Abandonded Hotel In UN Buffer Zone, Famagusta. Jamie: This is one of my favourite photographs I've taken this year. For some reason I suspect the woman in this image is not a holiday maker but a local. What is she thinking as she looks at the empty hotel, abandoned in minutes in 1974? Although the viewer can't see her face one gets the impression she is looking on forlornly. In the following pages Liz describes perfectly the sensation one gets when taking in this sad sight...

While we careered round the island in pursuit of anything worth (or not worth) buying we stumbled across some of the wonderful sites it has to offer, both in the north and south. On one epic expedition to the south we went via Famagusta to have a look at its world renowned medieval village. The day had been intended as an essential shopping trip coupled with a bit of sight-seeing along the way. As it turned out it is early closing day on Wednesdays in The Republic of Cyprus (this, we discovered just after lunch), so we made the best of it and turned it into a sight-seeing day, instead.

Famagusta is in the north of the island. Well, most of it is. Quite a large part of it is now sectioned off with barbed wire walls behind which can be seen the eerie no-man’s land of skeletal hotels, tumble-weed roads and literal urban decomposition…