudibly against the roar of the blades that God would protect him. The waters continued to rise and the man drowned. When the dead man came before St. Peter, he demanded to see God. So insistent was he that St. Peter finally relented and granted him a brief visitation. The man entered God’s chamber. “God,” he said, “all my life I have believed unswervingly in you. I pray, I read the scripture, I follow your commandments. Why then did you forsake me? Why did you let me drown?” To this God replied, “Let you drown? I sent you a van, a speedboat and finally a helicopter. What else did you want me to do?”

As if Christos had perfectly staged his account, a pickup appeared around the bend below us. “Well, he said gleefully, flagging it down. “Remember the proverb: when help comes, don’t turn it down, or it may be your last.” After exchanging a few words with the driver, he climbed into the front seat and off they went.

An hour later I was at Lara beach. To my surprise the seaside taverna that hugged the edge of the bay was open. As it was a weekday and in such a remote area, approachable only by dirt roads, there were only tourists there. I wrote and read over a Kypriako coffee and then shelved all bookish activities and attended to that most cherished of Cypriot national pastimes, eating. I had expected dinner to consist of bread, Anari cheese, carrots, and a partial sausage leftover from this morning but with the restaurant open, all that could wait till tomorrow. I ordered a village salad (a proper salad, including at minimum fresh cucumbers, tomatoes, lettuce, feta, and onion, unlike the cud found too frequently at American roadside eating places that involves a heap of watery lettuce, a slab or two of water-repellent tomato and a few croutons for token diversity), battered squid rings and fries, and a KEO beer.

I regretted Christos was not there to enjoy the meal. Had he known the restaurant was open, I am sure he would have continued towards Lara. Only later would I find out that the farmer with whom Christos caught a ride lived only a half mile up the road and so Christos had to walk back most of the way. Had he not made a parable out of the joke about the godly man, he would have gotten a seafood meal and then a ride back home with one of the other customers.

The taverna owner said I could tent at the foot of the restaurant, which was out of the way of the loggerhead and green turtle nesting grounds farther down the beach. I pitched my tent on a sandy area dotted with pastel-colored flowers and then went for a swim. I had considered staying out of the water as I had not packed any moleskin and did not want the two pieces that were by now glued firmly under the two leftmost toes of my left foot to wash off in the sea. I had awoken yesterday morning in the Pano Panagia hotel to find two yellow blisters the size of marbles under those toes and I felt that the moleskin was the only thing preventing a mess in my sock. But this seemed a meager reason, even if a rational one, so I swam, forgetting about the blisters. I splashed about and sculled in the crisp water for ten minutes or so and then rinsed off under the restaurant’s outdoor shower, where I found to my surprise that the moleskin had not come loose.

I retrieved from my pack a flask of zivania—a clean clear Cypriot firewater made from pressed grapes—and sat on a rock by the shore, watching as Orion brightened into view in the darkening sky above the sea. The face of the waves glistened under the light of the half-moon just before they broke, and the creamy surf leapt up at the pebbly shoreline. The small stones gurgled and tumbled over one another as the sea inhaled to make way for the next breaking wave, its curling face briefly illuminated by the moon before expending itself.

It had been a long time since I had been alone under the stars at night, and I remembered again why one must occasionally extract oneself from the noisy hyperconnected world, even just for a few hours of solitude and repose. As I sat there silently on the beach, the night, the sea, my very own life suddenly turned momentous and profound. Even if the feeling is mere illusion, which I do not think it is, it is a worthwhile delusion to occasionally indulge.

