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When I heard that one of my son’s friends was in the Ayia Napa Polyclinic with heat exhaustion, dehydration and some sort of virus, I was slightly worried. It only got worse when one of the boys told me not to worry; they had managed to get him to the clinic on the back of a quad bike and had everything under control. That was the same quad bike that one of them drove into the glass door of the garage in their villa. Why? Nothing to do with alcohol, I was assured. Apparently people get paid to steal bikes, so they hatched a plan to get it into the back garden for safekeeping and the glass door was just collateral damage. I decided to go and see what was going on for myself.

As the boys could not be woken before 3pm at the earliest I decided to take my daughter and her friend out of Napa for lunch. I thought it would be nice to go to Protaras; I remembered Fig Tree Bay being quite pleasant years ago. And as we know, the posh half of Nicosia all have a house in Protaras for the summer, so it must have something going for it, surely? Something more than just being an escape from the heat of Nicosia. Just like posh Londoners having a summer residence in Cornwall or France, one of the girls commented. Not quite, I thought, but we decided to give it a go with a few hours to kill before the boys emerged from their slumber.

We eventually managed to park at Fig Tree Bay. It wasn’t easy. We were all quite hot and bothered by then. There was not a single free sun lounger on the whole beach, although apparently it was less busy than Nissi beach. Imagine that! The sea looked quite inviting, from a distance. The same shade of blue as the loungers and umbrellas; it all melted into one vast blue and orange continuum. The heat and the hassle of wading through all those people did not appeal. So we ate a very mediocre lunch and headed back to the car to get out of the lovely if less than exclusive Protaras.

I was really struggling with the concept of Protaras being the posh end of Napa. It felt exactly the same: crowded, overpriced and full of karaoke bars and tacky shops. Maybe slightly fewer drunken Brits but they only come out at night anyway. And, all other things being equal, sounds like Napa might be a bit more fun than Protaras after all, thanks to the preponderance of drunken Brits. That is judging by the lurid tales I got from the girls of ‘chlamydia pools’, teenage boys stripped down to their boxers and size 18 women in nothing but a thong dancing ‘til dawn at the River Reggae club. Sounds a scream if you are 17 and drunk and not in the clinic with heat exhaustion. Or something worse!