Today we went to the island of Gozo. The drive to the northwest tip of Malta island took a little over an hour. As the crow flies it is only about 10 miles, but we were following the coastal road that winds in and out of the numerous inlets that grace the island and make it so picturesque.
Outside Valletta, the buildings are scattered in and amongst farmland and raw land. The raw land looks much the same as Sicily, except with more agave plants. We wonder if they make tequila here. We are told that Sicily produces blue tequila, but we didn’t try it. And yes, we saw agave plants in Turkey and Greece, too, but they were few and far between. Other than grapes and olives, we couldn’t tell what the farmers produce locally. We like this shot because it gives you a good idea of what some of the vegetation looks like, not just in Malta, but Sicily, Crete, and Bodrum, although the assorted plants aren’t normally quite so close together. It is arid, so the plants need space between them. The cactus in the foreground of this shot is dominant in Sicily and Malta.
Anyway, between the nice landscape, the stunning ocean views, and the occasional adorable little town, it was a beautiful drive. The ferry runs every 45 minutes. We found out that motorcycles get to go to the front of the car line, which is a nice benefit to having chosen a scooter over a car. The scooter has some down falls, though. The roads in Malta have a lot of uneven surfaces from filled in potholes, which makes scooter driving a little more challenging.
The ride across to the smaller island of Gozo was quick and pretty. We passed the even smaller island of Camino on the way. The port on the southwest side of Gozo is full of small, brightly colored fishing boats. Near the port there are a lot of buildings and activity, but it quickly becomes more rural, with pockets of structures scattered in and amongst farmland.
We drove northwest to the town of Xaghra. The streets had similar decorations to what we had seen in Vittorosia the first night, with lots of medieval looking banners and colorful statues. We stopped by a bakery for a snack, where we found a flier explaining the town was having a weeklong celebration of the Virgin Mary’s birthday.
From there we went to the Ggantija Temples, which were surprisingly close. Like, walk around the corner from the heart of town. Ggantija means giantess, and they are so named because they are the biggest of the megalithic temples on the islands. They were built between 3600 and 3000 BC, probably for fertility and life rituals. The culture that built them seemed to have abruptly vanished around 2000 BC. Successive bronze aged inhabitants used the abandoned temples as a cremation cemetery. The two temples stand side by side, and their shapes are fascinating. We have seen aerial photos and a model of them, and it looks super cool.
Sorry, we didn’t have any aerial photos, so a drawing was the best we could do for illustration. But it is better than nothing. Anyway, together the temples are 40 meters wide (120 feet). As you can see, the two temples share an exterior wall, but are completely separate from one another. The walls are over 6 meters tall (18 feet) and they are thick the space between the interior semicircles and the exterior is solid rock wall, as is the space between the two temples.
The approach to the temples is from the back, so it just looks like an old rock wall. The temple grounds are on a table overlooking a valley below and the view is stunning.
We walked around the wall to the front, which doesn’t look much different from the back. As you can see from the drawing, the entranceways are simply small openings in the wall. The one on the right was closed, but we went in to the one on the left. We expected to be awe inspired, like we were at the pyramids. After all, these are 1000 years older than the pyramids, so they must be extraordinary to have managed to stand for so long. But it wasn’t as mesmerizing as we expected. Inside, you don’t get the same sense of shape as you do from the aerial shots, and we think it is that shape that adds to the awe factor. But it is still cool, nonetheless. We believe these are altars, the first from the lower cluster of circles, the second from the upper cluster.
Our next stop was the Citadel. It was a fairly short drive west from the temples. From the distance, the Citadel looks like a medieval castle straight out of a fairy tale. It is beautiful. The Citadel sits high on a hill, with the city of Victoria (Rabat) surrounding it below. Victoria (Rabat) is a small town, with the main town center just around the corner (on a sharply sloping street) from the Citadel entrance. We climbed the hill and parked.
