The Malta chill-factor - Part 2

Writing in his Killing Batteries blog, Leif Pettersen - a Lonely Planet travel writer from Minneapolis, Minnesota - continues his turbo account of his recent visit to Malta:

..Another weird thing about Malta is that many of the native Maltese know surprisingly little about the islands. Every time we asked someone for information or directions or where the nearest bus stop was, people – even hotel clerks and bus station attendants – that had spent their entire lives on these tiny specks of land (and it’s not like there’s that much to know) had no idea where anything was. When we asked where fairly prominent tourist sites were, people had either never heard of them or genuinely had no idea how to get there. And it just wasn’t the people that we beseeched for help in person. The “Pocket Malta Guide” - a semi-worthless, marketing-produced piece of kindling handed to each person as they exit the airplane – was full of geographic and practical errors, once sending us to the exact opposite side of the island to visit a key archaeological site.

Yet Malta is a fine place to wander around. Even the interminable bus rides weren’t so bad once you’d negotiated each driver’s psychoses. Being sent to the wrong side of the island by the Pocket Malta Guide set us back three hours from our intended archaeological objective, but we ended up finding and enjoying other sites (that had not earned a spot in the Pocket Guide for some undoubtedly prudent business reason), not to mention lunch and three pints of sweet, life-giving Strongbow.

Vistas aren’t breathtaking, but they’re oddly unique. Not quite Italian, not quite North African, not quite spectacular, but nevertheless arresting. The “beaches” we encountered left a bit to be desired, however. The Maltese that have never been off the island, and have apparently never seen pictures of places from off the island, have confused the term “sand beach” with “sand-colored beach”. It’s all pretty much tan, lunar, butt-pokey, sheets of limestone...

The capital Valletta, while half given over to heart-breaking tourist shops and trite vacationer enticements, has enough character and funky exploration-worthy streets to fill a day. And either they’re flawlessly on-message with the tourist-friendly art of customer service or are just naturally sweet, but the Maltese were all wonderful, even when they couldn’t point out their little town’s bus station in three tries.

I so wanted to do my usual travel writer-induced, scout-every-corner-of-the-new-place routine, racing around for 12 hours each day to get the most out of my visit, but I was reigned in by my companion. In the end we only did one hard day and managed to stay semi-relaxed the other three. This kept us from seeing Gozo, Malta’s second largest island with what is supposed to be the best archeological site of all, but in the end it was for the best. I needed to slow down and they wouldn’t let me bring my Camel Pack of Strongbow on the ferry anyway.

So, after much soul-searching I finally concluded that Malta, again, much like Cancun, is really good for one thing, chillin’. There’s some cool sights and if you’re there for two weeks, and figured out how to safely sedate all the bus drivers, you could probably see them all at a leisurely pace, but if you don’t go there with an aim to sit around a lot, eating, drinking and watching rugby, you’re going to be deeply disappointed.

Two weeks on, I actually miss it a little. I’ve rarely been someplace with so much decent food AND cider (put your hand back down England) and I rediscovered how to relax on vacation rather than turn it into a frenetic cultural, research-gathering, tax-write-off reconnaissance mission. Or maybe I’m just nostalgic because I’m facing such brutal music back here in Italy. In the next three weeks I’ve got deadlines to hit, new offers to consider, nigh-impossible travel itineraries to build, comped accommodations to beg for in Spain, non-comped Spanish accommodations to arrange on short notice in high season, friends to entertain and tattoos to laser off. St Paul’s Bay and English grandmas in an ill-fitting singlets is looking mighty good right now.