Cyprus

Cyprus caught me off guard. I came expecting beaches and ended up spending most of my time wandering through ruins older than anything I'd seen before — tombs carved directly into the bedrock at Paphos, stone chambers that once held entire households of the dead, open to the sky now, the grass growing soft and green around them. The light there was particular: flat white in the middle of the day, but the shadows inside those rock-cut doorways were ink-black. You step between the two and feel the temperature drop instantly.

Paphos itself has this quality of being a place that doesn't try very hard. The castle sits right at the harbour, thick and square and salt-worn, surrounded by open paving on all sides so you can walk right up to it and just stand there. No crowd, no queue, just wind off the sea and gulls overhead. A short drive up the hill is the lighthouse — whitewashed limestone, a blue door, the whole city spread out below it. From Kathmandu I'm used to looking down on cities from altitude, but this was different: sea on one side, the low terracotta sprawl of the town on the other.

Larnaca's waterfront is where I ended up most evenings. The bronze fisherman statue catches the last of the sun and turns almost golden at dusk, with the water going from blue to orange behind it. There's an old rusted crane sitting out on the breakwater too, which no one seems to have bothered removing, and somehow it looks exactly right against that sky. The food by the sea — grilled meat, yellow rice, proper chips, a squeeze of lemon — was the kind of meal that tastes twice as good because of the view behind it.