Malta

We picked Malta for this year’s winter vacation with very little research. The idea was to get away from the dark, damp and what is generally miserable London weather in December so we could end the year on a slightly sunnier note. However, given my extensive business travels to Asia throughout the year, I didn’t fancy another long haul flight. We wanted to go someplace relatively laid back, a nice family vacation destination, where they spoke English, where we could get some vegetarian food and where we could rely on the public transport rather than having to rent a car and bother with the maps and directions. Malta fit our requirements perfectly!

Malta is a group of three small islands in the Mediterranean Sea. It has a diverse set of neighbouring countries. Sicily, Italy is only fifty miles to its North. Tunisia and Libya are about two hundred miles to the South West and South respectively. Spain and France are to the North West and Turkey to the East of the islands. The Maltese language, therefore, has Arabic origins but with a lot of words loaned from Italian due to its proximity to Sicily and English due to its one hundred and fifty years of British colonial heritage. Malta gained independence in 1964.

Malta is easy to get to. It’s a relatively short flight from at least a hundred cities in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. Its climate is pleasant throughout the year. It’s rarely hotter than thirty two degrees Celsius and the mercury seldom dips below the teens. The country gets sunshine for an average of two hundred and twenty days – in stark contrast to the island we live on. Malta is famous for its absolutely stunning beaches and historical places of interest such as palaces, cathedrals, museums and ancient temples including some that date back to 2,500 B.C. and therefore are Unesco world heritage protected sites of great archaeological significance. It’s schools, roads, shops and public transport infrastructure is reasonably good. People drive on the left side of the road, as with most countries that are part of the commonwealth. The real estate seems to be doing really well. Even during the Christmas holidays, the off season, we saw Malta’s impressive number of hotels, restaurants and beaches full of tourists. As a consequence, Malta’s economy is vibrant and thriving.

After a rather uneventful three hour flight, we landed on Malta’s international airport which apparently handles more than two million tourists a year. Malta’s local population is four hundred thousand. That’s a ratio of five tourists per local.

As we got comfortable in our airport transfer shuttle taking us to our hotel, one of the first things I noticed was how incredibly colourful the landscape was. The lush green farms on the rolling hills had dark green borders of cactus plants. The green background was interspersed with golden yellow houses with white facades constructed from the limestone found locally. At the horizon, this landscape was interrupted by the azure blue seas below and light blue skies above. I was instantly transported to the scene of Godfather I, where Al Pacino is hiding in Sicily and marries Apollonia.

Hotel Seabank

As we climbed down the next hill, the combined smell from the salt-pans and the local fish market entered my nostrils and I started remembering Godfather dialogues. Peter Clemenza says, “It’s a Sicilian message. It means Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes.” I had a strong urge to share my newfound deep connection with my wife Himani. But like many women, she has never been too impressed with Godfather movies and couldn’t get herself to watch all the three parts despite my repeated attempts over the years. I decided its best to keep the Godfather analogy to myself, as wise married men about to start their annual vacations ought to.

The main island of Malta is only about thirty kilometres long and fifteen kilometres wide. So you can pretty much travel across the entire country within an hour by car, bus or on a tourist coach. After about three quarters of an hour, we reached our hotel Seabank towards the North end of Malta.

I am used to hotels claiming to have the so called “sea view” whereas in reality, the view is often a small and barely visible distant patch of water between the land and the sea available to a few lucky guests who happen to have their rooms overlooking the seaside. Seabank Malta however, is literally thirty feet away from one of the best Maltese beaches – the Mellieha bay. 

It’s a rather large property with six restaurants – a Chinese, an Italian, a Brazilian, an American, a Mediterranean and a continental European. So we were spoilt for choice. Despite the variety of restaurants, however, our vegetarian options were limited, except of course for dessert where there was a good choice of cakes, pastries, ice creams, fruit and cheese. On Christmas day, we were struggling to find a vegetarian dish on the traditional Christmas buffet. The sous chef approached us, asked what the problem was and offered to cook five vegetarian dishes just for us. Now that is customer service.

After dinner, the hotel guests had entertainment arranged at “the dome”, a closed amphitheatre built on the property. Each night, they had a different theme of song, dance and music. On our first night, it was the music of the sixties. As the audience started to hum and sing to the tunes spontaneously, we looked around and suddenly realised we were the youngest couple in the audience! Not that we know our Western tunes, but the songs were truly before our time. The second night of our stay, the theme was Michael Jackson. The songs were acted and danced – ‘Thriller’, ‘Beat It’, ‘Dangerous’, ‘You are not alone’ – I must admit they did a pretty good job with elaborate costumes. The third night was Abba. The fourth night was a magic show. The Christmas Eve, was much more traditional with a Christmas band, a choir and carols.