Having said that, I am not one to preach about great intervals of solitude. At the moment of writing this, I am in western Vermont, having interrupted my job at the Cyprus Mail to return to the US for my yearly lucrative six-week stint planting trees along the banks of streams that wind through pastureland. It is hard work, with 11-hour days the norm, in which I generally work alone. Outside of bushwacking through a novel, this is far more time than I need or like to spend with myself. So with a walkman I distract myself with radio gibberish and books on tape, preferably books about hardship and travail (recent highlights include George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, The Best American Travel Writing of 2001 and—considering the subject of this essay—Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods) which are the only sorts of books that make me feel better about the fact that I am passing my days slouched in the manure-rich muck in either buggy 80 degree sunshine or showers and occasional downpours.

But there on the Lara beach I had no responsibilities, no work, and so I was perfectly happy there, alone. Of course, this was Cyprus, and one cannot be alone for too long. Three dogs, which I assumed were from the restaurant, came rushing over at me and after a five-minute fit of barking, calmed, with one even mustering the courage to near me for some patting. After that, he became my faithful watchdog, following me everywhere, and even held vigil at the foot of my tent with his head on his paws as I slumbered into the dawn.

Constantine Markides

Kaminaria Departure

AFTER FILLING in my name and place of employment, the young policeman behind the desk looked at me quizzically, apparently confounded by the next piece of information requested on the incident form.  “And you were doing this why?” he said finally. “Hobby?”

The perplexity couched in his question had been more bluntly expressed that same morning by an elderly monk at Kykkos monastery after my cousin Christos had explained the two of us were on a five-day trek from a village in the Troodos mountains to the Akamas peninsula: “And why, my son?”

Most generalizations about nations or peoples are founded more upon prejudice and ignorance than fact, but one can make one irrefutable assertion about Cypriots: they do not trek. The only creature on the island that traverses distances with a load on its back is the donkey, and even that beast of burden has become a rarity. Of course Cypriots have never been much for walking. In his account of his 600-mile trek through Cyprus in the spring and summer of 1972 Colin Thubron writes:

“In eastern Mediterranean lands nobody goes on foot unless he must. To walk out of pleasure or curiosity is unimaginable. A man walks only because he is poor. The fishermen watched me, puzzled, and a shepherd on an inland ridge turned among his flock to shade his eyes. There was no hostility, and no understanding.”

There may be fewer shepherds and more Mercedes on the island since then, but Cypriot aversion towards walking has remained as unswerving as the Cyprus problem. Why walk for five days what you can drive in five hours, including coffee breaks and a taverna lunch?

On the morning of Monday, April 3 my cousin and I drove to the mountain village of Kaminaria, and with the permission of the village priest who was clutching a black iron key as long as his upper arm, abandoned our car in the church parking lot and set off on a trail winding up past the church.

After an initial few brutal kilometers of steep uphill the trail leveled off and then dipped into the Platys river valley past some vineyards the Kaminaria priest owned. While resting at a picnic site by the Pyknopytia brook we met some of the foresters who had marked out the trail—the European long distance path E4.

In their tendency to shirk walking, Cypriots may be more Middle Eastern than European; but the government nonetheless decided to include Cyprus in the European long distance path (the trail starts in Gibraltar and crosses Europe) by establishing a 539 km E4 trail that traverses the central and southern parts of the island. There were no illusions about who would be hiking it; the Forestry Department’s main partner in creating the trail was the Cyprus Tourism Organisation.

“So it must be only foreigners who hike the trail,” I said to one of the foresters as he offered me an apple wedge.

“Oh no, we saw four or five Cypriots walking by here,” he said. I asked him when. “Last June.”

We soon came to a sign saying there were 9km left to Kykkos monastery, our day’s destination. The heaviness of our packs and our unpreparedness (me without hiking boots, Christos without a hip strap on his pack) had taxed our increasingly sore bodies and the single-digit number brought new vigor into our stride. But our jocularity quickly subsided into morose silence once it became apparent the entire way would be a steep uphill.

Roughly halfway between the monastery and us was Myllikouri, a 1200m high horseshoe-shaped village known for rose water production. After a brief exchange with a local it was clear that our lunchtime hopes for a taverna were a mirage. Only a coffee shop was open. Instead we shed our footwear and elevated our sore feet at a shaded picnic table overlooking the valley at the mouth of the village.

