Day 4

This was a very quiet morning, instead of our usual swim in the pool, we were getting ready to drive up to the Troodos mountains in order to escape a heat wave of 35*C. The sun was so bright, it hurt my eyes to look outside.

The temperature climbed up to 34*C. We aimed to drive up to the Caledonia waterfalls. Only with the help of a map (and no Sat Nav!), I navigated the car right up to the starting point of the Caledonia walking trail at the Psilo Dendro trout farm/restaurant near the village of Platres. It was a relatively short walk, being only 3 km from the start to the finish, running beside small mountain streams.

Mountain stream

But, after about 1km, LilBro had to be carried about. He got tired of jumping up and down the stones. Still we kept climbing up. But, after a while, we had to give up. It was getting too steep. In order to keep BigBro happy and keep on climbing waterfalls, we showed him a small trek to a narrow mountain stream all by himself. He was very happy to slide and climb down to the stream and climb back again. Then we made our way back to the car park.
According to the next agenda on our itinerary, we started driving to Vasa, a small village with supposedly excellent local Cypriot dishes. Again, we started driving up the mountains, through a Wildlife conservation area and through completely barren lands. Vasa turned out to be a tiny sleepy village with a central church, the bells of which were ringing when we tried to reverse back a narrow alley. No one was out and about. There were only 2 taverns, out of the first one, a man looked out with an unfriendly face and so that one was rejected for our dinner plan. The second tavern seemed to be solely based on a narrow cobbled street, the looks of which were frowned upon by our fellow passengers. So, back home to Chlorakas, where we found Angelika Tavern (seemed to be very popular with the tourists) for dinner.


Reflections
One thing was very particular about those sleepy little mountain villages - you might miss them in the blink of an eye. Some of them would have a central church and then the number of village houses will be slightly more. Old men and women would be sitting outside, practically on the so called narrow "streets" looking at the passing cars with a non-caring attitude. We had to take extra care to see that we didn't hurt them while driving, but they seemed completely indifferent about it. You could find a "street" only in a tiny village and they were really very narrow. So, whenever we saw a "street" coming up while driving through the mountain villages, we expected a very narrow road with space for only one car to pass through.