Malta: a quick catch-up

Agh, I always do this: I go away on a holiday for a week and when I come back I blog about the first few days and then I lose interest and never do the rest. Well, here's a quick-and-dirty update of the rest of the malta trip, before I forget it all!

On the tues we decided to go to Gozo, the other island. By now we were pretty used to the buses and so got to Cirkewwa to catch the ferry without too much difficulty. Once we landed in Mgarr, the fishing village on the other side, we were mobbed by taxi drivers looking to give us a tour of the island for a mere €70 each, or wanting to bring us into Victoria, the island's capital. When we said we'd take the bus the answer was "No! No bus for another hour!". This would have been a little bit more believable if we didn't see a bus pulling into the stop right behind yer man as he was arguing with us! :-) Once we got into Victoria, we took a look around the citadel, a sort of mini version of Mdina, where we'd been the day before, got something to eat, and headed back to the bus terminal to do some more tripping around, as we were by now used to doing on Malta. One snag: it was about 3pm at this stage and the next buses to the Gigantja temples and the Azure Window, the two places I wanted to go, were at 4:30 and 5 respectively - and we had to be heading back to catch the ferry for around 6:15pm as the last bus from Cirkewwa to Sliema went at 7:15! So, we ended up getting a taxi to Gigantja and forgetting about the other place. Ah well, next time!

On weds we went to Marsaxlokk, a fishing village on the south of the island which was supposed to have an open-air market (like the one we'd missed in Valetta on sunday). Am not sure what I was expecting, but it was mostly just the same kind of knick-knacky tourist crap that you could get in any of the shops in Valetta or Sliema. After wandering around that for a bit, we decided to go to see could we find this "Peter's Pool" that I'd read about. The guy who'd given us the directions had told us it was only a 15min walk form Marsaxlokk. Well, maybe he was getting "walking" and "driving" mixed up - it took us 45mins to get there! ;-( Once we did tho, it was lovely. Unfortunately there were no real shallow bits there, and Michelle can't swim, so she just sunned herself while I went into the water. Makes a nice change jumping into water without having to stifle the scream when it hits you! I had a good bit of a splash around anyway and then we headed back. The only problem was I'd sort of forgotten the small insignificant fact that swimming washes off sunblock - by that night I was quite a fetching shade of bright red! :-)

On the thurs we headed south again to the Blue Grotto, a series of sea caves that you can do a boat tour of. The tour itself was very nice, altho I don't think that Michelle was overly impressed :-) After that we decided to head to the stone age temples at Hagar Qim, just up the coast. So, we headed for the bus stop, fending off the usual taxi drivers and their warning of "no bus for one hour!". Unfortunately, they were right! 45 very hot, very boring minutes later. we were joined at the bus stop by an american girl, asking were we waiting for the bus to Valetta. We replied no, that was the other side of the road, we were going to Hagar Qim. "But that's only 10, maybe 15mins walk up the road, I'm just after walking down from there myself". D'oh! So, me, Michelle and Sabrina, the austrian girl we'd been waiting at the bus top with, walked up. Just as we got there, the bus pulled up behind us! I know I wasn't exactly expecting to see Gandalf there, but the temples were slightly less then impressive (altho the oppressive afternoon heat could have had something to do with that). After that it was another 30min wait for a bus back to Valetta, where we all wandered around for a few hours doing nothing much in particular bar chilling before heading our separate ways again.

On the fri, we didn't really have very many plans so we just headed back out to Mdina and Rabat to see all the stuff that we'd missed thanks to our time-sharing friends. So, we wandered around Rabat a while, did the catacombs, the dungeons and St. Paul's Cathedral, where St. Paul originally brought christianity to Malta (well, the cathedral was on the site, he didn't exactly preach from the pulpit! :-P). at least the cathedral museum there was better than the one in Mdina! After having a nice lazy day there, we headed back to Sliema to finish off the pressie shopping for the ppl back home.

The last act of the trip pretty much was a BBQ on the rooftop of the hotel on the friday night, all you can eat for just €15 each. As it was a BBQ, the inevitable happened: just as we were sitting down and waiting for the food to cook, it started raining! :-) Not to be deterred, we pulled up a few of the big sun parasols to cover us and had the BBQ anyway!

The next morning, it was all over. Nothing to do but pack and head to the airport, back to cold, rainy Ireland!