SITTING picturesquely in the foreground of Cape Greco, pulsating with sound, bursting with life, running on alcohol; Ayia Napa is an odd place not because of its humble origins as a fishing village, nor because of the fact that the most influential catalyst in its development has been its nightlife.
Ayia Napa is strange because despite being peddled as a cradle of vice, noticeably sterile of any cultural idiosyncrasy, it still manages to attract a mystifying assortment of families, louts and fashion-conscious youth from northern Europe, the Middle East and Cyprus itself.
For me, Napa has always been something of a crazy place. I have not been around long enough to reminisce of the days when smiling, moustachioed fisherman used to sell you the morning’s catch by the sea or when cicadas provided the only music and you could sit in the square in the afternoon and feel the summer laziness that gave the Spanish the siesta.
For me, my impressions of Ayia Napa have gone through a number of different stages. In the nineties, I remember that you had to drive for about two hours through a coastal road that passed through villages to get there from Nicosia. While too young to drive, I do remember feeling incredibly daunted by the idea of having to undertake this voyage, but once there, it all seemed worth it. As an 11 year old, Ayia Napa was great. There was entertainment, the water was perfect – the sand was like it looked in the films. The nightlife, or the square at night time as I knew it, seemed to contain a world of excitement that I didn’t really understand or care about, but which I felt good knowing existed. This was my first impression.
In the early noughties, a couple of things changed. I had grown a bit and the motorway had been built. I entered Ayia Napa with a group of friends who, following the lead of the older idols, ventured into the square looking for some fun and action. And there was plenty of it.
This routine was repeated summer after summer, with cynicism and conscious ridicule growing in tandem with each visit, as can be expected when you place in-the-know islanders amongst the hordes of wide-eyed tourists.
Which brings us to last Saturday…
ON ANY night out in Ayia Napa, it is worth beginning from the bottom of the hill, allowing a gradual ascendance into the mayhem. Walk up the road leading from McDonald’s, uphill until the church comes into view. From there, the broad steps will lead you to the square, whose sound, lights and energy let you know that you are about to enter something big.
Mismatched music ungraciously collides with its competing neighbours as it pulses from each establishment. You are inundated with implorations to attend such and such club with what seems like amazing deals of buy-one-get-one-free offers and so on.
Ignore them all for now and carry on walking. That Ayia Napa has managed to evolve into a place of partying unrestricted by specific types of music, fashions or people points at one thing: there is a common denominator that attracts the ordinary girls from Croydon, the family from the council estate in Blackburn; the hipsters from Stockholm, the teenagers from Tel Aviv and the gangsters from Brixton – and it is none other than the guarantee of a lot of people to get collectively drunk with, in the heat and by the sea. That, Napa can guarantee.
The variety of people you can see revelling in this prospect was displayed pretty well at around midnight. Sitting down at one of the only bars with reasonable outdoor seating and with a good view of the action, my companions and I were quickly given a preview of the dark side of individualism that everyone seems to be talking about.
A couple sat next to us with their infant child, no more than a year old. No sooner had we come to terms with how ridiculous an idea it would be to bring a baby into this environment had they got up again, asked in a shriek of a voice whether we could ‘watch the fella?!’, and, before we could say “What?”, scurried into the dark, smoky abyss of the bar.
I looked across the table to my two friends, who looked straight back. We then looked at the baby in the seat next to me and on to the table of people next to it, who were at that moment drinking shots by picking up the small glasses with their mouths and contorting their heads in what we heard one of them call “the Stephen Hawking”.
The baby started crying in a way that made the booming 50Cent, the whining Justin Timberlake and the nauseating Whoever Whatever all step back and allow its alarming tone to enter your ear uninterrupted.
“What is going on?” was the first thing my friend said. I didn’t know how to answer, though I did know that my other friend, a girl, looked angry. After about ten minutes, Mr and Mrs Moron returned with a four-foot tube of fluorescent liquid that was to be the totem of their family night out. We moved on.
HUMANS are known for going to great lengths to get somewhere they want to be. Booking a holiday is not what you would call a ‘great length’, but it still needs some kind of thought to be done effectively. You need to surf the internet, pack, get on the plane, etc. What you do once you are in Ayia Napa isn’t something that needs to be toiled over too much, as it is pretty much preordained that you will be going to the beach, going out, getting drunk and subsequently pursuing whatever it is that you deem fun.
For a lot of people, this is achieved by engaging someone who is sexually desired and promptly exiting the gauntlet of marauding topless youths and other annoyances.
For others, it involves taking up the attractive drinks offers and using them until their rewards yield a night of dancing and genuine fun. Some, like a couple of lads not over 17, were visibly content just sitting on one of the stone walls on the periphery of the square merely staring at their oversized kebabs, which looked dangerously close to reuniting with their long-lost, mayonnaise-soaked ingredients on the floor.
What to do at the latter end of the night, once the initial post-shower buzz and freshness has fizzled into the thick Napa air is a question that is countered with a series of commercial enterprises designed to offset, or redirect, feelings of frustration. These are namely junk food and entertainment gimmicks.
On one of the side-streets off the main pedestrianised club-zone and opposite the revered Castle Club, there is an arcade with five or so electronic punch bags facing out to the street that record the strength of the participant’s attack.
Young, drunk and ultimately bored men line up to take turns displaying what kind of damage they could do with their fist, while girls dressed in little more than their bathing suits, heels and maybe a bit of face paint teeter through their ranks, with the odd whim of enticing incitement to aggression (‘Whack it!’).
A trip into the tattoo emporium located centrally beneath one of the main bars and at the epicentre of the action, reveals another phenomenon that must be exclusive to resort towns; getting tattooed while on a night out.
The line of people opting for some opportunistic body art was significant, with the atmosphere inside the shop resembling something of a waiting room for a ride at a theme park. One young man, exiting the studio to find his mates waiting to see the results of his late-night enhancement, had his grin of achievement quickly turned around when his friends told him that it was “bent” and to “go back in and have them sort it out” – as if he had just come out of the barber shop with a few random hairs poking out. The topless youth then stumbled back through swinging doors, with the result of his appeal unknown.
Then there are the shouters. Exiting the clubs at closing time (around 4 am), I saw at least six people, within the space of five minutes, smash
a glass and declare their region/city/football team’s unmatched superiority.
Gangs of foreign and local men with little to do but plenty of motivation to do it walk around, taunting girls, and each other. I saw one man, unable to even look straight, ‘park’ his bike next to a taxi by falling on it, eliciting the expected rage of the driver.
These are all hallmarks of a clubbing area and Ayia Napa is admittedly not all like this. The area by the port is dotted by attractive restaurants and more upmarket clubs. It can also be argued that it is, despite the lights and helium zeppelins advertising strip-show, a pretty town, and the council has done well making sure that the church remains a centrepiece.
For all its bad press, Ayia Napa does not try and be something it is not. It is a place for partying, and it continues to be so. There is definitely aggression at the end of the night, but unfortunately, this is a result of people, not place, and if I’m honest, the atmosphere this year was generally lighter than it has been previously.
For those who want a more refined form of alcoholic recreation, the places are there, though in the island’s other cities which are perforated with chi-chi establishments. The ability to get drunk, limited only by your body and budget might not be what the CTO had in mind when it began promoting Cyprus as a tourist destination in the 90s; however the reality is that this is what it is, and will be so long as there are people to enjoy it.