We spent the Christmas day exploring the hotel since there was not much else to do with the shops and public transport closed. The hotel had four swimming pools one of which was indoor and heated, a full fledged spa, a gym, a bowling alley, pool tables, beach volleyball, dart, table tennis and some shops all on the property. Fortunately, it was a balmy twenty one degrees Celsius and sunny outside. So we hiked up the mountain behind our hotel to the church of ‘our lady of hope’. From the churchyard, we had spectacular views of Mellieha bay.

The north Malta tour

On Boxing day morning, as we waited at the tourist agent’s office for our open rooftop sightseeing coach, Lucille the tourist agent, decided to strike a conversation. Within twenty minutes she had told us about her age, how much she weighed and all about her family, which included two teenage sons who fought with each other all the time and her one year old dog Jackie. Lucille told how upset she was since her younger son had chosen to pierce his tongue this Christmas at the tender age of sixteen, whereas how she had waited responsibly till the mature age of twenty five, before she got her first tattoo.

Meanwhile, aforementioned Jackie, who was tied to a leash and was standing next to Lucille, was now trying to make friends with our daughter Aarohi. This was all getting rather too personal for us especially from someone who was a complete stranger. After all, we had hailed from the island of the stiff upper lipped Brits!

As Aarohi was stroking friendly Jackie, my wife twitched at the thought of him licking Aarohi’s new Christmassy red frock while I nervously speculated that Lucille was getting ready to show me her tattoo – thus taking our twenty minute long friendship to the next level. Fortunately, our coach arrived just in time and we were spared of further indiscretions. We had heard that the Maltese people are very friendly. We had now experienced it first hand.

We were now on our way to explore the north part of the island. A major highlight of the north tour was a walk through the narrow and winding lanes of one of the most ancient European cities, Mdina. Mdina was the capital of Malta since the ninth century before Valletta was built in the sixteenth century. It’s a fortified city on top of a hill offering excellent views of the whole island. On a clear day, one can see the Sicilian coast and the volcanic mountains of Etna. Mdina is also called the silent city because no cars are allowed inside – partly because the lanes are so narrow and partly because it’s a Unesco world heritage site. There is a nice thirty minute cinema in Mdina, showing five thousand years of Maltese history.

As we explored Mdina, we found several souvenir shops that are famous for their decorative tiles and door knobs. Every door of every house in Mdina has a unique doorknob with intricate designs.

 

Maltese people are family oriented, traditional and very religious Roman Catholics. En route our trip we saw virtually every single house tastefully decorated for Christmas. All houses obviously had Christmas trees decorated with baubles, lights and tinsel. The doors were adorned with Christmas wreaths made of holly and poinsettia (the red flower like plant seasonal for Christmas). Several of the houses had elaborate nativity plays neatly arranged in the windows. Balconies were lit up with rows of blinking lights and had Santa Claus figurines climbing on a ladder from the outside.

The islands have three hundred and sixty churches. What’s fascinating is that most Maltese churches have two clocks – one showing the correct time and the other showing the wrong time. Apparently when these churches were built between the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, people were superstitious. They thought that if you displayed two clocks with different times, then that would confuse the devil!

The Gozo island tour

Besides the main island of Malta, the country has two other islands called Gozo and Comino both of which are much smaller and you can get on them via a ferry from Malta in less than twenty minutes. After a nice hot chocolate on the ferry, we got off the other side at Gozo and into our tourist coach.

The Gozitans are laid back, very friendly and highly religious. Gozitans still celebrate twelve days of Christmas and not just the Christmas day. They say, they don’t even lock their doors. In Malta, each boat has a small colour strip on its bow indicating which village or town the boat is from. The person who started this tradition was a Gozitan. To mourn his early death, all boats from Gozo have are tagged in black.

On the island, there is famous traditional confectionary shop called “The Savina”. They export local handicraft and confections made here. What I liked the most, was a fruit basket that looked like real fruits but made of marzipan (a confection made from honey and almonds). 

From Savina, we went to the local arts and crafts village where there the shops had a tantalizing display of decorative vases and other gift articles in glass, wood and filigree. We bought Aarohi, a delicate butterfly ring made in filigree and matching ear-rings. That made her day!

The highlight of the Gozo tour was a spot called the “azure window”. It’s a place any student of geology must visit in their lifetime. The entire landscape looks like the lunar surface with small craters and ridges carved by the sea tides. The window itself is a rectangular natural cave about fifty feet high and hundred feet wide. On the other side of the window, there are lots of smaller V shaped caves and if the waters are calm, local fishermen take you on a small boat through them. 

We stopped for lunch at the only restaurant on the hill. The menu was limited but food was delicious. We had an excellent goat cheese and spinach ravioli and an authentic Gozitan penne pasta in arrabiata sauce made out of fresh local tomatoes. 

