Greenery, construction... and a challenge for January...

Rather than continuing to recount my days in tedious detail, I decided to take photos every day, at least when I remember to do so, and write about them. Life in Cyprus has become normal to me, but visitors are still surprised at some of the things they see and experience.

Greenery

In many parts of the world, trees and bushes lose their leaves during the autumn months, and have bare branches during the winter. This is useful when there's a lot of snow, but that's not at all likely in the coastal areas of Cyprus.

We particularly liked seeing the citrus trees everywhere when we first arrived. Now we take them for granted, and this year the lemons on the trees look fairly small and sparse. Perhaps that's because there was so little rain until December. 

This, for instance, is a normal sight at this time of year, although usually there are rather more lemons on the local trees:

More images of autumn in Cyprus

Two weeks ago exactly I wrote a post with a few images I associate with Autumn in Cyprus.  Some fruit, a cat bed, a cloudy sunset, and a few fallen leaves in our side yard.

Since then the temperature has dropped somewhat; this morning I switched the thin duvet, which we started using just two weeks ago, for the warmer one. We're both wearing long-sleeved warm sweaters or jackets all the time during the day, not just in evenings. I have put both my pairs of summer sandals through the washing machine, and put them away for the winter. 

And this morning I went out for a short walk on my own (since my friend Sheila is self-isolating with her family, hopefully just for a few days, after a Covid positive contact). I don't walk along the Salt Lake trail when I'm by myself, but today I did go through what we think of as the main part of the park area.  And since there was nobody to chat with, I observed the trees and foliage rather more than I normally do. 

The first thing that struck me was how green everywhere was looking:

It might look a bit brown to those from rainier climes, but a month ago the soil was bare, other than a few hardy weeds.  Now there is grass springing up everywhere.

Most of the trees are evergreen; many are pines, of course, but there are others which aren't pine, but still don't seem to lose their leaves. 

As I walked around the local streets, on a meandering route home from the park, I did see some evidence of plants that were changing colour, although they look brown and dead rather than red or orange:

And there are citrus trees all over the place too. When we first saw these, twenty-three years ago, it was rather exciting. We had an excellent orange tree and several lemon trees in the back garden of our rental house, and it felt very odd  - and thrilling! - to pick fresh oranges and lemons. 

Now, though we no longer have any of our own, we take them for granted.  The new season oranges and lemons are coming into the shops now, along with the satsumas I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. Trees like this are so commonplace that I tend to forget what a novelty they are to visitors from places that don't produce citrus fruit. 

And then, as I was almost home, I finally spotted a climbing plant that actually looked Autumnal.  Possibly it's meant to look this way, and those are bracts rather than leaves changing colour - I know very little about plants - but I liked the way it looked anyway: 

It's been good having some Autumn weather - too often Larnaka moves from Summer into Winter with very little in between. Tomorrow is Advent Sunday, and December starts on Tuesday. Today is supposed to be windy and rainy, although the sun shone for most of the morning and even now it's dry, albeit rather greyer. So we still don't know if our roof repairs have stopped our ongoing leaking! 

Shrubs and Trees along the Salt Lake trail

Although it wasn't fully light by the time I left the house on Tuesday morning for my walk with Sheila, I could see that there were plenty of clouds. So, thinking we might see an attractive sunrise, I grabbed my camera. Sheila suggested that rather than walk in the aqueduct direction, as we usually do, we might try the other way.

It was a good opportunity to see that there really was, still, a fair amount of water in the biggest of the Larnaka Salt Lakes, despite the last few months being hot and free of rain:

We walked as far as the end of that part of the trail, just under two kilometres from where we start:

Then Sheila, who does both directions when I'm not with her, mentioned that some new wooden signs had appeared in recent weeks. They are supposed to help people identify some of the plants on the trail, but she felt that they were rather confusing in some respects.

This one, for instance, gives the Latin as 'halocnemum strobilaceum' and the Greek as 'Αλμυριδι' (Almyridi) but, unlike the other signs, there's no English equivalent. I checked online before writing this, and, indeed, there doesn't seem to be any English word for this particular species, which is considered to be unique to the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern regions.

However, only a few metres away, is this sign:

This is also labelled as Αλμυριδι' in Greek, but although the plant looks much the same, the Latin is completely different: 'Suaeda vera', with the English translation below, 'Shrubby Sea-Bite'.  Checking online, this does indeed appear to be the English name for this plant, which mainly appears in coastal regions.

However it's a bit odd that the Greek word is the same for both.

Walking back along the trail, we came across this:

'Tamarix tetragyna', according to the Latin, and 'Desert Tamarisk' in English. My Latin, while rather rusty, suggested that it's labelled as a 'four women tamarisk' which turns out to be fairly close to the reason for its name: apparently it's a tamarisk with four stamens. It should be quite pretty when it blooms, although I don't recall it from previous years.

The Greek, however, is a little mystifying, saying 'Μερικος' (Merikos) which means 'partial' or 'incomplete'.

The next sign is confusing for a different reason. The Latin states, 'Acacia saligna', and the Greek 'Ακακια' which, transliterated, is simply 'Acacia'.

The English, however, describes it as 'Wattle'. Strange, but I gather is correct as the English name.

This is the same plant from a bit further away. According to Wikipedia, it should have bright yellow blooms in the spring or summer:

Next we came to a tree that's more unambigously labelled:  'Eucalyptus gomphocephala' according to the Latin. 'Ευκαλυπτος' in the Greek, which is, again, an almost exact transliteration of 'Eucalyptus', other than having the more typically Greek -os ending.

We weren't quite sure why the English just labels it as 'Eucalypt' since that's a more general name for a lot of similar trees, but at least it's similar.

It occurred to us that the word 'eucalyptus' must be Greek in its origin. The first part, 'eu' is commonly used to mean 'good' or 'well'.  Further research later on revealed that the word 'eucalyptus' means 'well-covered', referring to the way that the unopened flowers are, according to the site I found, protected by a kind of cap covering.

We wondered what the second part of the Latin name meant, since it's clearly made up of two Greek words rather than being true Latin. (Am I beginning to sound like a Cypriot here?) The last part, 'cephala' is from the Greek word for 'head'. I had to look up the first part: 'gompho' means a peg, or possibly the joint of a body. I was mildly amused at the thought of a peg-head eucalyptus...but perhaps it means that it has a jointed head:

It's a tall tree, so I couldn't get it all in one shot. Here's the top part against the sky. The head part does indeed branch out into different 'joints':

Then we came to another tree labelled as a eucalyptos in Greek, a eucalypt in English and 'eucalyptus camaldulensis' in Latin. I couldn't work out what the second word meant, either in Latin or Greek, but eventually discovered that it was named for the Camaldoli monastery near Naples, where it was first described.

This eucalyptus appears to be jointed right from the base:

And here's what it's like at the top:

As is clear from the above, neither Sheila nor I are knowledgeable or particularly interested in plants... but we are both fascinated by language and word origins. 

Yet another post about weather in Cyprus

People around the world know of Cyprus as a holiday destination, picturing it with clear blue skies and endless sunshine. That's pretty much how it is - usually - from early May until around the end of September. Official sources used to mention 360 days of sunshine, which is a high percentage. We realise, now, that this refers not to the number of completely sunny days, but those on which the sun shines.

In our first couple of years here the rain was minimal, and short-lived. We saw some torrential downpours on occasion, but an hour later, as put so succinctly in the children's nursery rhyme, 'Out came the sunshine and dried up all the rain'.

There were the occasional thunderstorms, even some hail.  But we didn't see real devastation until the major storm in May 2007, which makes me sad even to think about it now. The Cyprus weather news site reports storms lashing the island at the end of 2008.  In 2012 there was a horrific accident at the sea front, caused by a tornado.

