Supernobby's World

Malta, June 2006

My girlfriend decided to attend a language course on Malta, which gave me the opportunity to join her and to have a closer look on this Malta Island.

We took of course the plain to get there namely Air Malta. This was all together quite ok, even special wishes regarding eating habits that ware stated at the Air Malta homepage when booking the flights had been taken into account. Thus who ordered vegetarian food got it.

But the hotel Topaz in Buggiba was then a flop. Apparently some employees are not familiar with their own hotel and so the guy at the reception directed us in the wrong direction to look for our room. Well, this can happen. The room was then really difficult to reach, going down, along a corridor, up again and so on, finally on the opposite side of the street to the hotel entrance. And it could also not be called very orderly, the quality of the furniture was lowest level, in addition much noise on the floor - altogether this left no good impression.

The first walkabout through the city of Buggiba had been also not that impressive, it was quite loud and not very tidy. One can even not have a relaxing walk along the water line because next to the water there is a main street with lots of cars and busses. All this is far away from a normal beach with sand. We could also not take pleasure in the large number of English football fans (there was Football World Cup at that time) that were around. Malta had been an English colony until 1964, which became obvious in this context. But also besides this one could think that Malta had seen better times before and that times ended with the last day of the colonial period. Today they are something like a voluntary colony without much Maltese tradition, also not regarding food.

Allegedly there are 0 days with rain in June on Malta. But how else should it be? When I am there it also rains in June, in any case on that Sunday. And because of the weather we decided to undertake a small trip by bus to the city Masaxlokk. In this conjunction of course the yellow busses on Malta have to be mentioned. That are in most cases old, individually arranged, uncomfortable, more or less well conditioned old English makes that jolt over very bad roads. Some people get headaches from this combination. Similar to Buggiba, Masaxlokk could also not enthuse. Maybe without rain it would have look better.

On the next day there was then nice sunshine and we were looking around for some beach. With this Malta is also not very well equipped. But the Ghajn Tuffieha Bay next to the Golden Bay is quite nice since there are very few buildings around. Only the digger on the beach was a bit annoying in the beginning. And stupidly the used sunscreen failed to work as expected, which caused that day to end with sunburn.

When you walk around in the country you will notice that in fact everything is quite jam-packed. Cities and villages are close to each other without much space in between. Not much space remains for nature on the already not very green island. There are practically no possibilities for cycling and marked hiking tracks do also not exist. In addition much waste lies around in the country side, especially such strange fireworks- or gun rounds. This can really be found everywhere.

Mdina, which is the old capital of Malta, one should not miss, if you are once there. Compared to the rest of the island there are almost no cars thanks to the narrow lanes, it’s tidy and calm. Not that calm it is in the old town of Valetta, the current capital. But you should definitely also not miss it. Really impressive are the very massive buildings towards the sea. By watching this you can easily imagine how some attacking armada found it a hard nut to crack.

Also worth to see is Blue Grotto. There you can for 3 Lm take a short trip on a boat, which takes you to small caves in the steep coast. Due to the illumination by the sun the water shines in magnificent light blue. Quasi typically for Malta during the boat trip a plastic bag got entangled in the propeller because the ocean is really full with waste. I don’t know why it has to be like this, it’s quite a disaster.

The crowning end was then our last dinner on the island. It seemed like that they wanted to diddle us quite brazen, like pay big salad while a small one was served and so on. This was really pretty steep, and made goodbye not too difficult.

… yours Supernobby