Day 4: The free ride to the beach

Day 4 was Sunday, so like just about everyone else on the island, we headed for the beach.

Looking across they bay from our hotel, we had seen what looked like a promising place to go.

We set of early and had a nice stroll along the prom towards our goal.

On the way we saw this sign.

Barbaric, I call it!  :-)

Anyway, when we got to the beach, there were already some people there, but the beach itself was not what we had expected.

No sand to speak of, just bare, rough rocks.  After a short debate we decided to head back to the main beach to see if we could secure a spot there.

Instead of retracing our steps, we found a track that was heading in the right direction.

It DID take us in the right direction, but it did lead to us having to take another short cut through the grounds of a hotel, but hey, we just acted like tourists and the guard assumed we were guests...

So, back at the main beach, we started to look for a place to have our picnic, but were interrupted by a guy who wanted us to do a short survey.  I will cut a long story short:

We "won" a week's holiday.

We were given a ride in a car to a really posh hotel to claim it.

We realized this was really a time share scam, but played along.

We chatted to the guy.

We drank free drinks.

We said No.

We went outside and walked to the beach - a beach that we had wanted to go to but was a bit tricky to get to.  Thanks for the lift, guys!

There were some people there, but we found a nice spot to eat our picnic and watch what was going on.

There were some very inept surfers who got in trouble with the life guards for trying to surf in the swimming area.

I got really hot and went for another paddle.

Then it was time to go back to the hotel, so we decided to walk.  It was a few miles away, across 2 ridges and valleys, but it was a lovely walk.

We saw the ultimate cactus hedge...

And I have always liked the very different look of this church...

Half way back, miles from anywhere, we had a rather surreal encounter.  We had got used to the taxi drivers - they cluster in the towns, eager to offer us "a good price" for a ride.  We were strolling along, enjoying the views when a taxi pulled up, and the guy offered us, you guessed it, "a good price" for a ride home.  We declined, and he looked at us like we were insane!

The final stretch back to the town we were staying in was up this rather steep hill...

As we neared the top, we DID wonder about what our reaction would have been if another taxi appeared...

Looking back from the top to where we had come from...

Back in the town, we got freshened up and headed to an Italian restaurant for dinner.

The pizza looks very basic, but it was the cheesiest pizza I have ever had.  Fantastic.

I decided to save some for later so I could have a dessert...

Stuffed to bursting, we retired for the night.

Day 3: Valletta and the Birthday Cake

The wind had started to build up on the previous afternoon, blowing from the NW, bringing clouds with it.

 

 

For a lot of the morning there was the threat of rain, but we felt no more than a couple of splatters, and by lunchtime it was clear blue sky.

 

Valletta is the capital city of Malta, and has everything that you would expect either in or near it - all the major stores that you would expect to find in London, the president's residence, parliament, etc.

 

 

Valletta is surrounded by huge harbours, and the views out are wonderful.

Having strolled down the main street, we did a circuit of the sea walls, catching some views that I had not seen before.

 

 

There was a Disney cruise ship in town, which allowed us to fully appreciate a new piece of Malta's infrastructure.

 

 

You might remember that last time I was here I saw a new lift that went from dock level to city level.  Look at the picture 2 pictures up and you will realise how useful the lift would be to visitors who did not want to take the stairs all the way up!

 

We took the lift too, just like real tourists.

 

I don't know how much the lift cost to build, but now it is summer they have started charging - 1 Euro for the round trip.  Now with a Disney ship carrying up to 4000 passengers, I think they will be seeing a good return on their investment...

 

We stopped for a beer at this place, built in the Second World War as a platform for a 40mm Bofors Anti-Aircraft gun.

 

The bar inside is full of relics from the war - helmets, uniforms, belts of ammo, etc.  We tried one of the latest local beers, a lager with lemon in it.  Wonderful under the clearing sky.  We could have spent all afternoon there, supping beers, but Mrs RC does not hold her drink very well, so we moved on.

 

We decided to grab a snack next, so we looked around and went for a posh looking cake shop.

 

After a good look I decided that I had found my birthday cake.

 

I thought it looked pretty splendid, but it was rather horrible in reality - the icing was hard enough to break a tooth, the chocolate tasted stale, as did the rather odd cake-like filling.

 

Ah well, nothing goes to waste in a city, does it?

 

It was a great way to spend my 50th birthday.

 

Yes, the badge DID get a few comments, usually a whispered "Did you see that?"  but I also got a "You look really good for 50" from a woman in a shop, so I won't complain.

 

In the evening we returned to the Chinese restaurant for my Birthday dinner.  It was at this point that we noticed the difference in drink sizes between the UK and Malta.

