Around Larnaca, the earth is arid and flinty, hard on the eyes, but as you travel west - quite abruptly, as if someone has flicked a switch - the landscape is suffused with green. Solitary olive trees on parched hillsides give way to grass-lapped groves. Orange thickets drip with fruit as bright as headlamps. Blue bags, tied over ripening bananas to deter birds, snap in the wind as you pass through plantations. If you stuck a Kirbigrip in the ground around here, it would grow roots and chuck out some blossoms overnight.
Every front step and window ledge seems to be given over to the offhand cultivation of plants, and we're not just talking the ubiquitous marigolds and hot-pink geraniums that look so fetching against whitewashed Cyprus walls. No, here in old olive-oil containers on a shaded porch are freesias, a tangle of roses and flame-coloured ranunculus, a flower I've only ever seen in good florists marked £5 a bunch. Arum lilies, those elegant, sepulchral trumpets beloved of upmarket hairdressers, are growing willy-nilly in a front yard where six identical black dresses are flapping on a washing line.
Perhaps the stout, black-clad matron pegging them out knows something about the weather we don't. The sky is full of enormous clouds, moving between the hills and the sea as slowly and ominously as icebergs. April in Cyprus is officially early summer, but we won't be leaping into the surf during this visit.
At the Anassa, a luxurious year-old resort a little along the coast from the fishing village of Latchi, at the westernmost tip of the Greek side of the island, the pale-blue shutters have broken from their catches and are slamming against the bal cony railings. The owner, an imaginative-sounding man, told his architect that every bed must have an uninterrupted view of the sea, and as my head rests on the pillow I can look out on to the navy waves. Between the beach and the hotel, the pool-side parasols are furled against the gale and splatters of rain.
The Anassa looks like the seaside would look if it was designed by Armani. It nods at the vernacular - red roofs, white walls, even a church (air-conditioned for those mid summer rock-star weddings) - without conceding an inch on comfort or style or convenience. It is a fabulous resort for people who measure their holidays against the International Luxury Index: Frette on the bed, Molton Brown in the bathroom, Ty Nant in the minibar. At its three restaurants, you are more likely to eat red Thai curry with king prawns than anything wrapped in vine leaves. The curry is delicious, but sometimes, wandering back along the glossy cream marble floors to your room, you may forget where on earth you are.
This is why it's a good idea to hire a car. The district of Paphos is comparatively undeveloped, at least in the context of relentlessly concreted Greek Cyprus, and in hill villages like Kathikas and Lyso, where old men while away grey afternoons with roll-ups and earthenware pots of wine, it feels as if nothing much has changed around here since Aphrodite (who was born locally and famously bathed in a now rather fetid rock pool not far from the Anassa) was a gel. Yes, there are roadside notices stating, in English, that villas called Diane and Philip and Joanne are for hire, but there are also the vivid, touching frescos at Ayios Neophytos, a church and hermitage founded by a twelfth-century saint, where monks wield feather dusters behind the iconostasis; the fishing boats tethered at Ayios Yeoryios, where traces of Neolithic, Hellenistic and Roman settlements have been found; and, high up in the Paphos forest there's the tiny hamlet of Stavros tis Psokas.
Guidebooks urge you to go there for the Mouflon sheep - the quarry of medieval huntsmen and their trained leopards, and now the emblem of Cyprus Airways - but there's a distinct sense of anti-climax when you finally seize the wire of their enclosure and peer in at the shapes occasionally shifting in the bushes. The Mouflon plainly aren't interested in the fact that the pilgrimage to see them took you two hours on a precipitous dirt track high in the mountains. But Stavros, with its 1940s British-built canteen and picnic benches, and its family of friendly, dusty cats with green eyes, is an agreeable, cedar-scented place to have a glass of beer, even if you did forget to pack a jersey, and it must be blissfully cool and quiet in the hot months.
The car is also useful if the relentlessly international good taste of the Anassa begins to pall, just a little. The local cooking has to be one of the great peasant cuisines of the world, and it's a mystery why it has failed where Italian has succeeded. In the town of Polis, a few kilometres away from the Anassa, in the tiny 'Old Town' restaurant, we sat down to mezze and a bottle of wine, while the draught from the windows wafted the glorious scent of a gardenia plant, plonked on a nearby shelf, in our direction.
This is what we ate. Fresh sesame bread, dunked in roasted tomatoes and a chunky garlic and aubergine paste. A green salad, doused in olive oil and sprinkled with coriander and a handful of green olives. Pitta filled with grilled halloumi and drizzled with thyme honey. A ravioli made with feta and ham. Salmon in vine leaves. Wild asparagus in a buttery sauce made with egg yolks and lemon. Pork stuffed with feta and herbs, with a few fried potatoes. Chicken cooked with spinach, red, yellow and green peppers, and lots of olive oil. To finish, a thimbleful of the gritty local coffee, with a glass of water and a piece of almond cake soaked in honey. The whole shebang took about three hours to eat and cost eight quid a head. There are worse ways to spend a stormy evening in Cyprus.
Harriet Lane travelled with Seasons in Style (0151 342 0505), which offers seven nights B&B at the Anassa starting at £1,120 per person based on two sharing a studio suite, including return flights with Cyprus Airways from London to Paphos and private transfers. One week's car hire costs from £139.
