Advertisement
Published: August 23rd 2022
Edit Blog Post
We seem to have spent precious few hours on our now two month long jaunt doing much relaxing, so today we decide to make up for lost time. Our apartment is made for the job; a sizeable terrace equipped with a couple of large sunlounges overlooking the water, and if that gets a bit warm there’s always the leather recliners in the living room where we can stretch out and stare through the full length glass doors at the sea.
Unlike my beloved I do start to get itchy feet after an hour or so of lounging around, so I head off towards Zonqor Point at the mouth of Marsascala Bay. I’m not quite sure what to expect. One reviewer gave it one star with the comment “not nice”, which is not particularly encouraging, or helpful for that matter. Another gave it five stars and said it’s “good for standing”. I think the first comment was probably more helpful; at least it was less ambiguous. As is the case along most of Malta’s coastline it does look very rocky, so maybe the reviewer just meant it’s not good for sitting, unless of course you happened to bring your own deck
chair. I don’t know everyone in the world so I guess it’s possible that there are people out there who like standing so much that they’re prepared to give a place five stars on that basis alone. Anyway, there aren’t too many people here today, just a few stretched out on towels under umbrellas on the rocks, plus some others in the water; nobody seems to be just standing, but I guess it’s also possible our reviewer doesn’t come here every day.
I round the point and wander down onto the Zonqor Point salt pans. If the shack at the top of the ”beach” and the pile of salt under a tarpaulin held down by a few rocks are anything to go by, it looks like the pans are still in active service. They’ve apparently been carved out of the soft rock by hand, and knowledge of the salt production process has been handed down over the generations, sometimes for as long as 350 years. Apparently you can buy packets of locally produced rock salt in the shops here. It seems that this is just one of a number of similar sites around Malta and there are even more
in Gozo. It all looks very attractive and impressive.
We head out for a very pleasant home cooked meal at Issy’s cousin Nancy and her husband France’s house in Birzebbuga. We’re joined by their daughter Shirley and her two children Kelly and Jake. As often seems to be the case the conversation inevitably turns to Australia’s seeming abundance of spiders, venomous snakes, sharks, crocodiles, vicious mosquitoes and deadly marine stinger jellyfish. Shirley’s never been to Australia and if the look on her face as the conversation proceeds is anything to go by that’s not about to change anytime soon….
Advertisement
Tot: 0.053s; Tpl: 0.01s; cc: 11; qc: 25; dbt: 0.033s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb