I spent three winter months in the hottest country in Europe! It is an island as big as Corsica (French island) in the east of the Mediterranean Sea with turquoise blue waters, old villages with stones houses, orthodox churches and snow-capped mountains.

I came to Cyprus with the idea of ​​getting closer to Africa, my next and last continent of this hitchhiking world tour. A ferry company offered me two Turkey-Cyprus tickets for my boyfriend Sebastian and me. Then I found a contact to volunteer in a refugee camp. Everything was getting organized perfectly. Was it a sign? We went straight away!

This is how we discovered the complex situation of Cyprus. Its capital Nicosia is the last city in Europe still separated by a wall ! And those since the Turkish invasion in 1973. So in the north, it is the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (recognized only by Turkey). They speak Turkish, they pay in Turkish lira and they drive on small roads: it is quite wild and not much populated. Arriving from Turkey, it did not change us too much. We travelled ten days hitchhiking, quite slowly, stopping verey ten kilometers : our drivers were never going far away.

Then we crossed the checkpoint on the main street of Nicosia to go to the southern part. It is the independent state of Cyprus  (even if the English still have military bases since 1960!). It is also a member country of the European Union but not of the Schengen area. They speak Greek and English. They pay in euros. And people come to create their business by paying less taxes or even whitewashing their money ... Cyprus is a popular exil country the Russians. It is a very international island, and that for centuries!

But here we are, our thumbs at the entrance to a beautiful three-lane highway and nobody stopped. Why ? Because Cypriots are afraid of strangers, they do not like to mix with strangers and prefer their fancy comfort. 90% of our drivers were foreigners and the waiting time was extended. And we discovered this strange, cold atmosphere where smiles are optional. We found a room to rent for a month, but the paranoiac flatmate asked us for weird reasons to leave from the first day…

We moved in somewhere else and continued our volunteering at Kofinou Refugee Camp: 400 adults and children living in a mini village of containers in the countryside. We became specialists in clothes sizes of babies and children's. We had to make to sure that the parents don’t take too much to let for the others. To resume, we helped at the donation center. I would have liked to be "busy all week" as expected, but I forgot to ask for the Cypriot definition of "busy all week" and I only helped 3 days a week ... Too bad ! I would have loved to feel a little more useful. Most of the refugees came from Syria, Iraq, Palestine but also from Africa: Somalia, Niger, Cameroon ... They had all arrived "by mistake" ... They dreamed of Italy and were scammed by their smugglers by accosting in Cyprus. Here the asylum system is very slow. It is difficult to find a Cypriot who agrees to rent an apartment or employ a stranger. The lucky ones have to stay at least seven years before leaving Cyprus! After a month, we left the camp.

We started looking for hitchhiking a ferry or a plane at the beginning of February ... The sailboat was not an option because no one is sailing in winter. We went to offices, gave phone calls, looked for new contacts, wrote e-mails ... The time passed, but nothing happened !

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In the distance we could see Syria and Lebanon... We knew that Israel, Jordan and Egypt were not so far either.
So we hoped that in three days we would leave. But nothing. So every three days we imagined a new plan, we camped on the beaches and hiked in the mountain villages. We drunk at Mustafa’s parties (a Turkish-Cypriot), visited again Marion, Jean-Pierre and Roxane (French living in Nicosia). Wiktor (Greek-Polish) takes us to an Erasmus karaoke party. Natalja and Andrej (a Slovenian couple) made us sweat in their gym and sauna. We celebrated the carnival with Helene and Roberto (a Chyriot-French-Guatemalan couple). Thanks to Helene's mother we managed to get an appointment with a ferry company, but it did not end up successful.

We volunteered a week in an animal rescuing center of 90 animals (30 of them were living with us in the house!). We also slept ten days in an igloo made of sacks of soil. It was when we volunteered for a small permaculture farm. We were wearing shorts and t-shirts to prepare the bee hives and the compost pile. It was already the end of March, the heat of spring has arrived! We were looking for way to escape Cyprus for already two months. Finally a local airline company, TUS AIRWAYS, offered us flight tickets to Israel and it just took 45 minutes to cross the sea.

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