We were staying at the Alexandra Hotel in St. Julian’s, a once-grand place that just reeked of faded glamour. The lobby fittings were all marble and brass and the hotel’s bar, the optimistically named Park Lane Cocktail Bar, must have been quite the hang-out back in 1975. Our bed’s headboard had a built-in push-button FM radio (just the ticket for chilling to some lounge jazz while plying one’s lady friend with a glass or two of Blue Nun) and the only concession to modernity I could spot were the three internet terminals sitting incongruously in the lobby.
In other words, it was tremendii.
The next morning we were woken by the mechanical shriek of a circular saw and a general cacophony of other sounds of construction. We ate breakfast at a little café just up the road, the noise masked a little by intervening buildings, and soaked up the sunshine. I drank my coffee; Ash and I discussed my latest and greatest novel plot (a seafaring Mediterranean adventure starring an office worker disillusioned with his lot in the rat race—can you guess my inspiration?), and I mentally bookmarked the point at which the holiday turned from adventurous to relaxing.
We trotted around St. Julian’s for a while that morning but our hearts weren’t really in it; knowing that we could check into our final hotel in Golden Bay that afternoon we packed our gear and caught the first bus over to the other side of the island. Our bus was disappointingly modern* but the journey still took a while on the busy, winding roads.
The bus passed through the resort towns north-west of St. Julian’s before turning across the island to Golden Bay, and it was an educational journey. Malta is choked by construction. Every town was full of newly built or half-finished apartments blocks, but the further north we travelled the more we saw construction sites lying idle, some looking as if they hadn’t been touched for years. Once out of the towns, the landscape is (Ash tells me) just like Crete or Cyprus: dark green waxy bushes, reddish soil and omnipresent pale limestone rubble. Drystane walls are built from it; terraced fields on the hillsides are shored up with it; the innumerable bird-shooting hides** are cobbled together from it and the intermittent farmhouses are built from squared-off blocks of the stuff. Basically, any land not devoted to farming or roads is littered with the stuff.
The hotel loomed into view, overlooking a deep blue bay and sandy beach. Ash’s parents had again gifted us a week of their timeshare allocation and again we’d struck the jackpot: the Radisson SAS Golden Sands is not for the likes of us mere mortals. Our room was in fact a 2-bedroom apartment bigger than our flat. Holy shit, I thought. They’re going to chuck us out for making the place look untidy.
* * *
For the next week we just sat back and enjoyed the view, more or less: thinking back, I can’t remember a holiday where I’ve so wilfully ignored the local places of historical interest in favour of just hanging out in the sun, and it turns out I rather enjoy it. (As I type this, I’m sitting with a glass of beer on a beachfront patio watching the sun set over the aptly named Golden Bay, while Ash spends an hour or two in the hotel’s spa, and I can find very little wrong with this picture!) On the few nights where the weather deviated from calm and sunny, we sat on the balcony or watched through the patio doors as bolts of lightning cracked and hung in the sky for seemingly ages, and then enormous claps of thunder rolled over us a few seconds later. The storms never lasted out the night, and we had only a couple of cloudy but still warm days.
Apart from batting a tennis ball back and forth most evenings, our most strenuous activity so far has been some light scuba diving: one dive for both Ash and I in the bay below the hotel, and another couple for Ash a few days after that near the ferry port in the north of the island. With my elbow still playing up, our dive instructor Jason was leery of taking me on for a full four-day qualification course—that’ll have to wait, unfortunately—preferring to look the other way temporarily and combine a refresher dive for Ash with another “try dive” for me. Unlike the one in Croatia, he was happy for me to more or less take care of myself and I really enjoyed this one. Gone was the constant gnawing feeling that a submerged scuba diver is a busted regulator or panic attack away from being a corpse and instead I was able to fin gently along, looking around at the odd fish or sea urchin. To tell you the truth, I was more anxious about Ash, and I felt a little stab of fear each time I glanced around and couldn’t immediately see her, only to discover she was above or below me and happily doing her own thing.
For Ash’s wreck and reef dives off a couple of days later, Jason drove us in the diving school’s clanking Hilux up to the harbour at Cirkewwa, and while I waited for them to surface I pottered across to the shabby ferry terminal café and indulged my writer-in-exile fantasies, sitting outside with a cappuccino, a notebook and a faraway look in my eyes. Utter pomposity, of course, but enjoyable nonetheless.
* * *
We did finally manage to rouse ourselves for a bit of cursory sightseeing on a couple of days, first (abortively) to Malta’s smaller island neighbour Gozo and then to the capital Valetta.
Having taken a gratifyingly ancient bus to Cirkewwa, we arrived around lunchtime to be told that the buses on Gozo shut down for the early afternoon: tourists usually get there in the early morning and travel to the main city of Victoria/Rabat and then come back in the late afternoon, having spent the day exploring the place. Instead, we jumped on the Comino ferry, heading across to the even smaller island lying directly between Malta and Gozo, permanent home to exactly four people and temporary home to hundreds of tourists swimming in the island’s Blue Lagoon. Of course, having planned to do a bit of landlubber sightseeing on Gozo, we didn’t have any swimming gear with us, and nor did we have much clue about what Comino had to offer. In the event, Ash sunbathed down by the water while I hiked up to the Santa Marija watchtower and back, and we took the ferry back over to Malta around 3 pm. Not quite as edifying as I’d hoped, but a nice day out nonetheless.
The day before we left we headed into Valetta, the rickety bus taking about an hour from the hotel. We mooched around for a bit with the throngs of other tourists; we’d gone from a distinctly laid-back corner of the island to the busiest point on it, and it was a rude awakening. The town felt really familiar for some reason, with bits of Venice or Paris visible in the architecture and narrow streets, and maybe that familiarity was why neither of us felt particularly compelled to hang around for long. We had a quick look round the simple but engaging National Museum of Archaeology, ate a terrible lunch at an outdoor café spattered with bird shit and then hopped on the bus back.
And that was it; we caught (just) the plane home on Tuesday to land in the sub-zero Glasgow night. I feel like we didn’t see much of the day-to-day Malta at all, and I suppose that’s the price you pay for the days spent by the beach or the pool, but first impressions were still of a beautiful Mediterranean island with plenty going for it and a few niggles to lend it a bit of ‘character’. And of course, we’re now planning a trip to Cyprus next spring so I can finally get my PADI Open Water qualification somewhere other than an indoor pool!
* A fair number of Malta’s buses are tourist attractions in themselves, ancient Leylands or AECs hailing from the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. By all accounts they’re usually punctual, frequent and reliable, but we had pretty dreadul luck with them. On our journey to catch the plane home, a few stops from the airport, the engined rattled to a halt while the driver mumbled into his mobile phone. He got off and stood listlessly around for a while, complaining that he felt unwell while looking to be in perfect health, until a car pulled up (driven by his wife by the looks of things) and he sped off. Another bus arrived, 10 minutes after the promised 5 minutes had elapsed and proceeded to crawl to the airport, the replacement driver bantering with some of his regular passengers up at the front and rarely venturing out of 2nd gear. We sprinted into the airport, copped a lecture from the head check-in woman for being late and caught the plane in the nick of time.
** The Maltese love bird hunting. On any given day or night you hear the pock-pock of double-barrelled shotguns, and just about every scrap of land, farmed or otherwise, is covered in little stone hides. It’s an odd hobby—the EU certainly thinks so—and it’s a little disconcerting to listen to the entire population out there in the evenings trying to blow the few remaining winged creatures out of the sky.
No comments yet