Malta

Europe » Malta
May 4th 2007

Published: August 7th 2007

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B C vs The World

Main Island

C's bike

A tiny archipelago of 3 islands in the Med not too far from Italy. We stayed in the north of the main island in a place called Buggiba so we'd be close to the ferries that run to Gozo and Comino (the other 2 islands). Not a hell of a lot to do there, there's a few sandy beaches but most are pebbled (some red rock beaches that looked pretty cool, but not exactly comfortable) or just shear rock - very impressive. Other than that there's a bunch of seriously old remains of structures and archaeological sites. Unfortunately they don't take great care of these relics, we tried to see some caves that were 3000 years old but were told that they no longer existed, quite sad. They did have the remains of the oldest man made structure on earth too (or something like that), but it pretty much just looked like a big pile of rocks.

Other than that there's a gorgeous sapphire blue lagoon - called, imaginatively enough, The Blue Lagoon - at Comino Island. Apart from 1 Hilton hotel, that's all there is at Comino island, and that's it. Quite a cool little secluded spot on the

Main Island

Baz's bike

off season. Apparently in the height of summer the lagoon is surrounded by tour boats that all circumnavigate the islands and stop at The Blue Lagoon for lunch.

As the weather was a little windier than we expected, we didn't spend too much time in the water (read zero) or sun bathing on the beach (for fear of having our skin stripped by sand storms). So we decided to hire a little scooter and explore the main island for a day, only to find that there were more mobility scooters for rent than bikes owing to the fact that every nursing home in the UK had arranged excursions to Malta for the long weekend. We managed to find a little putter for the day and set off to explore the main island, which probably takes about 4hrs to putt-putt from one end to the other. We rode round the coast and turned inland to check out this enormous inland lake that was shown on the map...only to find that it had obviously dried up several years ago as they were now using it for farmland, complete with farmhouses! It's definitely a very dry group of islands and cactus is

Main Island

Rural farm house

rife.

We did check out the nightlife one night, which is concentrated in St Juliens about 15mins from where we stayed, only to find ourselves surrounded by school disco. The only 2 people we saw older than us were the two 40 yr old English dudes who happened to walk past us when I said "OMG I feel like a Grandma! I could have given birth to half these kids".

Valetta is the main city and not a bad place to wander through, again plenty of old stuff that was falling to pieces.

All in all very relaxing trip and super cheap so even we could afford a 4 star hotel!

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