Climate does change, and it seems that currently Cyprus winters are not just wet but, at times, very windy too. January and February seem to be the worst from this point of view.  Just over a year ago I posted about a storm at the end of January. As recently as a month ago I posted about a storm this year.... and it wasn't an isolated one. We had quite a warm week at the end of January, which was very pleasant. A pity, some of us remarked, that it could not stay that way all year round.

As so often happens, it got colder again - and earlier this week there were yet more windy storms. I took my camera on my early morning walk with Sheila, and we decided to walk the airport direction in the hope of seeing the flamingoes a bit closer up. It wasn't long before we spotted this:

Shortly followed by this:

There were bollards marking the hole where the old tree was uprooted a month ago:

It wasn't warm but we walked briskly and reached the end of the trail only to find that the flamingoes were nowhere in sight. It's hard to show by a photograph how full the Salt Lake is, but for what it's worth, here's how it looked:

Still and calm as anything.

When we got back to our usual starting point, we decided to walk a bit further in the hope of seeing the flamingoes at the other side of the lake; we could hear them chattering loudly so knew they could not be far away.

Sure enough, there were hundreds of them - at their usual distance where the camera simply picks them up as pink blobs:

We paused for a moment. I breathed deeply in the cool fresh air. The view, which I so often take for granted, was awesome:

Spring along the trail...

The word 'Spring' in the title is not a command, I hasten to add. While Sheila and I walk at a fairly brisk pace, covering 4km in around half an hour, or a little more, I certainly don't feel like springing along in the early hours of the morning.

Yesterday, however, was officially the first day of Spring. That means, in Cyprus, that we start to think about shedding our sweatshirts or sweaters during most of the day, but still put on something warm for the evening or early morning, and still definitely need a duvet at night. It's been a pretty mild winter, and dry too, so that I've had to water our plants a few times already, and the Salt Lake has never really filled up at all.

Spring in Cyprus, too, means that there is a lot of yellow. I write about this almost every year, but even now it startles and delights me with the suddenness of change.

Here's what part of the trail looked like just a month ago, when we were halted by a fallen tree:

Here it is now - as it's been for perhaps a week:

I was particularly taken with this bush, a kind of plant which I probably photograph every year: 

I am being woken by a persistent Sophia - mewing in my ear, batting my face, knocking things down - between 5.30 and 6.00am at present, when the sun comes up.  Sheila and I met at about 6.15 today, and then she walked back here with me afterwards, and we stood outside our house chatting for a while. By 7.30am it was feeling really quite warm - a reminder of the Summer which, in Cyprus is (unfortunately) guaranteed. 

I look forward to next weekend when, along with the rest of Europe, we will put our clocks forward an hour. 

Autumn in the UK (briefly out of Cyprus again)

We spent a couple of weeks out of Cyprus at the end of October/early November. No particular reason, for a change, other than to spend time with our various family members. We had a couple of weeks when not much were happening, and flights were pretty good value. 

We had been warned of cold temperatures and potential snow... but it wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been.  Admittedly there was a lot of rain and the sky was often grey, but for our first week the daytime temperatures were in the 15-18C range.  What struck me most were the gorgeous autumnal colours.  This is something we really don't see in Cyprus, where a lot of trees are evergreen, and there's no real Autumn.

We arrived in the middle of the night at Gatwick and had booked an inexpensive Travelodge to collapse in.  On pulling the curtains in the morning, this is what I saw:

Sadly it's impossible to capture the splendour of the oranges and reds through glass on a grey day. But here's another example from a different direction:

We drove on many motorways and a variety of other roads in our 16 days, doing 900 miles in all in a rental car.  The colours were fabulous along the roadsides... but we drove by too rapidly to capture them. 

