Day 142 - 23rd September, Wednesday. We made it!

We woke and peered out, there were people on deck, so we assumed it was ok to be seen aboard at the Cyprus end and went up to investigate. The sun was shining, the boat was docked, Ant’s parents were waving from the port cafe and trucks were being off loaded with some efficiency. Finally after almost 6700 miles our arrival looked promising. It was 8am.
Thankfully the only vehicles behind ours on the boat were the truck drivers who had also slept onboard, so we were not reliant on the return of the car owners aboard the Calypso (which was nowhere to be seen) in order to get off the boat...excellent.... we could get a head start on the bureaucracy.
I think not.
For anyone planning to take a vehicle into Cyprus, be aware; IT’S AN EXPENSIVE AND TIME-CONSUMING PROCESS!
First we were ushered to the police desk to get our passports stamped - again not so difficult. Then it was off to another building at the port gates to pay another set of port tax and to purchase Cypriot car insurance (apparently your own car insurance is not sufficient, nor is your green card), then outside the port gates to get the newly purchased insurance checked, and back to a different kiosk at the gates for something else (I don’t even know what he did at that one – if anything), then back inside to the customs desk with all our new bits of paper, where we stood in line to get a visa for Bee to enter Cyprus. Once you have collected all the stamps and paid all the fees, you can attempt to pass the gates, where another guy will ask you to reverse into a side area for vehicle inspection. Thankfully he didn’t notice the bottle of Ant’s pee when he opened up the back, else I’m sure at that point we would have offered it to him as an English ‘home brew’. It was some time after 10am when we finally entered Cyprus and starting driving on the left again for the first time in 5 months.
We met up with Cathy and Derek (Ants parents) and they did the best thing they could possibly have done at that point; took us for a large English breakfast.