Kyrenia

Ever since we got here it has been my ambition to climb the big mountain that we can see from our balcony and today we finally did it! Theres an old castle at the top and I was certain we'd be able to get to it by walking straight up instead of following the path that goes around the back. Unfortunely, Spencer was really against this idea and because he had the backpack and I didn't want to carry my own snacks, we ended up taking the path. The castle was 12km walk away, and for 90% of it we were walking along a freeway, which sort of sucked. Eventually we found a trail which seemed to be a bit of a shortcut. We followed it but it ended up stopping about 500m short of the castle driveway entrance so we then had to struggle through spikey shrubs, steep, unstable slopes and tons of spider webs to get back on course. Once we were on the driveway, we learned that the castle was right next to a Turkish army base, and that they don't let people walk through, you have to drive, so we spent an hour trying to hitch-hike until we eventually found a nice guy who agreed to drive us past the army checkpoint to the castle. At this point morale was pretty low due to the many hardships we had endured throughout our journey, but once we were at the castle we were well rewarded with a sensational view! We roamed around for a few hours and spent the majority of our time discussing how we were going to get back past the army base. In the end we were able to wave down a lovely couple from Denmark who agreed to drive us past the army checkpoint, they ended up taking us most of the way home. The walk up the mountain had left us completely shattered so it was a god-send that things panned out the way they did because I'm not sure we would've gotten home too easy. All in all it was an awesome trip :)). For dinner we went back to the casino, we've gone there most nights this week for free dinner, it's been awesome!!Read more