It was good to catch up with many of our family members in 'ordinary' times rather than special or sad occasions.  We still managed a few meals out and enjoyed some traditional English desserts, such as these: 

We were rather overwhelmed with the huge variety of Christmas decorations available, too: 

The prices of some of them were shockingly high.  Perhaps the recession in the UK is a thing of the past...

A week after we arrived, having driven from Sussex to Worcestershire via Berkshire, a major storm was predicted - across the South of the country.  There was a great deal of damage done, but it wasn't quite as terrible as predicted.  In the Midlands we had some high winds, making it difficult to photograph yet more Autumnal leaves: 

There was more rain than we had experienced in several years' worth of UK visits, but it was mostly quite gentle.  

I was thrilled to see rather a pretty rainbow, partly hidden behind some clouds, when we were briefly in Birmingham to see some friends: 

Then we drove further North still, to Derbyshire, where my brother took us out for a walk... not the gentle stroll around the village that we had expected, but a brisk hike across some rather attractive countryside, where we met some of the local wildlife: 

For a change, I saw a sunset rather than a sunrise: 

We did many things, enjoyed catching up with our loved ones, played games, went out for meals, and collected rather more things to return to Cyprus than we had expected.

Our final port of call was Carlisle, with our son and daughter-in-law.  When November started, the weather did turn rather chillier, and the morning before we returned to Cyprus, I saw this outside our window first thing: 

Yes, that's frost on the roofs of the cars, and quite a fog, although it dispersed later and the sun came out. 

We flew out of Cyprus with less than 20kg of luggage, and returned with 60kg of checked luggage (that's three suitcases) and rather full hand luggage too.  We got back a week ago... and although I haven't been as jet-lagged as usual, I'm only just now getting around to catching up with reviews and blog posts and everything else that is, perhaps inevitably, somewhat neglected when travelling. 

Yellow things hanging in trees...

One of the questions I am fairly regularly asked by visitors is:

'What are those rectangular yellow things hanging in trees?' 

It took us a little while to figure it out, but here's an example of what they refer to:

If you click the image to see it in bigger, better quality, you may observe some little dark dots on some of the yellow rectangles.  You might guess that they are flying insects of some kind.

If so, you would be correct in your surmise. 

These yellow rectangles are extremely sticky, and seem to last for months, reducing insect damage to fruit trees without the need for insecticides. They can be bought inexpensively at many shops - including such unlikely places as our local fruit shop - and are quite effective. We haven't used them ourselves, not having any fruit trees; but many of our neighbours do. 

They do not exactly add to the beauty of the foliage, it has to be said. But they are undoubtedly preferable to spraying toxic chemicals onto the fruit, or, indeed, having all the fruit destroyed by insects. 

Another walk and some vanishing trees

My early morning walks with Sheila have turned into a pleasant, regular habit three times per week. We communicate via text when we have both woken up, and usually leave our respective homes somewhere between about 6.00 and 6.15am. It's a pleasant time of day... or has been. Today there was quite a chill in the air, and I was glad of my long trousers and light jacket.

As we approached the Salt Lake trail, the area seemed lighter than usual. There was a gap, where previously there had not been a gap:

I'm not particularly observant, particularly at that time in the morning, but Sheila commented that this empty ground had been full of trees and bushes only yesterday. 

We didn't walk quite as quickly as usual, because Sheila's youngest daughter was with us, half asleep on her back. And while the sunrise wasn't as stunning as some of the recent ones we've seen, I took a photo anyway - most of the picture appears darker than it was in reality due to the sun shining so brightly:

On our way back, the newly cleared area was even barer looking, and a digger of some kind was busy taking out more trees:

We have no idea why this would be happening. Perhaps it's related to the new sewerage pipes. Or maybe they're even going to build more houses here, although it seems unlikely; there are far too many construction sites already, either half-done, or lying empty. 

When I arrived home and took my shoes off, I was greeted by Tessie who was very happy to have my shoe box entirely to herself: 

Still, I did manage to get one of my shoes in...