That ford is almost as tough as the last time I went offroading, gasp three years ago. I was with this french girl and she had rented a '79 toyota starlet. We went looking for some 15th-century bridge the Venetians built to carry copper down from the mountains of Cyprus. Unfortunately, the direct route there was blocked by some off-road rally race. So we backed out, pulled into some village to refuel (smartest move of the day), asked the navigator of the rally car at the other pump how we'd avoid the race, and flanked 20 miles W before inserting N.
After a couple of wrong turns and flooded-out roads, crawling over massive exposed root systems, we found the bridge. This place was way the hell out of the way. I mean, the only tourist guidebook that even mentioned this bridge had a drawing, and, as we figured out later, it was of a 19th-century turkish bridge further downstream.
This place was deserted. I spent about three hours there doing whatever it is you do with a pretty french girl, a bottle of wine and a 15th-century bridge, and the only sign of other humans we heard was the occasional jet bound for Larnaka or Beirut.
We decide to leave, but given the fact we're offroading in a compact, and the dirt track hasn't been tended to in over 20 years, decide to go in the direction opposite of the way we came from. 2 clicks up the hill we hit a village deserted by Turkish Cypriots in the aftermath of the 1974 invasion: roofless huts with greek alphanumeric spraypainting on them, lest their inhabitants ever return; a tiny little mosque with a sheetmetal minaret.
We came from the East. To the North and West are mountains and beyond that, the Turks. So we decide to go S. We roll down the side of the hill from the village and head to the valley where this stream flows, much like the one in that fording picture. There's a bridge, but it's one of those solid concrete ones that looks like it washed out over a decade ago. A ford's upstream a bit. She takes the dinky little FWD carburator job down the track in third gear, whips hard 90 degrees right, and blows through the ford, taking water halfway up the door. I don't know how she managed not to flood it.
We think we're safe as we start the climb up the hills on the South side of the stream. It's now about dusk. We can hear distant barking, a sure sign of civilization. Our mistake is shown to us when the barking gets considerably louder, and, indeed, a pack of wild dogs starts chasing us. Run up the far side of the hill, over the top, and in the distance we see the lights of some village.
It's night as we roll into the village, and encounter a villager walking on the main road. He turns to gape at our dust-and-mud covered Starlet. The French girl rolls down the window, and asks him in Greek "Do you know the way to Nicosia?"
He laughed at us.
The morals of the story:
A) A 100-lb French girl can outdrive you rutabagas.
B) Every rental car is an SUV.
