If I wouldn’t have known better, I would’ve called this blog post “Lara Beach and Bath of Aphrodite”. However, when I travelled to Cyprus again in 2015 I found out that what I saw back then was not really Lara Beach.

Let me start from the beginning. My friend and I were staying in Paphos and decided to make a day trip up north to Latsi, but more specifically to the Baths of Aphrodite. When you drive up north, you pass Lara Beach which has turtles and is supposed to be a beautiful beach; so we tried to get there. However, there were no signs and suddenly we ended up on a look-out point which offered views over the entire area (and probably one of the beaches below was Lara Beach).

Somewhere along the way we missed a turn-off to go to the beach. This is not really surprising because signposts in Cyprus are not great. The amount of time that a signpost will make you decide a direction rather than giving you the fastest one is shocking. Just look at the sign below and tell me which way you would go to reach Polis.

Clearly all the roads lead to the north so we didn’t have any trouble finding Latsi and the Baths of Aphrodite. I was happy to see that there were some donkeys lounging outside the site. People who read my blog post about Troodos Mountains might remember that my goal was to see a donkey sanctuary in Vouni which is actually closed now, so up until the final days of the holiday we didn’t see any donkeys.

The Baths of Aphrodite is definitely a tourist trap. It was quite busy and all you see at the end of a short walk through a park is… a tiny little lake/puddle of water where Aphrodite apparently bathed and met up with her lover Adonis. You can’t even swim there!

Conclusion

Aphrodite Rock was acceptable, but the bath thing is simply taking it to far. It’s clearly a way to make tourists travel to the north rather than sticking to the cities. Regardless, the short trip across the Akamas Peninsula was a nice day trip from Paphos. We didn’t lose anything going on this day trip, apart from our dignity when we couldn’t find Lara beach.

This wraps up my Cyprus trip in May 2014. It was a nice holiday in a beautiful county, but it would’ve been nice if it wouldn’t have rained so much at the start when we were in Larnaca and Troodos Mountains.