It is a little bit tricky to find hotels in Karpaz, because very few of them are listed on Booking.com– in fact, I was surprised to find any on Booking.com at all, because a while back the Republic of Cyprus sent a sort of cease and desist letter to Booking.com to get all of the hotels in the north located on Greek Cypriot land removed from the listings. That is basically all of the hotels in the north, or at least all of the hotels in the most touristic places (Kyrenia, Famagusta, and Karpaz). It seems like some of them might have trickled back on.
All of them were no-frills, that was easy to see, but it was otherwise difficult to get a sense of the condition the various hotels were in. Finally, I settled for a seaside hotel called the Oasis for 75 euros a night.
The rooms were a bit…odd. First of all, the front doors were traditional wooden doors with panes of glass on the top halves of the narrow double doors. There were no curtains, but there were wooden shutters on the exterior of the door which you had to close if you wanted privacy. The glass doors were warped by the damp sea air and were hard to line up properly so the old lock actually engaged.
But the worst part was that the toilet was in the shower stall. It was one of those bigger showers, but the sliding shower doors didn’t work well, so you had to step over the toilet in order to get to the shower part. Furthermore, unless you are an extremely tiny person, it was impossible to sit on the toilet and close the doors, because of the way the toilet was oriented toward the room. When I sat on the toilet, my knees were actually against the shower doors and my calves were totally in the bedroom. I could reach out and touch Severin’s side of the bed from the porcelain throne. So, we resigned ourselves to asking the other to leave the room while we used the facilities, and kept the shower door closed otherwise.
The OTHER worst part was that our air conditioning kept blowing a refuse repeatedly. And yes, we are soft, but it had also been 107-109 degrees all day long, and without air conditioning the rooms got very stagnant. In order to get even a hint of ocean breeze, we would have had to leave the doors and the shutters open. In other circumstances, I probably would have just slept on the beach chairs out on the beach– there was a nice breeze out there. Mercifully, they were able to call someone in to restart the air conditionings (we thought it was just ours but it turns out our friends had been without it and suffering too) around midnight, so we eventually got a fitful and well-chilled night of sleep.
The hotel was well-situated on an old Roman Harbor. It’s difficult to see from this picture, but below is actually a Roman jetty. If you walk out to it on the other side, you can clearly see man-made bricks in a straight line into the ocean, and some of the bricks have cleared become displaced and toppled into the ocean on the other side. Unfortunately, the water was completely clogged with very fine pieces of plastic bags and other trash. It’s very difficult to see in the photo, but in the whole bay you could have taken a pool net and scooped up a lot of debris. The beach was completely ruined, it seems like this harbor is now functioning as a pool skimmer and collecting all of the gunk, and the hotel didn’t seem to make a very big effort to clean it up on a regular basis. It’s a damn shame, and it’s enough to make you want to stop using plastic bags, wrapping, etc.
The restaurant at the hotel was decent, for dinner we had fried halloumi and I had tavuk shish (chicken kebabs). It came with French fries, a nice hearty village bread, tzatziki, tahini dip, salad, and olives. Breakfast was a “Turkish breakfast” and ended up being halloumi toast, olives, tomatoes, and some shepherd’s cheeses. Not bad.
Mama cat and her kittens hustling for a day’s meal:
Breakfast wasn’t served until 8:30 so we reconnoitered a bit and found this nice beach just a short walk away. I had my bathing suit and was ready to go in, but Severin had chosen wrong in his morning deliberations about whether to put his swimsuit on, so I just snapped a photo and turned back.
The hotel was located immediately adjacent to the Ayios Philon church. I can’t find that much information about the church (though apparently a small book was written about it by a British archeologist), but the consensus of random internet sites seems to be that it was built somewhere in the 10-12th century range in the Lusignan style. Just outside the newer church is a 6th century basilica, all that remains of that are some low walls, mosaics, and a few short (less than two feet) pillars.
View from the outside looking in, and inside looking out toward the basilica:
When we had arrived at the hotel there was a busload of Greek Cypriots who had stopped by for ice cream. Someone had left a small icon in the niche in the wall with a bunch of tea lights and a box of matches:
And it wouldn’t be Cyprus unless there were sheep involved. SHEEP!
