Disappointments and Surprises

 Today was our second bike ride. It was not really successful on several levels, and it left me feeling pretty dispirited about this whole trip again. As before, we were driven to the beginning of our bike ride. I just do not really understand why this hotel was picked for a trip like this as neither of the rides on Malta begins even remotely close to it. This one began at Birzebbuga at the far southern tip of the island. It is not at all an attractive place dominated by the Malta Freeport facility. The directions sent us uphill for a couple kilometers on a busy road. Fortunately it did have a broad and completely unused sidewalk. After that, however, things became completely confusing. The directions told us stuff life “Go left on road” and then “After 500 meters go right” and “Continue through the industrial park before going right again.” This even pulling out our phones and checking Google Maps we could make no sense of these directions. We were in an industrial area and there were many roads, none well-marked. Several times we made our best guess about which road we should take only to have to backtrack. By this time John was frustrated and I was angry. 

We just did our best to find the village of Zurrieq. We knew we were supposed to pass through it. Not a place with much to commend it other than a funny statue at the entry to one house on the edge of town

and a pretty decent fruit stand in the center. 

The main point of this trip was to show us the Blue Grotto. There are a number of places like this in the Mediterranean. Each of them is a small cove with a shallow bottom made of limestone. The white stone causes the water to appear a stunning turquoise color. Malta’s Blue Grotto is supposed to be one of the very best of these, rivaling the Grotta Azzurra on Capri. The way to the Blue Grotto was quite well-marked from Zurrieq so could do dispense with our generally useless directions. 

And it was indeed quite lovely there.

 

Was it worth the two punishing hours we had spent on the bike? I was not sure about that. We were supposed to go another six kilometers on the bike before being picked up, and I was eager to do this because it took us past one of the largest of the temple sites. But it was early afternoon, the temperature was about 100, and John was not feeling well or in a good mood. He decided that he wanted to go swimming and tell the driver to pick us up there instead of the final destination. I knew it was no good to fight with him. We rode our bikes down the hill to where towards a pier area with restaurants, souvenir shops, and boat rentals. We parked and locked the bikes.

 

It is not possible to access the Blue Grotto by foot or to swim there, but there were a number of people sitting on the rocks and swimming not far from the boat docks. John found us a spot here. It was not comfortable at all, and the place was filled with Russians and strewn with cigarette butts. At least the water was reasonably clear and pleasant. I swam a couple times and wondered if Malta would completely color my memories of this summer. 

 

At three o’clock, we met the driver and came back to the hotel. We rested for a bit, and cleaned ourselves up. John was not sure about what he wanted to do for the evening, but I knew that I wanted to go to Mdina. So I walked over to the nearby bus stop to catch the X3 bus, and he said that if he felt better he might join me. 

As it turned out, Malta public transit, which usually seems to be efficient and on-time, was not either of those things this evening. The six o’clock bus to Mdina never showed us. I stood there, along with a large group of Italians who planned to take the same bus to the airport, getting more and more annoyed. About thirty minutes later John showed up to catch the six-thirty bus. And in a couple minutes it showed up and we both boarded. I was glad to have him with me!

Mdina is the old capital of Malta. When the British took over Malta in the aftermath of the defeat of Napoleon, they made Villetta the capital and Mdina remained a seventeenth century walled city. Mdina is located on one of the highest points on the island and during the medieval period enormous walls were built around the city. These have been recently restored by the government of Malta in cooperation with the European Union. Here is a shot of Mdina take as our bus approached it. 

The old fortifications are now beautiful public areas. Most American urban planners do not have to think about how they are going to creatively turn an old moat into a public park, but Maltese planners do! And what a magnificent job they have done here. 

John paused outside the main gate to the city to get his picture snapped.

The restored city is absolutely gorgeous. Almost everything in Mdina was rebuilt by the  Knights of Saint John in the heady years after their victory of the Turks in 1657. Apparently the same earthquake the leveled much of southern Sicily did some damage here as well and that is also the reason that this is a baroque rather than a medieval town. 

The cobblestone streets are pristinely clean. Most of the shops had closed for the day, so it often seemed like we had the city to ourselves. It was near sunset, that time that director David Lean called “the golden hour” and John was in a mood to pose.