Amazing Malta

When we first started planning for our time in Malta, many questioned our week-long itinerary. It’s a country you can fully drive across in less than an hour, and cruise ships dock for less than a day. Wouldn’t we be bored with a full week?!

No. We were not.

Just our very first day, we traveled across epochs of Maltese history. We took a hike from our apartment door and passed a castle built by the Knights Templar. A British fort from WWII. Roman salt pans and apiaries. Community garden plots with grape vines and tangles of melons and olive groves and rows of tomatoes plants. Burial tombs of pre-Christian peoples.

We learned to say bongu in the morning. And watched the 2 videos that exist online which explain Maltese pronunciation. We practiced staying x as sh, and g for g, and j for a g with a dot above it, and nothing at all for gh. They do speak English here, but everything is written first in Maltese, and place names are solidly foreign-sounding (and -looking) thanks to the Arab influence.

We looked for hedgehogs, a protected species here, but only managed to find one very flat one by the side of a road. But we did manage to see geckos every day, 2 very friendly Siberian huskies, our apartment owner’s collection of songbirds that he breeds, and a handful of interesting fishie things.

Because we chartered a boat for a day from a local man (Gozo born and raised) and got a lovely tour of lagoons and caves and cliffs and beaches. And although we did visit the famous blue lagoon, it was much too busy for our taste and our captain happily took us to a spot equally turquoise with absolutely zero pizza trucks.

We wandered, of course, because what else would you expect us to do? Mdina (pronounced like M’Fashnik (or mmm, cookies)) was delightfully medieval and the tall walls provided delicious shade (and lots of fodder for Game of Thrones reenactments). Rabat seemed totally livable and beautiful with its alley after alley of enclosed painted balconies. Valletta bustled and moved with throngs of folks and boats (and cruise ships), but is literally built from rock, out of rock, on top of and into solid, immovable, permanent and steadfast rock.

A short ferry ride away from the island of Malta is the island of Gozo (the second largest island of the country of Malta). We unfortunately got stuck on the top deck of a bus going through construction on much too narrow “2-way” streets during the heat of the day. Which did not enamor the island to us. But it did allow us to fully experience the jaw-dropping skill of bus drivers (as we looked over the edge of the bus to the cement truck 3 inches away). And we got plenty of time to appreciate the decorations for approaching feast days — colored bulbs on churches (like you might imagine around a circus), festoons of red, yellow, and green flags strung over streets, lamppost gilded with flowers. And beer and Sprite have never tasted so good.

We split the party one day for an aquarium visit for half of us, an anime movie in the theater for the other half. We lounged in the cool(er) evenings in our backyard. We celebrated Bill’s birthday with a lemon “cheesecake.” And we discovered a beach known only to locals (where we watched a man snorkel with his 2 dogs at his side).

We totally missed the southern and western parts of Malta (and, honestly, really, Gozo too). So we still have more to see if we ever return! (Which we will do at a different season. Everyone kept telling us it was still spring. But, boy, it felt just about at our limit of still able to have fun. I can’t even imagine summer!)

And that is a wrap for our Mediterranean holiday! We head to London now for a few days before we fly home. All in all, we are ready. But also feel like this was one of our most successful big journey yet. We are coming home bronzed and satisfied and tired and happy.