Screw your lonely planet!

 
 That title is a cleaned up version of what my travel mate Gina was yelling after a harrowing, longer than expected journey to the middle of nowhere in search of adventure.  Looking to take a break from traipsing through the heat in the ruins of Cyprus we decided to follow a Lonely Planet driving tour to an abandoned town in the cooler mountains.  We encountered some issues...

To start with we are driving the worst car ever rented to 2 unsuspecting Westerners.  It doesn't even have power steering.  And Cyprus is left-side drive, a departure for my normal life.  And the roads on the mountain are just slightly wider than the aforementioned car.  So... driving is a challenge.

Our driving tour included such helpful directions as “turn after the farmhouse”.  Lonely Planet continuously referred to a single road, adorned with a name they apparently invented, on a cartoon sketch in the guidebook.  They make no mention of the fact that the area is covered in a series of small roads, intermittently signed with letters of the Greek alphabet.  It was like driving down a fraternity/sorority row at a U.S. University.  "Turn left at Phi Delta Kappa" would have been something I expected to come out of Gina's mouth as she tried to navigate is to the apparently fictitious abandoned town.

We did come close to dying at one point when Gina, unknowingly to me, applied the parking brake to the car after we stopped to get out a snap a few photos in a clearing on the side of a cliff.  When we hopped back in and I gently tapped the gas, we didn’t budge.  I assumed the car was acting up again or that we were in a bit of a rut, so I gave it more gas.  Gina then reached over and dropped the parking break– we shot backwards, hurtling towards the edge.  I am not sure if the brakes actually worked or the car just broke down again, but we managed to come to a stop on the edge of, what felt like, the world.  

Seventeen wrong turns later, we found the abandoned village…it looked like Detroit.  There were 2 buildings with a striking resemblance to a crack den that had just been tagged by gangs.  It seemed there was nothing to do but laugh.  And laugh.  And laugh.  Until tears streamed down our face.  After a string of expletives directed at the Lonely Planet book, Gina tried to hurl the guide out the window…unfortunately it wouldn’t roll down.


** We did proceed further down the road after our laughter subsided and did find what I believe Lonely Planet was initially referring to…it was truly an abandoned town (nowhere near the area indicated on the cartoon map).  The only residents appeared to be pomegranate trees and farm animals trapped in buildings. **