Day 2 in Malta: A Drive along the narrow coastal roads

We began our second full day in Malta with a ride to the airport, where we picked up our rental car. In my mind, I had budgeted at least half an hour for the journeys between each of our stops, but this was a wild overestimate of Malta’s size. We made it to the eastern end of the island in fifteen minutes. As we strayed farther and farther from civilisation, the roads became narrower, and around farms they began to be flanked by stone walls. Quite a few times, I had to slow down and slowly tango with a car coming in the opposite direction, which on one occasion resulted in my rearview mirror being folded back by that of the other car. On another occasion, I almost collided with a local turning into a road that could only fit one car at a time. The narrow roads were much better suited to horse carts, which we saw a few times in the more rural areas.

Finding a parking spot near Delimara proved quite a challenge, but we eventually drove up to a wide spot next to the road where we could leave the car and where, crucially, we could turn around again when we had finished walking along the steep cliffs above Malta’s turquoise bays. We drove down the bluffs on either side of a stone arch above the sea before turning around again.

We made our next stop at the Blue Grotto, which forms the tip of a steep bluff on the southern end of the island and consists of two arches connected by a single slender column. Not far from the viewpoint, we found a restaurant for Brent and Joel to eat breakfast. I had already eaten half a sandwich I had packed for my flight in case I was not served dinner on the plane, and I finished the rest outside while Brent and Joel waited for their order. At some point during my gradual, hourlong consumption of this sandwich, I ended up with bits of cheese in my pocket, which I only discovered in the evening while searching for the keys to our apartment.

No more than another five minutes from the Blue Grotto stand the archaeological sites of Ħaġar Qim and Mnajdra. The two share a single museum and each can easily be seen from the other. Both Ħaġar Qim and Mnajdra are ancient temple complexes, their oldest parts dating to somewhere between 3600 and 3200 BCE. Both also align with the solar cycle. The one major difference between them is that Mnajdra is built of harder sandstone than Ħaġar Qim, but I still struggle to account for why such similar sites were built right next to each other at around the same time.

From Mnajdra and Ħaġar Qim, we continued to a viewpoint above the Dingli Cliffs before turning inland again – insofar as any place on this small island can be considered inland. We made a last-minute addition to the programme as Brent discovered that the Domus Romana museum in Mdina would be closed on the following day. The museum itself was not extraordinary, but it was interesting to see a Roman settlement in such a seemingly inconsequential and far-flung place. Just like some of the other museums we have visited, the Domus was an unwitting testament to Malta’s somewhat peripheral role in important chapters of European history – the Romans captured Malta during the Punic Wars to prevent the island from fomenting an uprising in Sicily.

While looking into their multisite ticket for tourist spots in Malta, Brent and Joel also found that the Ta’ Bistra Catacombs only open every last Sunday of the month, which was serendipitous enough to warrant their inclusion despite the abundance of ancient burial sites on our trip. The catacombs are about seventeen hundred years old and belong to Malta’s paleo-Christian age. They were excavated in the twentieth century and were unfortunately altered and expanded to serve as animal pens and air raid shelters even after the Second World War was over.

The catacombs lie on the outskirts of Mosta just within sight of the Mosta Rotunda. We tried to find a parking spot near the Rotunda to visit it but had no luck and decided to try again the following day. This did not stop me, however, from trying to make several stops on the way out of Mosta to take pictures of the massive rotunda, driving onto poorly paved tracks and stopping on the sides of the narrow village roads to take in the view. While Brent loved what he called “the Romanticist death-drive” of this aesthetic endeavour, Joel tried to mentally dissociate himself from my ultimately successful but stressful attempts to turn the car around by reversing off the road into the field.

With some two hours of daylight remaining, we decided to continue our journey to the northeast. Going around Mdina again, we stopped by a roadside overlooking the Victoria Lines, which divide the island in two and were built to protect the populous south from an invasion from the north. Underneath the section we visited were some caves, which are alternately referred to as Bronze Age, Punic, Greek, and Jewish, and are believed to have served as burial sites. Driving farther north, we made a quick stop at a viewpoint above the so-called Popeye Village, a theme park inhabiting the old set of a 1980s live action Popeye film. By all accounts, the film was not very successful, but the village itself was an appropriately bizarre sight to behold.

Our last stop for the day was the Red Tower on the very northeastern end of the island, which overlooks the nearby islands of Comino and Gozo. The sun went down just as we turned the car back towards Valletta, and it was completely dark by the time we returned to our accommodation.