Land of Rabbits, Rifles and Rocks

Ben Mason, an Australian based in the UK, blogs about his travels jointly with his fiancée, Louise Jamieson (aka Weisie) at Weisie's World. He blogs about their journey to Malta a few months ago - with photos. From Weisie's World:

The flight was good but the in-flight movie was cut short due to our early arrival. We dropped into the diminutive island nation of Malta in the early evening. Like many Mediterranean islands the land was barren, but the buildings were golden against the sun. We were greeted by the last rays of warmth and were happy to have escaped the chill of London...

The people of Malta were very friendly and it would seem that everyone had a relative in Victoria, Australia. In fact, there are more people living outside of Malta than there are living in it. Another fact: there are more Maltese people living in Melbourne than there are in Valletta (the capital). With a population of 400,000 and around 400 churches, there is room for everyone on Sundays. Malta has a rich history, having been occupied at various times by Phoenicians, Romans, Arabs, Normans, the Knights of St John, the French, and the British (among others). As a result, many place names are Arabic, the people bare a resemblance to those in Southern Italy (many have blue eyes), and most menus include a full English breakfast, pizza, pasta, rabbit and horse. The fishing boats are beautifully colourful and reminiscent of Venetian gondolas, but with the enigmatic “Eye of Osiris” painted on the bow...

I have wanted to visit this part of the world for a long time. I recall buying a geographica at Uni and reading the following: “Malta and Gozo have the oldest freestanding stone structures in the world”..Little is actually known about the “temple builders”. Archaeologists generally agree that the temples were built between 5,600 and 4,500 years ago. The builders had a penchant for obese (female) figurines and the odd phallus, and they tended to favour a temple orientation approximately in the direction of the winter solstice. All of this makes for some fantastic theorising. We were very lucky to have almost exclusive access to every site given that the tourist season was drawing to an end...

And no trip to Malta can be made without an examination of the curious “cart ruts”, apparently worn into the limestone by repeated use of carts by a race of Bronze Age people that occupied Malta sometime after the mysterious disappearance of the temple builders. The ruts are all over the island (Weisie posed in front of most of them for perspective) and in some places run off the edge of cliffs and reappear on the other side of a bay. I have seen photos of underwater ruts (and read about submerged temples), but did not see any personally. From what I did see, I can say that the ruts are truly baffling and that even the most authoritative archaeologists cannot fully explain them. Please note that Erich von Däniken is neither an archaeologist nor authoritative on any point..