Day 28: Choirokoitia Village

Kait came by and we walked to the nearby village, called Choirokoitia (pronounced with a 'K' sound, and apparently the 'oi' is pronounced 'ee', so it sounds more like Keero-ka-teeya).  It was almost cold today - not compared to Scotland, but compared to what I thought it should be, here.  Still very pleasant, and Kait and I enjoyed catching up, sprinkled by stops for lovely photos. (I'm actually horrible at trying to spend time with someone and take photos at the same time - I really shouldn't do it. I kept stopping at random times and poor Kait would keep walking on and then look back and realise I wasn't next to her, or listening to what she was saying...but she pressed on valiantly and didn't complain!)  We found a 'Natural Path' (as opposed to a Nature Path - sometimes the Greek translation to English falls a little short) and were amused to see manmade stone steps taking us down.  So natural! 
Soon this led to a legitimately 'natural' dirt path, which wound around the outskirts of the village.  I stopped every few seconds for a photo - as Mary Stewart puts it in "Moonspinners", "The very dust of this place is photogenic!"  Halfway round we felt a few sprinkles of rain, and then a huge rainbow spread across the whole valley we were in.  It was glorious. 

We passed a small cave, climbed seemingly endless steps, and came back round to the stone streets of the village, with cheery blue and white flags waving to us as we passed.  (One, however, wrapped itself firmly around its post and stubbornly refused to fly.  It was feeling either unpatriotic or just plain grumpy.)  We passed a whole slew of cats, chatted to a friendly man who fed the cats, and when I stopped to take a photo of a fruit truck, its owner stopped, leaped out agilely, and posed winningly by its side for my photo.  I loved it.  He stopped again as he passed us going down out of the village and insisted on giving us fresh apples and oranges from the back of his truck.  We couldn't speak either of us a word that we could understand (curse you, Tower of Babel!), but we parted with great cheer and much waving on both sides.

Walk length:  1.5 hours