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Contents |
Day 1 |
Day 2 |
Day 3 |
Day 4 |
Day 5 |
Day 6 |
Day 7 |
Malta - Day ThreeTo Mdina! |
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Promptly at 7:00 AM, I awoke to hear the phone ringing. I picked it up and was informed by the voice on the other end that it was the 7:00 wakeup call I set for that morning. I hung up the phone and rushed back to sleep for another two hours. Promptly at, oh, 9:00... 9:30 or so, Chris and I rolled out of bed for showers and breakfast. We didn't have a lot of ticks left on the clock before breakfast would be over, so we ate quickly. With breakfast complete, we headed back toward the bus stop with the newfound route we discovered the night before. We did run into an issue where we had not noticed the 5-way intersection the night before but, fortunately, Chris had enough sense of direction to send us on the right road. Our bus arrived and I set up my mental landmarks without too much trouble. Then, as we headed out beyond the twisting streets and tightly packed buildings, we caught our first sight of the countryside of Malta. Glimpsing BeginsMalta is not the most fertile of spots on earth. The red clay soil can't be good for much other than wine grapes and olives and I doubt that it would yield much in the way of grain. Furthermore, the small size of some of the farms just outside the suburbs would mean that any one farmer wouldn't have a whole lot to work with anyway. The farms demarked by the beige limestone walls surrounding them were tight and often joined by tall but narrow houses constructed out of Malta's ubiquitous building material. Clearly, land was at a premium and more land was better than more house. It looked like a hardscrabble life on the land close to the city and it made me think of those tightly packed farms of Ireland that were once the standard. Not that I really know that much about the farms of Ireland, but I know of them in the general sense of being small, tightly packed, and filled with potatoes and Irishmen. |
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Okay, so it’s not the most scenic of pictures. At least I cropped out the power lines. |
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Eventually, our bus traced the way through Mosta, where we saw the outside of the Mosta Dome, another vital sight in Malta. However, we had not the time for a stopover to see the interior of that impressive but inconvenient sight and the bus continued on. Past Mosta, the land opened up a great deal and the farms finally managed to stretch out and get some space to play with. It was not exactly Iowa or Nebraska, but it was easily the most open space we'd seen since we arrived. And amid the broad furrows of heavy clay, there were some surprisingly tall, surprisingly stony sheds. It seems as though the Maltese are as incapable of building anything out of something other than beige limestone as they are incapable of making a building only one story tall. Mdina and RabatEventually, we found ourselves approaching a hill that appeared out of nowhere with a fortress sitting on top of it. As fortified a place as Malta is, even I could tell that we were nearing the fortified city of Mdina, and Rabat, its sister outside the walls. Mdina is so-named from Malta's period of time under the control of the Arabs. They built the fortress atop the hill from nowhere and named it "Walled City". Or at least that's the translation of the city's name from Arabic to English. It just so happens that Mdina means "Walled City" and Rabat means "Suburb". I'll admit, it does kill the poetry when you find that out. Upon climbing the switchbacks up the slope, our bus wound around to the top of the hill and the entrance to the walled city. And, after some refreshment at the conveniently located snack wagon, we headed through the city gate into stone maze of Mdina. |