Easy rider on the Med

Matthew Teller takes the 'Short Way Down' by scooter on the Maltese islands for the perfect adventure:

I sat waiting, focused ahead. The cross-traffic started thinning out. I gave a twist with my right hand, just a touch, till I felt the bite. The lights changed to green. I gave it a bit more. The automatic clutch caught, and I was rolling. More with the wrist, and I was going fast enough to lift my feet and tuck them on board. Sheer bliss! Like the best bits of flying and skiing rolled into one.

Let's not kid ourselves. I was aboard nothing more meaty than a 125cc Kymco Agility, but I had never had this much fun on two wheels. In real life, I'm an adrenalin-averse pedestrian. As the Maltese countryside breezed past, it occurred to me that if riding a Taiwanese scooter could induce this much euphoria, a real motorbike might be well over my limit.

You've heard of the Long Way Down – Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman's epic 15,000-mile motorbike journey from John O'Groats to Cape Town. Well, this was me living out the Short Way Down, my idea for a somewhat-less-than-epic ride across Malta in search of excitement and adventure.

From Gharb, on the northwest coast of Malta's second island, Gozo, to Delimara, on the south-eastern tip of Malta itself, is perhaps 45km. You could walk it in a day. On a bike – two hours, tops. I suggested to my mate Tim that we should make a long weekend of it. He looked askance..

..That's the main thing – the freedom. A car really boxes you in; on a scooter we could smell the smells, taste the air and enjoy a panoramic field of vision. We could go where we wanted, stop where we wanted – and, this being Malta, if we liked the look of a road sign we could detour with impunity, since even the loneliest dead-end would take us, at worst, 5km out of our way.

Gozo was the real discovery. It had quite a different feel from the Maltese mainland – wilder, prettier, less predictable. Much of the rocky, cove-dotted coast was still free from development. The Gozitans were, it seemed, a bolshy lot – church-going folk who didn't much like the hotshot Maltese next door. They'd already quashed the idea of building a bridge, and were intent, so I'd heard, on getting their own international airport to steal traffic from their neighbours. I liked the sound of them...