Malta

I apologize for my lengthy radio silence, but I did warn you. I am now only days away from retrieving my poor abandoned bicycle and getting back down to business - finishing my vacation away from my vacation. During this time I have indulged in a great deal of relaxation. I will now attempt to sum up some of the highlights for you.

I made it to sunny Malta on May 7th and met up with my Dad, Don. It was a welcome thing, seeing the friendly face of one of my best buds. We ended up spending over three weeks exploring this funny little country, seeing wonderful sights and meeting wonderful people.

Malta is composed of various shades of brown and beige. The countryside is baked by the sun - dry and crusty. We were lucky to arrive just towards the end of their spring however, and there were patches of vibrant green and vivid flowers hidden in corners. The buildings are all constructed of local limestone of a light tope colour that burns orange when the sun begins to set. I was expecting more riotous paint jobs as this is a Mediterranean country - bright reds and blues and yellows - but I guess they save these paints for their fishing boats.

We spend a great deal of our time walking through the countryside, if you can call it that. This place is so anciently populated that you get the impression that every square inch of the land has been walked on about a hundred million times. Nothing is in its natural state, and agriculture dominates the landscape between villages. Even so, it is easy to get away from people and feel alone in the 'wild'. As we walked our noses were filled with the scent of the sea and wild oregano and rosemary that grows everywhere. The air was thick with birdsong.

Birding is a popular pastime in Malta but, unlike Canada where birders just want to look at the birds, the Maltese like to net and shoot everything that flies. Traditionally, in the spring, the countryside is a dangerous place where you are more likely to see a shotgun than a songbird. However, as this is Malta's first year in the European Union, there has been a good deal of political pressure put on the government to stop the bird hunt and a moratorium has been placed on the hunting season. Thankfully. If we had travelled here a year earlier we would not have been allowed into all of the places that we spent our time exploring. Still, shotgun shells littered the ground.

We visited many of the ancient temples that are scattered about the islands of Malta. This was the real reason we decided to visit this place - Dad is an avid ancient history buff, and Malta is the site of the oldest known freestanding human built structures. The stone temples predate Stonehenge, the pyramids, everything. They were built before people had written language and, as such, we have no way of ever knowing what exactly what went on in these sacred places. Which made it quite enjoyable to visit them... there is a good deal of room for creativity in your interpretation of the sites. Although most temples were above ground, we did get to visit one, called the Hypogeum, that is completely underground. Constructed in the stone age, using only rock and bone, a giant cavern was excavated in the subterranean limestone environment to, it is thought, house the dead. It was carved to mirror the shape of the temples built above ground and, by doing so, gives us a better idea of what they may have looked like before weathering degraded them to their present state.

Aside from visiting ancient sites and exploring the countryside, our activities were pretty relaxed. We took the approach of 'one day on, one day off' - a day of discovery followed by a day of sitting around. We swam in the ocean, drank coffee in the morning and beer in the afternoon. I read more books than I have in the past three years combined, mostly spy novels that I found in the lobbies of hotels - stories of international mystery and espionage. Needless to say, I started getting paranoid. At one point, while in a public bathroom stall, someone tried to open the door and found it locked. A piece of paper fell to the floor and drifted underneath the partition. Jumping to the only logical explanation, I realized I had been mistaken for a Russian double agent, and this was the dead-drop site for some very important information indeed. Not wanting to get involved, I left the paper untouched. I waited for the mysterious man outside to leave before finishing up and getting out of there before counter-intelligence officers could come on to the scene. As I walked over it I glanced down and realized the paper looked a great deal like a receipt from a grocery store. 'Man, modern spies really know how to conceal the true nature of their information!' I thought.