A man soon approached us as we were gnawing at a loaf of bread along with some cucumbers and a hard cheese called Kefalotyri. The man declined an invitation to join us in our meager lunch but did sit at the wooden bench table beside ours.

“We were hoping to find a taverna here but we were told there’s nothing open now,” my cousin told the man, whom we soon found out was the mukhtar, the community leader. “So instead this is lunch.”

“The villages are dying,” the mukhtar said matter-of-factly. “We’re all pensioners here.” I asked him when the decline began. “Ten or fifteen years ago. The young men leave for the army and don’t return so the fathers take their daughters away. What else are they going to do, hump ‘em themselves?”

Not a vehicle passed us as we trudged the last five winding kilometers along a paved uphill to Kykkos monastery. At around five we came in view of the slogan “Makarios is alive” – painted on the side of the mountain upon which Makarios’ tomb rests – and soon after arrived at Kykkos, the gilded seat of power and wealth in the Cyprus church.

After a few inquiries and some rigmarole, we managed to score a guest room. An older monk outside the office had tried to redirect us elsewhere when we asked for the key, presumably because guestrooms were not his monastic duty, prompting a younger monk nearby to chastise him in ancient Greek about responsibility and irresponsibility while ushering us into the office.

The monk, who later said he was 30, seemed eager for conversation. “It is hard to be a monk anywhere, but here at Kykkos it is even more challenging. With so many tourists, you lack the peace and isolation the monastic path requires. Nor do they help in the struggle against lust.” It was a subject he returned to several times. The monk invited us for lentil soup, so after dropping off our packs in a spacious guestroom that could have passed in a budget hotel had it been furnished with a television, we returned to the monastery.

The lentil soup turned out to be an ample feast, accompanied as it was by fresh bread, tomatoes, garlic chives, cucumbers, hot peppers, olives and halvah slabs. Christos and I had only eaten peanuts and sunflower seeds since breakfast so we grubbed in silence as he lectured on ‘Anglo-American-Zionist’ involvement in Cyprus, on his vision of a Greater Byzantium in the Mediterranean, and of course on the carnal challenges a Kykkos monk faces.

Another monk came in briefly and seemed about to sit with us but our host shooed him out of the room with a furtive but violent expression. The young monk had been educated in Greece at a theological seminary and had a facility with the ancient ecclesiastical tongue, so it seemed some of the older monks held him in awe, thereby enabling him to get away with more authoritarianism than his years would have otherwise allowed him.

As is true of many young men who hold stations considered by society to be respectable and lofty, he took himself very seriously. Not only did he have a habit of raising a forefinger when he disagreed with you, which was frequent enough, and of didactic turns of phrases (“Let me tell you one thing”) but he also spoke in painstakingly precise grammar, which he would pepper with Ancient Greek proverbs as if to impart extra weight and sagely solemnity to his every statement.

But I was grateful refueling on the cornucopia set before me. I only interrupted his pontifications to thank him for the meal while ladling myself another bowl of soup. “Don’t thank me. Thank the Virgin Mary,” he replied in proper saintly fashion.

We abandoned our plates in the kitchen to a large woman in apron who was busy spraying down dishes amidst rising mists of diabolical steam, as if relegated by the monks to this infernal task for some misdeed of hers, perhaps for being born a woman. Our dinner host then gathered his black robes about him and motioned us to follow him. At the main monastery entrance we wished him good night.

The monk raised a forefinger. “No, not good night, good paradise.” We stood there, dumb with exhaustion, as he expounded upon why monks wish each other good paradise.

“So is that what the monks say to each other here—Good Paradise?” Christos finally asked.

Our gregarious host fell into an uncharacteristic silence. “Yes,” he said finally, although lacking his former conviction. So we wished him Good Paradise and shambled off for sleep.

