If you were thinking of going to Ayia Napa and haven’t been recently, I really wouldn’t bother. I have had to go twice in the last week and it was not a pleasant experience. Imagine the set of the Jeremy Kyle show, a heat wave, excessive alcohol consumption and vast amounts of unattractive flesh on display. It is not pretty…
I was there to drop off my daughter and a friend last week. Their holiday apartment was reasonably pleasant inside. If it had been anywhere else in the world, I might have considered renting it myself. It was spacious with a large balcony overlooking a pool, lots of concrete and of course, the other guests on the complex. The vast amount of concrete was slightly disturbing but the whole other guests of the “my boyfriend ate my baby and slept with my mother’s brother” variety was quite scary at three in the afternoon; I don’t think I could hack it any time after midnight.
It is amazing how all these young people can afford to come to Ayia Napa the prices they are charging. Without wishing to sound at all snobby, I didn’t spot anyone that I would have put in the ‘well-paid professional’ bracket. Most of the tourists look about 18. But when my daughter tells me she had to pay €3.50 for a pack of pitta bread, I just wonder who in their right mind wants to come here and pay those kind of prices. Presumably most people staying in Ayia Napa don’t eat much as they are saving their money for alcohol, which must explain why it is so difficult to find anything half decent to eat. You wouldn’t mind so much if it were at least cheap. She tells me that the supermarkets are well stocked with overpriced packets of crisps and not a lot else. But I guess, if all you want to do is club all night and sleep all day, it really is paradise.
It’s probably paradise for my son and his six friends from London on their first holiday together. No parents, a house to themselves with a pool and a hot tub, access to vast quantities of alcohol and plenty of drunk young women must be paradise for any 17-year-old boy. I didn’t actually get to see the villa they were staying in because when I dropped them there from the airport at 11.30pm, there was no electricity in the house. The holiday company claimed that there were instructions in the house about where to find the electricity switch, which was apparently somewhere in the street. The problem was that it was pitch black and we couldn’t find the instructions or the switch. It was difficult enough finding the villa in a road without a street name. Not exactly my idea of paradise; ridiculously expensive, tacky and unhelpful but maybe I am just getting old!
