Day Three Malta: 5/15/22: Traffic, Ferries, Cars, and More

May 15, 2022

What a day… We headed to the Malta Airport right after breakfast to pick up our rental car…. Which was fairly simple and straightforward, except for the rental car guy who was a great salesman about getting their insurance, despite the fact that AmEx covers all damages related to rental cars charged to that account and the fact that our regular insurance has some kind of clause related to rental cars worldwide. Anyway, we got out in our little Hyundai and Mike was the designated driver for British style driving. I was actually glad he chose to be the driver. It was a little scary at first, but he quickly seemed to get into the mode, remembering all the other times we had to drive British style, including in Thailand.

Our plan was to head north and take the ferry (as passengers, leaving the car in a lot on the Malta side). The hotel reception person and the rental car guy, as well as the taxi driver who took us from the hotel to the airport to get the car all advised us to take the car with us to Gozo so that we’d have more flexibility and we were contemplating the options. One great comment someone said was: “It’s really nice to drive on Gozo because they don’t have those cameras that monitor traffic and driving!”

The drive did give us a chance to see the Malta countryside. The terrain is mostly low hills with some fields terracing on the slopes; there are lakes and streams and many ridges and valleys. The shorelines are pretty rocky, but there are also good beaches and I learned today that it is one of the best places for diving. The water is unbelievably clean and you can see down to the bottom. The route was dotted with huge cacti. Gozo has more arable land than Malta.

And everyone told us the drive to the ferry would be 45 minutes and we’d just drive right on to the ferry. Still we thought maybe it would be easier to go on the ferry as passengers and take a taxi. We had already booked lunch at a little restaurant in Victoria, Gozo; then we thought we’d either walk around or maybe walk all the way back to the ferry – about a 90-minute walk. Well as it turned out there was a ton of traffic; seemed like everyone in Malta decided to head to Gozo on this bright sunny Sunday. And apparently even though it was the weekend and no work was being done, the workers keep the equipment on the road and so the roads are closed down over the weekend. Anyway, it took us more than an hour and 45 minutes to get to the ferry and then we waited on the car line for a quite a long time before we actually got on the ferry.

So we didn’t expect all the traffic and road delays. We contacted the restaurant we had booked for lunch and learned they would close at 2:00, and that most restaurants are closed on Sundays. Malta and Gozo are pretty Catholic; Gozo—with only 30,000 residents, has more than 40 churches, basilicas, and cathedrals—and they are huge, what you’d normally find in much larger cities. Not sure if this is tied to restaurant closures on Sundays. We told the restaurant we’d do our very best to get there by 2:00, and then searched for a backup plan. By the way, everyone says that it’s not possible to get lost in either Malta or Gozo as they are so small. But I think that is an exaggeration. And everyone says it only takes “5 minutes” to get to anywhere, but that too is a bit of an exaggeration.

Enroute to the ferry we came upon a little promenade of old Mustangs—one following the other on the highway. Maybe some kind of club outing. The ferry was full of families with young children, and I did spot a woman in a string bikini wearing a “cover-up” over the bikini, but the cover-up was totally sheer; Mike seems not to have seen this. Anyway, we managed to make it to the restaurant—Maldonado’s Bistro—exactly at 2:00 and they could not have been nicer, and the food was great. All locally sourced and some new takes on very traditional dishes. Malta (and Gozo) is famous for a particular kind of sheep’s cheese and they are pretty creative in how they use it. We had chicken that was raised on Gozo, local Gozo wine, house-cured olives, and a ravioli dish that used the local cheese and was laden with all sorts of wonderfully fresh herbs that were growing right outside the window. At the end, the waiter presented us with some wonderful limoncello that was also house made—apparently a Covid project that took all of Covid to perfect.

Another interesting thing to note: nearly all of the service people we have encountered come from outside Malta— Tunisian taxi driver, waiters from Albania, Italy (Amalfi to be exact), Spain, southern and eastern France, Philippines, etc. The Albanian waiter was especially impressed that we had been to Albania and traveled throughout the country.  

And I should mention that the whole country is built of sandstone, creating a unified visual vocabulary. Much of the country is from the 17^th Century when the craftsman building these structures were amazing.

After lunch we strolled the center of the town and also decided to go inside one of the basilicas. I’m still trying to figure out why a town of 30,000 would have so many churches and who built them all. Then we drove to the sea to look at the “salt pans”… Pythagoras said: “Salt is born of the purest parents: the sun and the sea.”  And so it goes in Gozo. 

We then raced to get the return ferry; according to Google maps we were just 15 minutes away… and most of the drive went as planned with remarkably accurate instructions from both Google Maps and also Waze. But as we approached the ferry, we realized something was wrong and we were guided to join the mile-long queue!! By our calculations this meant we would probably need to sit out the first three ferries and hope to get onto the 4^th one. The ferries only go twice each hour, so that meant 90 minutes or two hours. And we patiently waited and inched up whenever a ferry departed. It took us close to two hours to wait of the ferry and then sail. But we made it back. Only glitches were that we realized it would be dark by the time we got close to the hotel (and navigating those narrow winding streets in the medieval town of Valletta would not be easy; we would again be late for a reserved dinner and were unsure how late the restaurant would be open on a Sunday; and we didn’t know where we would be able to park the car. Our hotel doesn’t have parking.

In conclusion, we made it back, we found a parking garage, we walked from the car to the hotel, we made it to the restaurant (Grain Street) just in time to order before the kitchen closed, we ate and walked to the hotel. And here I am to tell you my tales. Oh, the photos of Mike squeezing into the car is on the ferry. They guided us to park really close to the wall and then Mike couldn’t quite get out of the car,. And then back into the car. But, alas, he managed to will himself to be skinny.

Stay well. A little on Malta’s politics tomorrow.

Fern