Rent a Car in Kyrenia (Girne)

Kyrenia's old town, with its Venetian harbour and castle sitting right over the water, is small enough to see on foot in an afternoon. The real reason to hire a car here is everything around it. St. Hilarion Castle, a ruined mountain fortress up in the Five Finger (Beşparmak) range that's often compared to the towers in Disney's Snow White, is a 20-30 minute drive into the hills. Bellapais Abbey, the 13th-century Augustinian ruin that Lawrence Durrell wrote about in Bitter Lemons, sits in the village just above town and is usually combined with St. Hilarion in the same trip. Further east, the Karpaz Peninsula and Alagadi Beach — a nesting site for loggerhead and green turtles monitored by the Society for the Protection of Turtles (SPOT) — make a longer, full-day drive along the coast.

None of this is realistic without your own car. Northern Cyprus has no railway, and the shared dolmuş minivans run limited routes between the main towns, not up the mountain road to a ruined castle or along the quiet lanes of Karpaz. With a hire car you can do St. Hilarion and Bellapais back to back in a morning, or give the coast road to Alagadi a full afternoon, on your own schedule rather than a bus timetable.