Tuesday 3rd March 2026

The first full day of the tour, though only half the tour was here. But we would make the most of it.

Breakfast was another buffet affair, enjoyed after a shower and dressed in clean clothes. The hotel has a posse of resident cats, who do come to say hello and offer to dispose of any spare food.

Before setting off, we go to the back of the hotel, where on two low banks overlooking the sea, two species of orchids could be found, and we tried to guess which species they might be. Two closely related species, whose forms slightly overlap and can also hyrbridise with each other too. This would be a repeating theme of the tour.

We leave at quarter to nine, with a short drive to where Jools and I had walked the day before. Though going up the hill via a different route.

In our bags we carried water, juice and a packed lunch, while hanging from my shoulder was the old trusty camera.

We spent an hour in a field, where we found many interesting orchid species, some the same but different to what we had seen the day before. Everywhere we looked there were orchirs or orchids emerging, we had to watch our steps as we climbed higher up the field.

Across a drying up stream to another partly fallow field where we found more orchids, and some reptiles, including skink and gecko, of which we all got shots while our tpur eaders held the tiny animals.

And as time went on we climbed higher and higher. Until we came to a road, so followed that at an angle of something in excess of 35 degrees, past two new build villas, and son a leafy valley the other side. The villas windows, blank, overlooked the fields and down to the coast road below, will make someone a fine place to live.

The fields were, of course, private property, but the local farmer seeing us stomping all over them raised a friendly hand in greeting towards us.

It was now near midday, and warm enough to cause even the fittest to begin to sweat. Doubly so for me, and yest I coped, and as the week would go on, I got used to the temperatures, and struggled less as the daily stepcout climbed towards 10,000.

All the way down I thought to myself that we would have to climb the way back later, I regretted each step down, knowing there would be harder steps back up.

We found more orchids along a track leading to an an abandoned quarry, we chased butterflies, like the endemic Paphos Blue, and delighted in finding orchids everywhere we looked.

We stopped by a small chapel for lunch, and beyond were dozens of the rare Orchis punctulata, all along the sunny side of the track.

The chapel was only built in 1978, or something, but looked old inside, of what you could see of the building, as every surfaces was covered with icons of saints, but mostly St George and the Virgin Mary. I took shots of everything.

Overhead, the sky was blue, and temperatures peaked in the low twenties in the afternoon, until it was time to turn back, and I retraced my steps along the valley, and to the chapel. Where I found a seat in the cool interior, and so surrounded by multiple St Georges, I drained a litre of water as I cooled down, and prepared for the walk up the hill towards the van.

The others came back, and we set off, across the bottom of the valley, and the road soon rose up, like a hissing serpant. I was, of course, soon left at the back, but step by step I climbed up, stopping frequently to take in the views.

It took five minutes huffing to get up, but the view opened up to the view of the bay between the two headlands. Then along beside a field, where we arrived where Jools and I walked the day before, so I could show the group the orchids we had found.

Richard was able to ID the spikes we saw, and confirmed that we had stumbled on one of the orchid hotspots of this part of the island, rich in punctulata.

Down, finally, through the building supply dump, and the helipad to the main road and back to the van. Leaving us with a two minute ride back to the hotel, where Jools was waiting with a fridge full of cold beers and ciders.

Happy days.