Getting to Kallepia

Our family home in Kallepia, Cyprus is in the hills above Paphos on the west side of the island. There are two major international airports in Cyprus, one near Larnaca (LCA) on the eastern side of the island and one near Paphos (PFO) on the Western side. It’s about 125 km (77 miles), a one and a half hour hour drive on the highway between the two. Add on a thirty minute drive from the Paphos airport to our house and it’s about two hours from the house to the Larnaca airport. Major airlines tend to fly to LCA and budget friendly airlines tend to fly to PFO, although there is a mix of both at both airports. About four million tourists visit Cyprus every year, with about 1.8 million of them passing through PFO. As you can imagine the airports can get very busy. We prefer to fly into PFO as it’s closer to our house, but sometimes fly into LCA depending on ticket availability.

It’s not easy to get to Cyprus from the USA. There are no direct flights from anywhere in the US, so we always need to, at a minimum, connect through Europe. At the same time, living in Charlotte (airport code CLT), we generally need to connect through a major American hub to get to Europe. This time it was no different, a long 32 hours of travel time with three flights and two connections.

Rather than go through the stress of possibly missing a connection due to short connecting times, we elected to choose long connecting times and just hang around the airport for a few hours. Our first flight was CLT > Washington Dulles (IAD leaving at 2:40 PM). Our connection time in IAD was about five hours and we had the luxury of spending the time in the United Airlines lounge. The lounge food was pretty good, especially the meatballs in tomato sauce, and helped pass the time. We then boarded a United flight from IAD > Dublin, Ireland (DUB) which left about 20 minutes late at about 11:20PM. Flying in to DUB from the east coast is possibly one of the shortest transatlantic flights at less than seven hours. We landed at 10:30AM Dublin time. Picked up our luggage, cleared customs and immigration and then found the food court to have breakfast.

Coincidentally we arrived in Ireland on St Patrick’s day and there were signs of it throughout the airport, with no shortage of men in tartan kilts and women with bright green hats and clothing. There was a good choice of food at the food court with beer on tap everywhere, Guinness and Harp of course and other beers, Irish breakfast, Irish stew and other more international offerings, even a Burger King. All the signs at the airport are bilingual in Irish and English. We had to wait till 1:25 to check in our luggage with Ryanair for our direct flight to Paphos scheduled to leave at 4:25PM.

(Wikimedia Commons)

Ryanair is an Irish low cost carrier based in Dublin, Ireland servicing more than 180 destinations throughout Europe. They can best be characterized as a no frills airline where you pay for everything, and the price to fly, while cheap, gets more expensive as you add on your own preferences. Some examples are preferred seating, preferred boarding, checked luggage, carry on luggage etc. Ryanair fly a fleet of about 570 aircraft almost all of which are Boeing 737s, standardized to keep costs down.  New Ryanair aircraft have been delivered with non-reclining seats, no seat-back pockets, safety cards stuck on the back of the seats, and life jackets stowed overhead rather than under the seat. This allows the airline to save on aircraft costs and enables faster cleaning and security checks during short turnaround times.

Ryanair prefers to operate out of low cost, airports and terminals so as to keep ticket prices low. When Ryanair negotiates with airport operators, it demands very low landing and handling fees, as well as financial assistance with marketing and promotional campaigns. They try to minimize ground turn around times as quite obviously planes only make money while flying and not while standing on the ground. As a result, passengers get ready to board while the arriving passengers are still deplaning and departing passengers are held in a waiting area in the terminal. After the plane has emptied, passengers walk from the terminal to wait at the steps at the back and front of the aircraft till the plane and crew are ready to board the passengers. Ryanair have been criticized for their treatment of the disabled and elderly who may not be able to wait outside and then climb steps with their carryons to board.

Paphos International Airport (Wikimedia Commons)

We left on time for our five hour flight to PFO, arriving just after 11:25PM. Luckily we were the only flight that arrived at that time so we cleared customs and immigration pretty quickly, met our taxi driver and gratefully sank back into the taxi seats for the thirty minute drive. The taxi driver, Luba, got a bit confused so we had to help her navigate through the village to our destination. We arrived at our Kallepia house, travel weary, after about 32 hours on the road. First thing, after opening the back door, was to turn on the heat and hook up the cooking and heating gas cylinders.

A quick snack and drink and it was off to sleep, if we could get past the jet lag from the six hour time difference.

I’ll discuss our first day in the next post.