Malta: Wed Sept 21 – Thurs Sept 29
Accommodation link.
Thursday 22nd September
It was a slow start for our first full day in Malta but we managed to get a walk in before the rain. We headed down towards the outer city wall of the Valletta peninsula, putting us on the southern side, and did an anti clockwise half circle loop around the perimeter to the northern side. Two things struck me. Firstly, Malta, or at least Valletta where we were located, is gobsmackingly grand and beautiful. Secondly, sheer amazement at just how much limestone must have gone into creating this majestic city; absolutely everything here was made of the stuff! It’s very clean limestone too, I might add, lovely and golden honey in colour being Globigerina limestone. We did a walk by St John’s Cathedral and thought it looked a little ordinary from the front, compared to the inordinate number of Cathedral’s we’d seen on our travels thus far, but we committed to come back later when it was open to the public.
Much of the rest of the day was spent back at the apartment except for a brief foray out to have lunch where we bumped into another Aussie couple. They just happened to be from Melbourne and one supported Collingwood and the other Geelong. You can imagine the joy Mark experienced with this revelation. They were quite surprised to learn that Mark was going to spend Saturday morning watching the Grand Final; they had no such plans. I then had to wonder about their so called ‘fan’ status! I don’t consider myself a fan anymore but even I was closely monitoring the phone last week for the Swans v Collingwood Finals score whilst also navigating Mark through Italian traffic! There was a bit more chat about the footy, as well as the similarities of our travel itineraries, but we eventually ventured back out into the rain to head to the Cathedral. The long queue put us both off though, making us wonder what the special appeal of this particular Cathedral was, but we decided to come back another time and only queue if it wasn’t raining.
Our plan was to have dinner at home, given the unpleasant weather, and so we stopped off for supplies at the supermarket on the way home and enjoyed an afternoon of forced relaxation. The rain today didn’t really bother us as we both actually needed a bit of a rest; given the pace we’d kept up for the last four weeks. Also, the drop in temperature was much appreciated. This was one advantage of having a relatively long stay of 8 nights in Malta; losing a day to rain didn’t really have too much impact on what we hoped to see and do whilst here.
The thing about plans is: they change. 6 pm rolled around and neither of us were hungry. So, given the rain had eased, we shelved the ‘eat at home’ idea for a walk around town and for Mark to try and find a decent Happy Hour venue. It was rather busy out around town and it seemed other shared our plan to get our whilst the rain had stopped. We did find an English pub with a Happy Hour but there wasn’t much happy about it. Few of the many tap beers were available and we didn’t receive any Happy Hour benefit. It didn’t matter though as we were just glad to get out and have a stroll before having an early night. We had a 3 hour walking tour booked for tomorrow and a plan to try and get in to the Cathedral without queuing.