After scarfing down an overpriced English breakfast at the cafeteria by the monastery, we set off under overcast skies to make the 26km hike to the Stavros Tis Psokas forest station, a 9-12 hour hike according to the sign. It was 10am, a late start. But Christos proposed cunningly that we ask any driver heading for Stavros Tis Psokas to transport our packs and drop them off for us there. I approved. My unpadded hip strap was cutting into my side and blisters were forming on the soles of my feet despite efforts to thwart them with moleskin. There is nothing pleasant about walking under a heavy weight; Atlas bears the globe on his shoulders as punishment, not recreation.

But the paved path soon developed into a dirt road and then into a rutted rocky path that snaked along the steep mountainsides of the uninhabited Paphos Forest. Only someone with a pickup or jeep would dare navigate it. Our packs were no doubt ours for the day, but my cousin would not relinquish hope, that carrot-stick of the desperate. Every stirring in the forest or buzz of an airplane overhead became a reason to pause and perk ears in hope that some fool on route to the forest station had decided to impress his girlfriend with his manly love of wilderness by driving her through the boondocks.

To our surprise a vehicle did eventually appear—a forestry department pickup—but coming from the opposite direction.

“Are you going back by any chance?” Christos asked the foresters, the carrot now dangling tantalizingly close to his mind’s eye. No, they were not. Their expressions clouded over with doubt when we said we were heading to Stavros Tis Psokas.

“That’s far, real far. You’ve got to go all the way down to the stream, and then all the way up again and then…”

There was nothing to do for us but keep walking. Below us a moufflon—a wild sheep—bounded off down a mountainside splashed white and golden in spring bloom. It was early afternoon, but we were in no hurry. Steep as the mountainside was, the path frequently widened to grant enough space for an unobtrusive tent. We paused under a grove of pines and heated ourselves some water for instant coffee, which we nursed contentedly in the shade of the pines, leaning against their trunks.

The coffee helped boost our pace of descent. A few hours later we had crossed the brook over a wooden bridge and were climbing towards Cedar Valley. We came upon a heartening sign: ‘Stavros Tis Psokas 10km’. Almost in the single-digits! But the memory of yesterday’s uphill grind tempered our enthusiasm, so we maintained a degree of humility and trudged on upwards without self-applause.

It began to sprinkle. For some time now I had sensed new hotspots on the undersides of the leftmost two toes on my left foot but the moleskin was in the depths of Christos’ pack and I had forgotten to ask for it during our coffee break when he emptied his pack to retrieve the buried camp stove. Now it was also starting to rain, which made stopping less desirable, so I disregarded the hotspots, a move which, as I suspected, I would later regret.

Until this point, the E4 had been well posted. But as the sprinkling picked up we encountered a perplexing trio of signs, with the E4 now pointing in three different directions. One metal E4 sign pointed as expected down the path we came from. Another E4 sign that was large as a placard and additionally said “Panagia 10 km,” indicated we should continue in the direction we were walking. And a final E4 sign directed us up a narrower trail that branched off to the right in a steep uphill; this sidetrail was also postmarked with a red ‘Do Not Enter’ sign.

I remembered that the last sign, which had stated that Stavros Tis Psokas was 10km away, had also listed Panagia as around 15km away. This suggested Panagia was five kilometers beyond our destination of Stavros Tis Psokas, which meant we had only five kilometers left. So agreeable was my kindergarten calculation that I swallowed it without bothering to even consult the right map. I did glance at the Western Troodos Area map in my pocket, but the western boundary of the map cut off before Stavros or Panagia. The Paphos map was in my rucksack. Had I fished it out I would have seen that not only are Panagia and Stavros tens of kilometers apart but the E4 does not pass even remotely close to Panagia.

Storm clouds were developing. We agreed it was most logical to stay on the wider path that had so far characterized the E4. In the worst scenario, we would arrive in Panagia in 10km, surely in the vicinity of the E4. So raindrops pattering on our hoods we continued in the direction the big ‘E4 Panagia’ sign pointed us.

