Keep on walking
A four-day trek along some of Cyprus’ long-distance E4 trail turned into a cold, wet experience and sometimes confusing experience
After filling in my name and place of employment, the young policeman behind the desk looked at me quizzically, apparently confounded by the next bit 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 when my cousin Christos explained the two of us were on a five-day trek from the Troodos mountains to the Akamas: “And why, my son?”
Most generalisations about nations or peoples are founded more upon prejudice and ignorance than fact but there is one irrefutable assertion about Cypriots: they do not trek. 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 village of Kaminaria, abandoned our car in the church parking lot and set off on a trail winding up past the church.
After a few initial brutal kilometres of steep uphill the trail leveled off and then dipped into the Platys river valley. At a picnic site by the Pyknopytia brook we met some of the foresters who had marked out the trail we were on – the European long distance path E4.
Cyprus has recently been included in the path (it starts in Gibraltar and traverses Europe), by the establishment of a 539 km trail that spans 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 tourists who hike the trail,” I said to one of the foresters. “Oh no, we saw four or five Cypriots hiking by here,” he said. I asked him when. “June.”
Soon after leaving the picnic site we came to a sign stating there were 9km left to Kykkos monastery – our day’s destination. The heaviness of our packs and our lack of preparedness (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 vigour to our stride. But our jocularity quickly subsided into morose silence when it became apparent that the entire way would be a steep uphill.
Roughly halfway between the monastery and us was Myllikouri – a 1,200m 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. There was only a coffee shop open. So 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 approached us as we were gnawing at a loaf of bread, some cucumbers and hard cheese. He declined an invitation to join us in our meager lunch and sat at the wooden table next to ours.
“We were hoping to find a taverna here but we were told there’s nothing open now,” my cousin said to the man, who turned out to be the mukhtar. “So instead this is lunch.”
“The villages are dying,” the mukhtar said. “We’re all pensioners here. The young men leave for the army and don’t return so the fathers take their daughters away. What are they going to do, hump ’em themselves?”
Not a vehicle passed us as we trudged the last five winding kilometres to Kykkos monastery. At around five the slogan ‘Makarios is alive’ painted on the side of the mountain upon which Makarios’ tomb rests came into view and soon after we arrived at Kykkos.
After a few inquiries and some rigmarole, we managed to score a guest room. The monk who let us in invited us for lentil soup, so after dropping off our packs in a spacious guest room we returned to the monastery. The lentil soup turned out to be an ample feast.
Christos and I had been hungry for hours so we ate in silence as the monk lectured us on Anglo-American-Zionist involvement in Cyprus, on a Greater Byzantium in the Mediterranean, and on the carnal challenges a Kykkos monk faces.
After scoffing down an overpriced English breakfast at the cafeteria by the monastery the next morning, we set off under overcast skies to make the 26km hike to the Stavros Tis Psokas forest station, a 9 to 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 for us there. I approved. My unpadded hip strap was cutting painfully 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 wild and uninhabited Paphos forest. Only someone with a pickup or jeep would dare navigate it. Our packs no doubt would be on our backs all day. Every stirring in the forest or buzz of an airplane overhead became a reason to pause and perk ears.
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. 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 but keep walking. Below us a moufflon bounded off down a mountainside splashed in white and golden 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 trees and heated ourselves some water for instant coffee.
The coffee helped us boost our pace of descent. A few hours later we had crossed the brook over a wooden bridge and were climbing towards the Cedar Valley when we came upon a heartening sign: ‘Stavros Tis Psokas 10km’. Almost in the single-digits! Our enthusiasm was nonetheless tempered with the memory of yesterday’s uphill grind, so we maintained a degree of humility and trudged on upwards.
It began to sprinkle. For some time I had sensed new hotspots on my toes but the moleskin was in the depths of Christos’ pack. Now it was also starting to rain, which made stopping less desirable, so I disregarded them, a move which, as I suspected, I would later regret.
Until this point, the E4 had been well signed. 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, this one as large as a placard that also 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 la
st sign, which had stated that Stavros Tis Psokas was 10km away, had also listed Panagia as somewhere around 15km away. This suggested Panagia was five kilometres beyond our destination of Stavros Tis Psokas, which meant we had only five kilometres left. My kindergarten calculation was so agreeable that I swallowed it without question.
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 kilometres 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 characterised 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. “Have you noticed we haven’t passed any E4 signs,” Christos said, breaking the sodden silence. It was true. But the other E4 branch-off trail was now several kilometres behind us.
My jacket was not waterproof so I was by then 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 bikes raced by us, which I later learned were involved in a week-long GPS treasure hunt around the island.
It was not until the path came to a T junction at a dirt road that we realised how na?ve 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 nuance. 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 heavy rucksacks.
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 a 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. Finally the biker and I gave up trying to make sense of his ultra-detailed map. We wished each other luck and I enviously watched him speed off.
Christos slammed the receiver down and retrieved his mobile from a pocket. I had been opposed from the start to his bringing a mobile on the hike but he was married with two sons and so had the needed justification. But because he had been abusing his mobile 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. But he brought the phone up to his face only to curse loudly. There was no reception.
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 ‘Panagia 12km.’ Our pace had fallen to a gritty stagger. Our packs, soaked through, seemed to have doubled in weight.
We had only hiked three kilometres 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 the logical choice. Dusk was a little over an hour away. He checked his mobile. There was reception.
So we dropped our packs and I leaned 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 several minutes later. “Now that’s what I call innovation. Maybe they’ll even have a cell to lock us up in for the night!”
I did not protest. The prospect of being locked into a heated room with beds seemed a luxurious dream. 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, mountains haloed in mist unfolded themselves in seemingly unending ranges that reminded me more of the Chiapan jungles of Mexico than a Mediterranean forest. It was one of the most awesome vistas I have encountered in Cyprus, but I was too miserable 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,” he said. “We’re walking… Yes, on foot! Why? Because we’re on a trek!” After several more phone calls, in which he had to continually reiterate that we were walking, it was clear we could not rely on the police to pick us up.
It was dusk and the cold by now had pierced us to the core. 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 three hours at most of limping left before arriving at Panagia.
Christos’ mobile 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 I was only met by 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 their warm Landrover at the entrance to the woods, waiting at the mouth of the same dirt road on which we were shivering several kilometres farther down in the forest.
After filling out our incidents at the Panagia police station, which regrettably lacked a jail cell, they 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 least for hikers on a budget, at £38 for two beds it was an overpriced dream.
Of course, the schizophrenic trio of signposts still remained an enigma, hinting at a subtle logic beyond my comprehension. But that is part of the charm of Cyprus: anything is possible. A hike 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.
And upon waking
up in ‘The Dream’, we still had four days to go…
For the complete story go to www.fourthnight.org