When you enter the huge and formidable walls, the first thing you see is a big church ahead of you. There is a building on the right and left and a narrow walkway only as wide as two people between the buildings. We know we keep saying this, but it is super charming and makes you feel like you have stepped back in time. You can almost feel the city alive, bustling with people.
We followed one of the walkways past the church and rounded a corner to the folk museum. The museum is in three townhouses built around 1500. The museum itself was OK. It had different displays in each room carpenter tools, blacksmith tools, fishermen tools (mostly nets), farming tools, and everyday household items like irons. There was a loom on display, and assorted every day life items, like guns, figurines (including a nativity set), scales, clothing, chests and chiffarobes (old fashioned closet). There were a couple paintings of life in the olden days, too. It was all designed to give you a sense of what life was like way back when, how different it is from life today.
More interesting than the exhibits were the houses. In the American real estate world, if a house has something about it that is impractical, we call it a “functional obsolescence” issue. For example, if you have to walk through one bedroom to get to another, the bedroom that is the walkway is considered “functionally obsolete”. Everything about these houses were functionally obsolete. The ceilings and/or doorways were either ridiculously high or ridiculously low. There were narrow little hallways to nowhere, presumably storage space, but difficult to access storage space being so narrow and deep. In each house, the top of the staircase led to an exterior door. You walked outside to the landing, then entered into another door to the upper interior living space. We can imagine that all the historic houses around Malta, and Sicily and Rhodes for that matter, have to be a nightmare to remodel to make them functional for life in the 21st century. The walls are solid, thick limestone and moving them around isn’t nearly as easy as moving drywall. It looked like one house had added plumbing. It had a sole pipe strapped to the wall. Being as the walls are solid, there probably was no way to put the plumbing into the wall. Another house had what we presume was a toilet a hole with a lid and a very long pipe. Most interesting of all, though, is all the houses seemed to be built over a water table and each house had an interior well to access water from.
As we mentioned, the Norman style was narrow, curving streets so you could never see farther than a few hundred feet ahead or behind you at any time. They also have oddly angled intersections so that you can’t see down any of the streets when you are at a crossroad. Anyway, because of the curved streets, we couldn’t see that most of the rest of the buildings were gone. The sidewalks are still there and intact, and so are the foundations. The land in between the foundations is perfectly graded, though covered with plants. We are guessing that the missing buildings must have been bombed in WWII, which is the only explanation we can think of why half the buildings clustered together are intact and the other half are just foundations. Here is a compare and contrast:
The citadel was actually surprisingly small. It looked a lot bigger from the outside. We walked around to the rest of the intact buildings. All are museums or tourist shops with a couple of restaurants. The walls around the fortress are huge, tall and thick and seem to be completely intact. Like most of the fortresses we have been to, there are still a few canons on display along the perimeter walls. The views are beautiful.
From there we went to lunch at a restaurant near the ferry terminal. The guys that run it are both Maltese who lived in New York City for quite a few years. The food was “Maltese Fusion” and it was really good. We had quail in an orange and grand marnier sauce, octopus, prawns and vegetables in plain gelatin with a bell pepper (capsicum) sauce, stuffed eggplant, and crepes with salmon, cheese and a yogurt dill sauce. Everything was phenomenally good.
We headed back to Kosmos. At 1900, a couple that we met in Siracusa picked us up and took us back to their house for dinner. We had a fabulous time with them, their three kids and daughter in law who are all approximately our age, and the two grandkids. Our time with them is actually the highlight of our time in Malta so far. They are very smart, gracious and kind people and were fantastic hosts. Dinner was amazingly good. They put out way more food than we could ever hope to eat! They had a variety of appetizers out, including that same bean dip we had tried a couple nights before at the wine bar and hadn’t liked. Their bean dip was much better, quite good actually. The main course was grilled fish. And, when we thought we would explode from overeating, out came dessert. We found room, though. After all, if we didn’t eat every bite of all the dessert, we might offend our hosts, right? We learned a lot about Malta and the culture, which was most interesting.
It had been an extraordinarily good day.
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