A series of articles covering our trip to the Holy Land on the Thomson Celebration cruise ship. Our itinerary had been changed at the last minute due to unrest in Egypt. A day in Alexandria was changed to give us an overnight stay onboard in port in Israel. The ports for this trip will be Marmaris, Turkey > Rhodes, Greece > Ashdod, Isreal > Larnaca, Cyprus > Alanya, Turkey > Marmaris, Turkey.
Click each picture below to access the main articles and photos of this fabulous trip.
Saturday 5 October 2013. I've skipped a day from the previous entry about Bethlehem. This is because the ship stayed in Ashdod for a second day. But so did we. We didn't venture off the ship at all.
Today however we have arrived in Cyprus. To Larnaca to be more precise. We haven't booked a tour but instead get tickets for the shuttle bus which drops us off at one end of the seafront and we stroll the length of the Promenade until we come to a wooden jetty.
This is a far simpler affair than you might expect to find at a British seaside town. The resort, at this time of day anyway, is a lot quieter than Blackpool... In fact we hardly saw anyone stirring, we had the Promenade pretty much to ourselves apart from a few other people who had also come off the ship.
Even the beach was deserted at this early hour - around 10:00am. Tourists staying in Larnaca were perhaps sleeping off the after effects of last night's binge?
A little further on from the jetty was a small fortress. Living near the coast was both good and bad in medieval and earlier times. Good because there were fish to be caught in the sea and bad because there were plenty of pirates looking for easy loot, whether that was goods or slaves.
Also by the jetty was a marble statue of the Venetian winged lion, looking very smug and pleased with itself. It had been a gift from Venice, just one of an incredible string of invading rulers since Biblical times (by legend, Larnaca was established by the great grandson of Noah) and Venice itself was chucked out by the Ottomans in 1571.
We left the seafront and saw a very grand church, which we made our way to. This church is another Biblical link - the second tomb of St Lazarus, the friend of Jesus who had been raised from the dead.
His first tomb was at Bethany on the Mount of Olives. He lived a further thirty years and was made Bishop here by St Peter. Another tradition is that he and his sisters were set adrift in a boat and ended up in Marseilles in France, which also claims a site as his tomb.
Yet another version is that after the remains of the saint were taken from Cyprus to Constantinople, they were taken by the Crusaders to Marseilles.
The taking of the saint's relics to Constantinople is a long accepted version. However in 1970 a fire here in Larnaca caused much damage and during renovations human remains were found in a marble sarcophagus under the altar. Obviously not all the saint's remains had been removed.
The iconostasis - the framework for the row of icon paintings on either side of the altar - was carved between 1773 and 1782 and gold plated twenty years later. The church is rich in its icons and paintings, including one of St George on horseback, slaying the dragon. A large chandelier hangs over the main body of the church.
Sunday 25 April 2010. The Ocean Village docked at Limassol in Cyprus and we had a lazy start to the day, waiting until all the excursions had left before heading for the gangway ourselves to go exploring. We found a mass of taxis and buses waiting outside the port entrance and hopped on a bus with several other cruisers for the trip into town. It was quite a way, I have to say. We'd been told it would be a 40 minute walk but we were on the bus for a good quarter hour!
Anyway the bus driver dropped us on a roundabout and pointed out the way to a castle, the way to the beach and offered to take us up into the mountains if we wanted. Only a few said they wanted to go and he arranged to meet them back at the roundabout in a couple of hours and - as we were looking round the nearby market at the time - he turned up and waited and none of the ones who had asked him to come back bothered to turn up.
We walked up to the castle and had a brief look around. There was a museum inside the castle, but we were too hot to think about it. Also an interesting snippet - this castle was where King Richard the Lionheart got married in 1191.
There was an old olive or lemon press in the grounds of the castle - I wasn't too sure which. There was a huge stone pit to collect the juice - you could have swum in it... We couldn't as it was empty... Come on pay attention - if it had been full it would have been obvious whether the press was for olives or lemons!
See! Lemon trees! That settles it then...
We went back to the roundabout - it being a sort of focal point - and headed for the beach area. After a wrong turning led us to the old port we found a pleasant Promenade along the sea front. An ice cream van was parked at the entrance to a wooden decked pier but for the moment our thoughts were more on walking than ice cream.
The sea was crystal clear. I love watching the sea flow over rocks and plants like this - I can do it for hours, totally hypnotised by it.
We had a stroll along the pier and sat down on one of the many benches. After a while a couple sat on the bench behind us, out of breath and speaking English. It turned out that they had walked from the ship, the "40 minutes" walk having taken them a gruelling two hours... We went back to the roundabout, bought some drinks and sat there to see if a bus would turn up to take us back to the ship. None did except for the go-it-alone excursion bus that the ship had laid on and we had no tickets for that.
We sat drinking our pop and watched several near misses on the roundabout until from the opposite side down the road off which we had found the seafront there came a loud crash. A van had ploughed into a couple of cars which had (correctly) stopped at a pedestrian crossing. One of our fellow passengers from the cruise went to have a look and related in great detail the damage, what had happened, that there were no injuries etc. I think it was the most exciting thing he'd seen in a while...
No buses were in evidence and in the end we grabbed a taxi back to the port which was a good move after seeing how far it would have been to walk!
We had a late lunch next to a window in the restaurant onboard the ship, watching a jellyfish in the harbour which was making heavy weather of the current. We watched it for a good half hour until the current had brought it right up under our window and then we realised the poor thing only looked to be pulsating because of the optical effect of the waves. It wasn't alive. In fact, it was a plastic carrier bag...
