Living In The Real Cyprus

Cyprus ticks all the boxes. Sun. Sea. Cheap food and drink. Friendly, smiling people. How would you like to live there? Is this island heaven too good to be true? Surely there can be no darker side? Is there no lingering resentment from the colonial period and the bitter and vicious guerrilla war which ended it? What happens when Vic and his wife Gay come into contact with the real Cyprus, away from the garish, overdeveloped tourist resorts? They quickly find people even more friendly and generous than in the towns, although less likely to speak English. But they also discover terrible cruelty to animals; winter weather worse than tourists are led to believe; snakes, dangerous driving and earthquakes; hunters, armed to the teeth, excited and trigger happy; institutionalised hatred between Greek and Turkish Cypriots; racism and sexual exploitation of women tricked into coming to Cyprus from abroad. Is paradise lost?

Cyprus ticks all the boxes. Sun. Sea. Cheap food and drink. Friendly, smiling people. How would you like to live there? Is this island heaven too good to be true? Surely there can be no darker side? Is there no lingering resentment from the colonial period and the bitter and vicious guerrilla war which ended it? What happens when Vic and his wife Gay come into contact with the real Cyprus, away from the garish, overdeveloped tourist resorts? They quickly find people even more friendly and generous than in the towns, although less likely to speak English. But they also discover terrible cruelty to animals; winter weather worse than tourists are led to believe; snakes, dangerous driving and earthquakes; hunters, armed to the teeth, excited and trigger happy; institutionalised hatred between Greek and Turkish Cypriots; racism and sexual exploitation of women tricked into coming to Cyprus from abroad. Is paradise lost? Vic and Gay lived in Cyprus for 8 years while researching for this book which reveals how one only scratches the surface of a place when spending a holiday there and how one learns little of a country and its people in such a short stay.

Vic Heaney was born in 1940, in Blackpool, Lancashire. He was a grammar school boy but “ran away” to sea. He has been a ship’s Radio Officer, a Civil Servant, a Regional Manager for a computer manufacturer and the founder of a very successful business. In his spare time he has been a writer, a political animal, a competitive runner, and a not so competitive squash player. He is a husband, father and grandfather. He is an avid reader, a keen but hopeless guitar player and, when he gets the time, will be a painter of animals, especially wolves, dolphins and horses. Vic lives in the foothills of the French Pyrenees, in a place some people call paradise. In 2010, to celebrate his 70th birthday, Vic walked, in 70 days, from his current home to the house of his birth, then wrote "Vic's Big Walk". The walk was to raise funds for pancreatic cancer research. The proceeds from all his books go direct to the same cause.