 

We ordered orange juice, and were asked if we wanted small or large.  In the UK, small is a small juice glass, large usually a half pint.  We ordered large, and were pleasantly surprised when 2 PINTS of juice arrived!  I guess they don't want customers getting dehydrated!  This was reinforced a couple of days later when a "Large sparkling water" turned out to be a huge bottle of Perrier!

 

We had a dinner of ribs, pork balls, fried lamb, rice, chicken wings and prawn toast.  No room for the deep fried icecream that I had planned to have for dessert, but we were very happy...

 

On the way back I wanted to play in the fountains again...

 

 

but as I was wearing my suit I had to give it a miss...

 

Still, there was always tomorrow!

 

PS - just noticed that this is my 1111th post on this blog!

Day 2 - Gozo

We had a quick breakfast and then headed to the bus stop, which was only a short walk from the hotel, and were soon on the bus to the ferry terminal.  Maltese buses are legendary, being driven by insane, angry drivers who want to complete their trip as quickly as possible.  Let's just say that the downhill rides are better than most funfair rides.

By the way, the bus has a hinge in the middle, so that it can bend like a small train.  It is the hinge that is making the screeching sounds (hopefully!)

So, down to the ferry, a quick trip across and we were in Gozo.

The tour rep had told us that the buses on Gozo were not reliable, pushing us to take the guided tours.  As we left the ferry terminal a bus was waiting for us.

We had bought "ride all day" bus tickets in Malta, expecting them to work on Gozo too.  Wrong.  As we boarded the bus on Gozo, the woman there glanced at our ticket with utter contempt.

"Ve don't take your steeen-king MALTESE tickets!"

OK, maybe she did not use those exact words, but close enough.  We bought some more (they were dirt cheap anyway) and settled in for the ride.

Once in Victoria (the main town on Gozo) we set about wandering the streets with the vague aim of finding the Citadel which would give us great views of the island.

Being a staunchly Catholic country, the church gets a lot of respect.  People rush to give their seats to Nuns on the buses....

There are some great vehicles scattered around the islands - this one made me think of wReggie for some reason...

We finally found the Citadel, and staggered to the top in the intense heat.  Mrs RC even managed to perspire a little, something that never happened back in England!

As expected, the views were amazing.

Then it was back on the bus for Xlendi, a lovely little bay that you might remember from previous posts.  Oh, the bus we needed was sitting there waiting for us, too!

We had dinner here, which was great.  

One thing we had was deep fried goats cheese.  

Sounds so wrong.

Tastes so right.

One of my pieces of bread also tried to look like a local attraction:

As it turned out, the bread was as close as we were to get to the Azure Window, but more on that in another post.

We also discovered a new drink here - Watermelon Lemonade.

Without a doubt, this is the most refreshing drink in the entire universe, and as soon as we got home Mrs RC went to work trying to recreate it with great success - watermelon, lemonade and ice smashed together in a smoothie maker.  Fantastic.

After this we headed back to the ferry and the hotel (the bus had been waiting for us - so much for the rep's advice!), were we decided that we needed a bit of a swim.  From a visit about 20 years ago, I remembered a small beach that was not too far from where we were that might not be as busy as the main beach, so we set of to find it.  To cut a long story short, the town seems to have expanded to absorb the beach, and all we managed was to spend a couple of hours meandering through an estate that consisted of a series of loops with no quick way out - they were basically gated communities with no gates, just one way in and out.  So we retreated to the hotel in defeat, for a drink on the balcony.

Day 1

We woke to a splendid sunrise, and sat on the balcony, admiring the view until breakfast was ready.

Breakfast was a buffet of bacon, eggs, beans, toast, bread rolls, cheese, ham, cereals and fruit.  We stoked up, fed the cat and then waited for our meeting with the holiday rep.

I had been uncertain about meeting the rep, but as part of the meeting was to confirm pick up times for the trip home we thought it best to hang around.  He arrived a bit late and then got to business - largely to recommend guided tours and cruises that we had no intention of going on.  After making our escape, we headed into town to start our day....

This is a fairly typical side street in the town we were in - quaint, clean and steep!  I love them and Mrs RC fell in love with them too.

We had planned to take the ferry to Gozo (a smaller island to the north of Malta, but still part of the Maltese nation), but with the meeting with the rep we were later than expected, and now the buses were totally over loaded and refusing to take on more passengers.  Not wanting to wait, we decided to spend the day strolling in the local area to see what we could see.

We were soon on the prom that ran around part of the bay that we could see from our hotel.

This was an area of intense tourism, and we cringed at the massed sun beds and parasols, our idea of  holiday hell.  From here you could also do banana boat rides, parascending and jet skiing.  These all provided part of the entertainment when we watched from our balcony.

Suddenly, Mrs RC said that she wanted to get away from the beach, down a small lane.  She had seen a red house from the hotel, and wanted a closer look.  Mrs RC likes red things....

This is the best pic I could get of the red house - it was rather nice.

