Back to travel booking again. Not my favourite activity, in part because I’m picky. Well, careful? Sounds better. Get out the thesaurus and may end up sounding quite impressive. The world is getting harder to travel, our sort of travel anyway. More restrictions all the time. So now not only does the Schengen Area (most of the EU plus a couple of other European countries) allow you to stay for 90 days out of a 180 day period, but separately so does the Republic of Cyprus and, separately again, so does the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. And, just to complicate matters, time spent in North Cyprus is included by the South in their 90 days if you entered through the South. Gone are the days when it was easy to go to a country for 90 days, leave for a weekend, and come back to start over.
So, our 90 days here will be up in early February and we are booked in North Cyprus for two and a half months. The geographically obvious method would be to drive the 90 kilometres involved. However, that would mean that from the point of view of the South we would never have left the Republic of Cyprus and would be subject to a substantial fine for overstaying and possibly refused entry in the future. The alternative, which I’m in the process of setting up, is to fly from here to North Cyprus via a third country and then Turkey. Insistence that flights go through Turkey is essentially due to pressure from the South and based on the fact that only Turkey recognises the TRNC. Not exactly an inevitability. Taiwan is recognised by only thirteen countries, none of them major - think Haiti - but there is no problem at all in flying to Taipei. So China causes fewer difficulties than Cyprus? Who knew?
And as a consequence, currently looking to book flights to Athens and from there to Lefkoşa via Istanbul. Well, haven’t been to Athens in a while.