The young pine and cedar along the trail were too small to provide adequate shelter from the rain, which had by now developed into steady showers, so we slogged on without stopping. Christos was the first to break our sodden silence: “Have you noticed we haven’t passed any E4 signs?” It was true. But the other E4 sidetrail was now several kilometers behind us.

My jacket was not waterproof so I had by now drenched through. My khakis were stuck to my legs and there was a mudpie caked under each of my waterlogged sneakers, rendering them heavy as hiking boots but without the support. An entourage of dirt bikers raced by us, which I later learned were participating in a weeklong GPS treasure hunt around the island.

It was not until the path came to a T at a dirt road that we realized how naïve we were to expect trail signs in Cyprus to reflect distances any more accurately than do road signs, whose distances often impossibly increase the farther you drive towards your destination. We had hiked three or four kilometres since the last E4 sign, which had read that Panagia was 10km away. Now we stood numbly in front of a green sign that read: Panagia 11km.

In a vehicle we might have shrugged off the mistake as another humorous and even charming instance of Cypriot disregard for Anglo-Saxon fastidiousness. But we were on foot, soaked, fatigued and, with dusk just hours away, astray in the Paphos Forest on a desolate forest road, groaning under rucksacks whose contents were drenched because we had not bothered pack them in black plastic bags.

Near the sign was a rusted emergency Forest Service phone that may as well have been in an antique shop. The directions read that you had to wind the crank three times before raising the receiver. While Christos was trying to place the call a dirt biker rounded the corner towards us. I flagged him down and asked if he knew where the various roads led. But he was as lost as us and as eager to get to shelter. It was an absurd sight: Christos cranking away on the phone like he was placing a call in the early 1900s and me asking directions of a Brit on a dirt bike who had only arrived in Cyprus two days ago. Finally the biker and I gave up trying to establish where we were located on his ultra-detailed map. We wished each other luck and I enviously watched him speed off.

Christos slammed the receiver down and retrieved his cell phone from a pocket. I had been opposed from the start to his bringing a cell on the hike but he was married with two sons and so familial duty provided him with the needed justification. But because he had been abusing his privileges with non-emergency calls, I had grumbled several times since the start of our hike.

“You see why it was a good idea for me to bring this?” he said, grinning triumphantly. But once he brought the mobile up to his face he cursed. For the first time on the trip there was no reception.

As usual there was nothing for us to do but keep walking down the dirt road towards Panagia, although we both dreaded chancing upon another Sisyphusean sign that would read something like ‘Panagia 12km.’ Our pace had fallen to a gritty stagger. Our packs, which were soaked through, seemed to have doubled in weight. It was as if we had removed our clothes and sleeping bags from a washing machine and stuffed them in our packs without bothering with the drying.

We had only hiked three kilometers or so when we came to a curve in the road where two side roads branched off, both marked with red ‘Do Not Enter’ signs. There were no other signs. It made sense we should just stay on the main dirt road, but after our last misadventure with the postings, Christos doubted this logical choice. Dusk was a little over an hour away. He checked his mobile. There was reception.

We dropped our packs and I fell back against a rock ledge while Christos dialed. I was so soaked it was irrelevant whether I was under shelter or not.

“The police are coming,” Christos said jubilantly, after hanging up a few minutes later. “Now that’s what I call innovation. Maybe they’ll even have a jail cell to lock us up in for the night!”

I did not protest. At that moment the prospect of being locked into a dry room with beds seemed a luxury. Never before had I ever wanted to be in jail so badly. Christos had told them we would keep walking, but with the knowledge a vehicle was on its way our bodies resigned. We were moving like stooped old men. My pack seemed grotesquely heavy, but with the cold settling upon us, we could not afford to stop.

