Everyone arriving in Ayia Napa seems to be aiming at the nightclubs, so when Lia and I rented a scooter and pointed it the other way — east, out past the last hotels toward the headland that closes off the bay — we had the impression of escaping something. Cape Greco, the blunt limestone nose at the southeastern corner of Cyprus, is a national forest park, which on this island mostly means low juniper, wild thyme you can smell before you see it, and a coastline that the sea has been quietly demolishing for a few million years.
The caves and the arch
We left the scooter near the little white chapel of Agioi Anargyroi and walked down toward the water on a path worn into the rock. Below the chapel the cliffs are riddled with sea caves — proper ones, where the swell comes in and booms and then sucks back out with a long hiss. I watched a teenager from a tour boat throw himself off a ledge into the deep blue while his friends filmed it, and I understood the temptation completely. The water here is the colour people put on postcards and then get accused of editing. It is not edited. It really is that blue, because the bottom is pale rock and the sea is absurdly clear.
A short way along the coast path is the sea arch that the maps label, with no shame at all, the Bridge of Lovers — a thin span of rock the waves have undercut into a natural bridge. I am usually allergic to that kind of naming, but standing on top of it with the open Mediterranean stretching toward Lebanon and Syria somewhere over the horizon, even I shut up about it.
Why the afternoon vanished
We had planned to stay an hour. We stayed until the light went gold. There is a network of marked trails across the headland, and we walked the loop that climbs to the viewpoint where an incongruous cluster of radio masts shares the hilltop with the best panorama on the cape. From up there you see the whole sweep of coast: Ayia Napa to the west, Protaras and its hotels to the north, and below you the white cliffs falling into that ridiculous blue.
Lia found a flat rock out of the wind and we ate the supermarket picnic we had bought without much thought — halloumi, tomatoes, a bag of those small sweet Cypriot cucumbers, bread, a couple of warm beers. It was not a sophisticated lunch. It was one of the best meals of the trip, mostly because of where we were eating it.
Go early or go late. In the middle of a summer day the rock throws the heat straight back at you and the snorkelling boats crowd the coves. We came back the next morning at eight, before the scooter rentals had even opened, and had the arch entirely to ourselves — just the boom of the caves below and the smell of thyme, which is exactly how I want to remember Cyprus.