Continuing along the lane, Mrs RC was able to develop her appreciation of Maltese walls...

Rural walls are dry stone walls, not a speck of cement in site.  I have a strange feeling that our garden might suddenly develop some new walls in the near future....

 Our lane took us on a long loop, past the sewage works (definitely not part of any of the guided tours on offer), almost to the opposite coast of the island and half way back, before coming to a sudden end.   Not wanting to retrace our steps, we cut across country, finding a well trodden path.

This path led us to the back of a sprawling hotel/apartment complex, so we pretended to be guests and made our way back to the prom through the complex.

By now we were getting hungry, so we caught a bus (which was now not totally jammed with passengers) to the north coast.  After a short walk, we were at a favourite pizza place of mine.

We shared a pizza and some goats cheese ravioli. 

The pizza was slightly over done, but it was all utterly delicious, and washed down with a few local beers.

After this we strolled back to catch the bus back, taking time for a paddle in the sea.

I have never experienced such a warm sea - normally, when the water reaches "certain parts", I have a "oooh" moment.  Not here!

Back at the hotel, we had a rest and drink on our balcony, then headed out for our evening meal.  After much checking of menus and asking of "what do you want to eat?", we settled on a Chinese restaurant.  It was amazing, the best we have ever had.  Promising ourselves that we would return before the week was over, we headed back to he hotel and a well earned sleep.

The Trip, Part 1: Getting there and the hotel

My brother collected us at 5.30 am to take us to the airport  This was a couple of hours earlier than was really necessary, but we all agreed that it was better to get there very early than to get stuck on the motorway and miss the flight.

The roads were pretty clear, so we had a while to wait, but this let us do some good people watching and be first in the check-in line.

The flight was pretty good, except for a bit of turbulence which had us all on lock-down in our seats.  However, I did not realize that this made it against the rules to use the toilet, so I had a special announcement just to myself....

After landing, we left the plane down steps on to the tarmac - the afternoon air hit us like a blowtorch.  It was about 40C that day, and hotter for the next couple of days before a breeze/wind got up and cooled things to the high 30s.

We zipped through passport control, grabbed our bags and headed for the exit to find our transport.  We had gone for the standard transfer, so expected a coach or minibus.  However, as we reached the door there was a guy standing there with my name on a piece of card.  We were the only people that he was picking up, so he led us outside to his air conditioned Jaguar!  Woo hoo!  What a way to arrive at the hotel!  The drive was really nice, and he took us by the scenic route, letting Mrs RC get a good feel for what was to come.

I had been to our chosen hotel once before, back in the mid 90s, and it seemed to be pretty much as I remembered it - a friendly, family run place with a great view.

You can also check the panorama pic in the last post.  These fields were active farms, most Maltese farms being on this sort of scale, just producing stuff for local sale.  They form an excellent buffer between where we were and the louder beach-side hotels.

This is the view from the bottom of the hill, the arrow shows our room, right at the top.

The derelict farm building in the middle of the first pic was home to the local cats.  There were about half a dozen of then.

Yeah, they do look good for wild cats, don't they?

At breakfast, we sat next to sliding doors that went out onto the sun deck, and this little guy took to sitting with us.

He was a picky little thing - he liked ham and bacon, but did not like sausage.  Yeah, he clearly has a tough life!

Having settled in at the hotel, we headed out for dinner, finding an amazing Chinese restaurant. OK, not local stuff, but it was great, and we had a week ahead to look at local food.

The route from the hotel to where the town's restaurants were took us past the church.

We love the churches there, they are so ornate.

We also went past these fountains in the pavement.  It became a regular stop for me to splash through these in my Crocs and shorts.  Yes I just turned 50.  Yes I am still a child at heart.  But it was OK, we were on holiday and who is going to know?

Except you, of course  :-)

More soon...

We're Back!

Just a quick post to say that Mrs RC and I have just got back from our Honeymoon.

And what a splendid time we had!

Be prepared to be spammed with photos of our trip, and to be bored senseless by our stories.

I will just start with a couple of photos:

The view from our room:

And we finally found a Maltese Terrier:

Not a friendly chap either, he clearly wanted me dead, but you can't have everything!

Hope you all had a good week - I have got some catching up to do!

This time tomorrow....

Mrs RC and I will be in Malta....

Everything is packed and we are ready to go, although Mrs RC is having trouble accepting that she will actually be going with me. I guess when we are loaded into the car she will realize that it is not just me going  :-)

Oh, I hope you are all ready for a mass of photos of the trip.  They bought me a new camera for my birthday (Saturday coming).  It has a great zoom (x24 optical, x48 intelligent), so I will be taking all those pics that I couldn't get last time because my old camera didn't zoom very much (x5).  We are taking a laptop with us so I might be able to do some posts from Malta, otherwise I will see you again soon!

Bye Eeeeeeeeeee!