I took a break for a little while due to personal reasons, that some of you know about and then we took a holiday which came just at the right time, though we booked it almost a year in advance. What I noticed though during this time was that my hive wallet didn’t stand still, it wasn’t as though taking a break did any harm at all. That’s thanks to the auto-pilot of curation trails and automatic voting plus delegations to a few things. It kept ticking over albeit at a lesser velocity.
Can I hit 10k by the year end? That I’m not sure about but I’ll give it a good shot. I’m going to do a little DCAing, powering up and 100% posts till the year is out.
If I hit 8k that will be lovely!
Though I’ll settle for anything more in these stranger than strange times.
Cyprus
We’ve never been to Cyprus before and it was exciting to visit somewhere new. We were invited by my stepdaughter to go on the trip when one of her friends announced she was getting married in Paphos. My wife and I didn't attend the wedding but we had a day to ourselves doing our own thing. Thanks Alice, Matt (my son-in-law), baby Effy and 3 year old Aurelia for keeping us entertained. Hotel wasn't great, food was bad but there were plenty of decent restaurants about town, especially down by the harbour.
It was hot and humid but the temperatures weren’t as high as had been reported where we stayed, they ranged between 31 degrees Celsius by day and 28 at night. The humidity was above 80% most of the time with the coolest day being a comfy 29 - horrified by the news of many locations around Greece suffering so many fires and Hawaii, the world is in peril and I felt painfully aware of our role in this unfolding disaster. How should my family travel in future?
So outdoor activities were kept to a fairly pedestrian level! I had hoped to do more photography but spent more time in the shade around the hotel or the room we were staying in and its balcony. We didn’t really get out out until the evenings which is when Paphos very much came to life.
Here are some photos...
I loved this pathway up past the old historic parts of Paphos, just to my right and you'll see it fully in the photos below is the site and very well preserved ruins of the Church of St Paul's pillar the very site where the Apostle Paul was flogged for converting the Roman proconsul, Sergius Paulus to Christianity. There are no records of when the church was originally built and is likely what stands today, was built and rebuilt numerous times since. It still retains it's religious and spritiual importance to this very day.
We could get close to it but the walkways were all closed whilst we were staying there.
There were so many cats around the city, lots of strays but they are looked after, people feed and water them. They seemed fairly healthy but there was a bit of a smell. The litter around Paphos and the area our hotel was located in wasn't great, it was very untidy but around this part of the town, it was not so bad.
The Ottoman Baths of Paphos, also known as the "Hammam" or "Turkish Baths," these historical bathhouses are remnants of the Ottoman Empire's influence in the region during the 16th century. Some were apparently used until around 1925 and then after the Second World War, some became museums, closing for good in the 60's.
They had a good old run didn't they?!
The Tombs of the Kings was a fascinating site, that has in fact never been the burial place of a single King but a vast necropolis on a scale like no other. It dates back to the 3rd century and exploring it was absolutely phenomenal. It was difficult to photograph in many ways but luckily I recorded some video on my Insta360 x3. I've included some stills from this video to share below but first, here is a photo or two taken from my Ricoh GR3x...
Junior Archaeologist Aurelia, was determined there must be dinosaurs under this rock before her Dad Matt carted her away. We all needed to take some shade for a bit and guzzle another litre of water plus we'd sweated out most of our sunblock by this point!
This, wow oh wow, almost like Petra (Jordan) on a smaller scale. To think all of this had been carved out of rock by hand, is purely mindblowing!
The following are stills from the Insta360's data, that I captured on the day, to compose and edit when cooler later on!
The above image and video were taken inside the first tomb you find by the ticket office, which incidentally, wasn't overly expensive and we could use our tickets a second time had we chosen to. So fascinating and I am pleased with the photos taken on this camera too, no need for tripods ever again!
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