You will collide with a wall, complete with spectators’ gallery provided by the Republic, and allegations of atrocities committed by the Turks. Within weeks this could be dismantled, and the barrier replaced by a pedestrian thoroughfare that will re-unite the city. An ancient arm of rock curls around the port, which is dominated by a Byzantine fortress.Now for Berlin, or what is claimed to be the world’s last divided capital If ever a city deserved to be kept intact, Nicosia is it. The Anglicisation has been more effective: the Dome Hotel looks like a remnant of Eastbourne, though with an impressive seawater pool hewn from the rock.

The restaurants around the hemispherical harbour are aimed squarely at Brits; some have bought second homes here, though many properties are still legally owned by Greek Cypriots. The new, improved Turkish lire has shaved six noughts to join the federation of sensible currencies. It is no longer a fiscal laughing stock; I am, and my carefully conserved collection of cash is shrapnel.The bus fare to Kyrenia is now three mighty lire, but the rate of exchange for a Cyprus pound is a tantalising CY£1 = 2.90 lire. Simple, says the man in a bureau de change that appears not to have seen a customer all day; let me nudge up the rate a little for you so you need not change more than a pound. That doesn’t happen at the bureau de change at Heathrow.On board the bus that is racing across a land of Anglian flatness, the view has been nudged up by an order of magnitude as the sky of fractured cloud conspires with the landscape to create a Biblical vision.

Shards of sunlight slice where they can through the steely shield, illuminating the terrain like searchlights. To the north, the horizon is serrated by a menacing line of mountains; from the south, a sequence of storms is marching towards us, for another aerial bombardment of heavy rain.We make it through the mountains, followed by a splendid descent to Kyrenia – or Girne, as the official process of Turkification dictates. Or at least I will be once I overcome my financial embarrassment.My awkward moment has arisen because this part of the island is in a different currency zone. I have brought a few Cypriot pounds across the frontier, but most of my funds are in the form of Turkish lire: tens of millions of them. On my last trip to Turkey, I became a multimillionaire by changing £50 I had some left over, so I have brought them with me. I expected them to have declined in value in the intervening years, but they appear to have lost all of it.

But I am heading west, towards one of the great ports of the Mediterranean: Kyrenia. They really should get together sometime soon.South of Famagusta lie the abandoned hotels in the resort area of Varosha, marooned in no-go territory; to the north, the ancient city of Salamis; and to the east, the curve of the bay tapers to a peninsula that points directly at a fully-fledged member of the axis of evil, Syria. But a mile later, I am passing a garage that announces itself to be a “United Nations Filling Station” on the scruffy outskirts of a busy town: Famagusta.Around 1300, this port’s position astride the main trade routes made it one of the richest places on earth; and around 1974, prosperity was once again returning with the peaceful invasion of tourists. I fell in for coffee and chats with a fine bunch of men: warm and welcoming chaps of the kind I had not met, well, for a good couple of hours since the Sport Cafe on the other side of the border. The British holidaymakers who happened to be there that summer were bundled out by the Navy with a thrilling tale to tell; but the Greek Cypriot property owners tell a tale of treachery.The heart of Famagusta is an exquisite warren of lanes guarded by absurdly muscular walls, with the handsome cathedral of St Nicholas – now the main city mosque – at the heart. Mustafa did not stamp my passport; instead, I was given a slip of paper that bore a close approximation to my name and announced itself to be a visa.This process has taken a couple of minutes, but in that time I have gone from a tidy British military enclave to a vision of blight: barns and cottages laid waste in the fighting that split the nation and caught in no-man’s-land.

Mustafa is sitting inside a white-and-red plastic hut that looks as though it has been requisitioned from a local ice-cream vendor, right down to the frilly red-and-white awning.”Welcome, friend.”Old habits die hard. Now to enter a country which, in the eyes of the world, does not exist The next bureaucratic hurdle is hard to take seriously. Evidence such as a passport stamp was, in theory, enough to make you non grata in Corfu, Cephallonia and all Greek islands to Crete. So immigration officials issued a separate piece of * * paper. A year ago, the people of the Republic rejected the Annan Plan, brokered by the UN Secretary-General himself, for a settlement with the unlawful regime in the north. A week later the Republic joined the EU – and the Green Line started to melt. Brussels has no great love of frontiers, particularly within member nations, and has provided cash to prise open the border.