Fortunately, it wasn’t very windy and the waters were calm. The boat ride through the caves was lovely. On the island side of the caves, the sea is light green. As you pass through the caves, it turns azure blue leading you one of the world’s ten best diving and snorkelling venues. As we were admiring the clear transparent waters, we saw several little purple jelly fish and corals. They made some memorable snaps.

We ended the Gozo tour with a visit to a nice little village called Xlendi famous for its seaside cafés and local seafood.

The south Malta tour

On our final day on the islands, we did the tour of south Malta that started with a boat cruise of the ten creeks and the grand harbour. Despite the weather being windy and cloudy, we got spectacular views of the capital city of Valletta, the three ancient cities of Cospicua, Vittorioso and Senglea all of which were fortified to protect Malta from the Turks and north African invaders. 

Each of the creeks is full of yachts and modern luxury boats – including one that belongs to the Indian tycoon Vijay Mallya called ‘The Kingfisher’. Apparently, entire Europe uses Malta as a giant parking lot for their boats because the Maltese government charges an insignificant parking fee of one Euro per day. This is a smart move, since families come to Malta during the Easter and summer holidays to get their boats out and naturally spend their time and money, thus propping up Maltese economy.

As the afternoon progressed, the clouds broke and we got some Sun again. As our coach passed beside a limestone quarry, the Sun shone on the yellow cliffs making them glisten like gold. I was transported straight to the scene of Gregory Peck’s MacKenna’s Gold.

Following the boat ride, we went on a vintage bus tour inside Malta’s capital city of Valletta. The bus had its engine rebuilt, but the exterior was preserved from 1930s. After a rather rushed tour of the grandmaster’s palace of Valletta, we stopped at a famous Italian restaurant for lunch. This is not a restaurant you should dine at if you are in a hurry. They had a menu with at least forty types of pastas and a similar number of pizzas and starters. The staff are passionate about food and clearly took a lot of pride with which they cooked and presented their dishes. We picked up the menu and salivated just reading the descriptions. The Margherita said, “If God ate pizza, he would probably eat our Margherita. Nothing special about it. And that is so special in itself. Honest wholesome, sourdough base, San Mozano tomatoes, wonderful fresh organic buffalo mozarrella and a leaf or two of basil. Finished off with a drizzle of the most amazing OEVOO (organic extra virgin olive oil). It all started from here.” The description for Focaccia said, “A focaccia like you have never tasted before. Our red onion focaccia is delicate, light, tasty yet full of flavours thanks to the pecorino, red onion (we chop our onions impossibly thin), oregano and poppy seeds. The perfect accompaniment to the opening drinks.”

Quite understandably, the restaurant takes at least twenty minutes to prepare and serve a dish. It was a difficult choice between treating ourselves to one of the best elaborate authentic Italian lunches we’d ever have or get a quick takeaway from one of the cafés and still manage to see the major highlight of the south tour “the blue grotto”.  We chose the latter and reluctantly left the restaurant. We picked up some Bruschetta (bread with tomato and basil salad dipped in olive oil) and Pastizzi (a delicious typical Maltese snack that is diamond shaped and filled with ricotta cheese and mushy peas) on the way, to eat on our coach.

By the time we reached the southern tip of the island, the Sun was almost touching the horizon. Winds had picked up and the waters were choppy. We got down at our last stop “the blue grotto”.  As the azure blue waves came up to the shore, they were trapped in a gorge which was getting increasingly narrower. The waters slapped the cliff on one edge of the gorge and splashed a good thirty feet high. The cliff kicked it hard onto the other side. The waves slapped the other cliff harder and splashed higher as they frothed. It was like watching the nature’s duel between the land and the sea.

On the west side of the gorge, a man made staircase descended about a hundred steps. The last ten steps were submerged in the sea. We thought of climbing down half of it to get a closer view, but somehow common sense prevailed and we decided to stand on top of the staircase by the lookout point comfortably safe and about a hundred feet high. The Sun had set making the waters dark blue and grey. The clouds had a silver lining and a rock island in the distance was fast disappearing in the fog. As tourists do, we got busy with our smart phones, tablets and other toys video shooting the spectacle. Just then, most unexpectedly, a giant wave crashed and splashed in the gorge, this time at least a hundred feet high and rose above our eye level, giving us a bath and making our toys wet as it went down. Its roar was nothing less than a thunderstorm. Nature was showing us who was in control.

Nobody spoke a word as we climbed in the coach taking us back to hotel Seabank, leaving a dark silhouette of the blue grotto and the rock island behind us. It was a humbling moment!

Sachin Kulkarni, 31^st December 2013, London