Couchsurfing really came through for us during our time in Malta. Although we didn't actually surf anyones couches, we arrived just in time for the first dinner meeting of some of the local hosts, and we invited ourselves along. For those that don't know, Couchsurfing is an online network of people who are willing to take strangers into their home as they travel through their country. But for us it is really just a great way to meet people that are outgoing and interesting, a way to get right to the heart of a culture by finding the coolest locals around. And that's what we did! We instantly had a network of over 20 helpful locals and travelers who, amongst other things, helped us find good accommodation deals, took us out to interesting places we wouldn't have found otherwise, brought us to beach bbqs and house parties and even took me out scuba diving! I even got interviewed by the local TV station about my experience as they did a small feature on Couchsurfing in Malta. It aired, and now I am a celebrity there. It will eventually get posted to YouTube and I'll put the link up here.

Actually, its not entirely true that we didn't surf couch while we were there. When we visited Gozo, the second island in the country, we stayed with a very friendly local named Mario. He wasn't technically a CSer, but we found him through the network, and he agreed to put us up for a while. We ended up staying there about one week and, during the course of our stay, met two Italians, two Hungarians and a handful of locals. Mario and his friends are very interested in archeology and ancient history - have even made some important discoveries in the area - and Dad was in his element. They talked prehistory for hours, which was a relief for me since I simply cant keep up with Dad when it comes to which culture cross-pollinated with which and who conquered who. So he was entertained and learned a great deal while he was at it.

I think the highlight of Malta for me was a day we spent on Gozo. We rented bikes in the morning and headed North. Gozo is really small... you could walk across ithe island in an afternoon, so biking is an ideal way to cover ground. We headed to a location called The Azure Window, on the Northern coast. This is an enormous and striking sea arch pitching into the water. Beside it is something the locals call The Inland Sea, which is really a pool connected to the sea by a large natural tunnel through the rock. After exploring the top of The Window, we both went for a swim in the inland sea. I climbed around a bit on the rocks inside the tunnel until I fell into the deep waters below. Ever the intrepid explorers, Dad and I swam through the tunnel, which no one else seemed willing to do. We made it to the open sea just in time to realize the water around the cliff faces was swarming with small, stinging jellyfish. I found them the hard way. Their tentacles conduct a toxin that feels like an electric shock, or a series of bee stings in rapid succession. After that, it became a new version of my old biking game, Dodge. Except it was hard to see the little critters you were trying to dodge. Dad swam back through the tunnel, but I decided to swim along the coast so I could pass beneath The Window. I did, but I paid for the experience by receiving several more painful stings, like laying in a patch of nettles for a few minutes and rolling around. The marks from the tentacles lasted for a month on my chest and back. Apparently urinating on these stings will relieve the pain, but I didn't like the idea much of the position I would have to get in to urinate on my own chest, and I wasn't about to let someone else do it, was I?

After ice cream to sooth the pain we hopped back on our bikes and headed along the coast. We found a rough trail along the top of the cliff and rode our bikes (ok, pushed them a little too) along the path. The views were astounding and I stopped for many pictures. We got kind of lost out there, but we jut kept riding on. We ran out of water and were overheated. Then we got to a dead end at a small cabin. Three Maltese hillbillies sat out front, their shotguns put away when they saw us coming. Birders. The first (and thankfully only) ones we saw. We said hi and they gave us the finger. We asked for directions and they glared at us angrily while pointing back the way we had come. We were happy to oblige. Scenes from Deliverance came to mind. You could almost hear the twang of a banjo and the haunting sound of someone playing the saw... a sharp one.

We made it back to civilization safely and found water. It was a long day of hard riding, swimming, and exploration, but this is the kind of thing I travel for. It was invigorating and renewing, knowing that we had done things this day that most people would not even consider attempting. Again, some folks have a weird idea of fun - and I'm not really sure if its us or 'them'. Dad kept complaining that I was trying to kill him by riding in the heat of the day, but he kept on keeping on. Tough old bugger. We have changed the old saying... Its actually only 'mad dogs and Canadians that go out in the mid-day sun'.

There are more stories to tell. More experiences, more people, more vivid details that make Malta come alive in my mind. But I cant put them all down here. I think I got all the main points. We left at the very end of May, saying goodbye to our new friends and this strange land full of mystery and understated beauty. Our flight was to Barcelona, but that's a different story altogether...