We toiled through the muddy road for 45 minutes. As the rain tapered to a drizzle, mist-haloed mountains unfolded themselves in seemingly unending ranges, reminding me more of the Chiapan jungles of Mexico than a Mediterranean forest. It was among the most awesome vistas I have encountered in Cyprus, but I was too miserable with cold to enjoy it.

Christos called the police station again. I heard him again explain where we were, as if they had no idea who he was. “No, we don’t have a car,” I heard him say with exasperation. “We’re walking…. Yes, on foot! Why? Because we’re on a trek!”

After several more phone calls, in which he reiterated that we were walking, it was clear we could not rely on the police to find us. The policeman allegedly on his way not only decided not to enter the woods, but also felt there was no need to call to inform us of his change of mind.

It was dusk and the cold by now had pierced us to the core. It took me a minute of repeated and focused efforts just to unbutton my jeans to urinate. Buttoning up again afterwards proved impossible. I had to content myself with succeeding in at least zipping up my fly.

We ditched our excruciating packs on the side of the trail and decided to tramp for Panagia. But as the dark closed in, and as every turn on the unmarked road only seemed to reveal more looming shadowy mountains, Christos began to fear we were only trekking deeper into the forest.

“Let’s go back and pitch our tents,” he suggested. I disagreed, convinced that the contents of our packs were drenched and that camping would be the surest way towards hypothermia. I estimated we had at most three hours of limping left before Panagia.

Christos’ cell phone battery was almost depleted. I ran ahead in the hope that a few more bends in the road might reveal the end of the mountain range. But there was only rock face after rock face.

When I returned, Christos was on the phone showering blessings on someone. “A forester is on his way,” he said after he hung up. It was not long after we had returned to our abandoned packs that we saw the headlights of a pickup round a distant bend.

It turned out that the police for some mysterious reason had been sitting for hours in a warm Landrover at the entrance to the woods, waiting where the paved road downgraded into the dirt road on which we were shivering several kilometers farther down in the forest.

After filling out our incidents at the Panagia police station – which regrettably lacked a jail cell – the police served us some tea and then dropped us off at the only hotel open at that hour: ‘The Dream.’ As we were in need of thawing, the hotel with its steaming shower actually lived up to its name, although at £38 for two beds it was, at least for hikers on a budget, an overpriced dream.

In Cyprus, as in most Mediterranean countries, you can find administrative bungling of the most spectacular form, and it was no surprise that the authorities made a mistake in posting the signs. But it remained a mystery how they had actually requested a sign to be manufactured that read ‘Panagia E4’ when the E4 passed nowhere near Panagia.

It was not until the next day while Christos and I were taking turns drying our clothes with the hairdryer of the proprietress’ daughter when the mystery revealed itself. I was flipping through the handsome glossy booklet of the E4 when I came upon one of the trail maps of the Troodos region. And there on the map of the Eastern foothills of the Troodos – the opposite end of the range from where we were – I saw that the dotted red line of the E4 passed by a little black dot labeled ‘Panagia.’

A number of churches, monasteries, nunneries and even sites like bridges in Cyprus are named after Panagia—one of the titles of Mary, mother of Jesus. As I flipped through the pages, I saw there were plenty of “Panagia” sites along the E4. It seemed that one of the trail makers, who apparently had no trail map on hand, mixed up one of these Panagia sites with the village of Pano Panagia, tens of mountainous kilometers south of the E4.

Of course, how they managed to unquestioningly post that schizophrenic trio of signs still remained an enigma, hinting at a curious logic beyond my comprehension. But that is part of the charm of Cyprus: anything is possible. A walk can impossibly blossom into an absurd odyssey. You can wake up in the morning at a monastery, hike through a flower-studded mountain range in a rainstorm, and end the day in a town called ‘Virgin Mary’ drinking tea amicably in a police station with the same policemen whom just two hours earlier you had been cursing to damnation.

Constantine Markides