Herod goes to Malta

Herod, who blogs at Non-conformists are all alike, writes about his recent trip to Malta:

It was amazing. Malta is made out of two and a half islands in the Mediterranean, and it's practically tropical. We flew out there and booked in at 3am - and experienced one of those coincidences that you can't ever explain to anyone else because you can't emphasise how WEIRD it is to actually know the night porter at the hotel without expecting it - and the next morning headed straight for the beach. We took a rackety yellow bus and then a boat to a tiny island surrounded by pure, blue water. You could see straight to the bottom of it. You know these photos they take for holiday brochures - and you know that in real life the sea is kind of green and brown and full of shit - well on this spontaneous trip I learned that those places actually do exist.

We swam out to another island, which had this white sand and just everything you would imagine of a desert island as a kid. Not a cloud in the sky. A bit later we hired some snorkels and check out this reef. There were shoals of tiny fish - thousands of them - and as you swam through them they split up into different groups in a hurry. There were a couple of tiny jellyfish doing their weird floopy swimming. Today we saw these ruins on Gozo, the second island. They're from around 3,800BC, they're the oldest freestanding building in the world and predate the Egyptian pyramids. We made the special effort to go all the way out there to see them and it was well worth it...