A Funfair Adventure in Cyprus Part one

I had finished the manufacturing of the basketball game. All I had to do was get paid. The next couple of days were spent making the regulation hoops a bit smaller, so that the Irishman could put bigger prizes on. He was a character and for some reason the local youths gave him a hard time. They would go on the trampolines and jump from bed to bed and not come off when their time was up. The Irishman would go on and chase them to try and get them off, then, when he was exhausted he would go and get the security. One day when he arrived to open, the kids had undone all the springs. The first customer fell through the canvas. Funny now, but not at the time. So much for the 24hr security. “L”s wife also had problems at the dart game. After a week of torture from the youths she stabbed one in the hand with the darts while he was trying to steal the prizes from the game stall! Eventually “L” put chicken wire around the prizes to protect them. This made the stall look like Stalag 13, but it stopped the thieving. When it came to the end of the three weeks, Mr “A” added on another week onto Strovolos. We did get some money but the commuting was becoming too much (over 4000 miles in a month), good job the fuel in Cyprus was so cheap. One day “L” got pulled up in his Land Rover. When the police checked his number plates they were not registered to him . “L” had always wanted a private registration, so he had one made up and just put it on his vehicle! He got a slap on the wrist and had to change back to his proper plates, but he didn’t mind, he had gotten away with it for three months. At this time the war in Yugoslavia was at its height. There was a strong objection here to the Allies bombings and the protestors were out on the streets in force. For the first time I felt threatened, we removed all the European & American flags around the fair and from then on we only flew the Greek & Cypriot flags. This was originally to be the end of our tour, but Mr “A” pulled a new venue out of the hat.

End of Strovolos March 1999

The last week of Strovolos was spent getting ready to pack up and shift. The twist ride owned by “a” was going home. “a” sourced some empty 200 litre barrels and stored them on his ride and filled them with fuel for getting home.( fuel in Cyprus was only 25c a litre). We all thought this was a great idea and before long we all had barrels packed into the rides. The last day of the fair “c” decided to take the roof cover off the dodgems to quicken the pull down time. What a blunder, sunny Cyprus rained that afternoon and the dodgem cars would not go around the track, they just skidded on the floor. Eventually someone remembered an old trick to restore their traction. He got a few fluorescent tubes and broke them on the wet track. Then he ground the glass to shards and spread it around. I don’t know exactly why this works but it does and after a few minutes the cars were driving around again no problem.

That night when we pulled down everyone left the site and drove all the equipment to Limassol. It was about 2am when I got to the hotel. We all parked along the verge. When I got up in the morning and looked out I was mortified to see all our vehicles parked along the sea front. It completely blocked the sea view from the hotel. The management didn’t seem to mind though, probably because we had been guests there for two months and had drank and ate in the bar nearly every night. Later that day some went to the docks to sail for home and we moved a few others onto some waste ground beside the old football pitch. A couple of workmen had started to rebuild the wall we had knocked down the month before to make the gate. (new concrete breeze block, you could easily spot the difference).

We had a couple of days before we were moving to the next fair so we all arranged a bus trip up to mount Olympus (10,000 ft) and had a day skiing. That was probably the best