Malta: Ta’ Dmejrek (1/28)

This blog post marks the start of our trip to Europe; where we are attempting to climb the highest peak in each of the 28 EU countries. We’ll mostly be travelling in our newly, self-converted VW van; with the exception of Cyprus & Malta.

When I realised we had a whole two week gap between returning from Tennessee and getting the ferry to Ireland I starting investigating whether it would be possible to squeeze a peak into the gap.

I soon discovered that you can get very cheap flights from Exeter to Malta. Two of our friends; Pat and Rich joined us as the dates conveniently matched up with their shift work. Even more conveniently Pat works at Exeter airport so gets free parking and a discounted rate into the executive lounge where we ate as many free Babybells as possible. 

We arrived late into Malta, collected our hire car and headed to the Airbnb, Rich was already there as he had been doing a free-diving course for the previous couple of days.

Bright and early we headed out for the main aim of the day which was to climb the highest peak in Malta. This is located on west side of the island on Dingli Cliffs. The peak is more of a plateau and it was actually quite difficult to find the exact highest point. So make sure we covered it we wondered across the plateau and had summit pictures on top of the spoil heap which looked the highest as well as another location that Open Street Map had recorded as the highest. All within 100m of the car.

This peak is a startling 253m in elevation and is the second lowest of the 28 summits, beating Denmark by an extra 82m. With the main aim of the holiday achieved by 11am we had plenty of time to explore the rest of the island. We first headed to the old capital Mdina which is a silent city. It is named so as only a few residential cars are allowed within the fortifications. We had a wonder around the pretty streets and admired the view.

After some lunch we headed to the Blue Grotto, we eventually decided to go on the boat ride even though the weather was a little rainy. We glad we did as the caves were very cool and the skipper had some expert skills not to crash us into the rocks. I bet this looks spectacular in the sunshine. We timed this perfectly as just as we got off the boat the heavens opened. Perfect time for a beer we thought, unfortunately it was Mother’s Day and all the bars and restaurants were fully booked at 3pm. Instead we trudged back uphill to the car and headed to the show cave near to the house.

We were pretty disappointed that we had paid five euros entry when we realised you can only go in the first 30 meters of the cave due to the presence of a rare cave adapted woodlouse. Nothing to do with the Acrow props just behind the woodlouse sign...

The show cave redeemed itself as the museum had the most extensive collection of dwarf hippopotamus toe bones I have ever seen, all neatly ordered in rows. It must have been pretty cool to have been on Malta in the Pleistocene frolicking amongst the dwarf elephant, hippos and deer, whilst running away from the giant turtles and shrews. The larger animals colonised the island and then were cut off, and began to evolve dwarf forms, over subsequent generations, as an adaptation to the resource poor environment.

We headed back to our Airbnb and went to try and find a nice pizza restaurant in nearby Pretty Bay. Pretty Bay is kind of pretty in its own way as there is a beautiful, golden sand beach; but also a dock for huge cargo ships. Unfortunately everyone seemed to be still taking their mum’s out for dinner and we ended up having pizza in what looked like a kebab shop, which actually turned out to be very good.

The Airbnb had a Malta guide book and we noticed a cool picture on the back of a collapsed sea cave. This wasn’t actually mentioned in the book, but a bit of Google image searching discovered that this was “Coral Lagoon”. So the next morning on the way to Gozo (a small island off Malta) we went to investigate.

First however we went to the Popeye village look out point. This village was built for the film set of the 1980 musical production ‘Popeye’ but has become a theme park style tourist attraction. We were just in time to catch the end of the 10:30 dance routine. This was quite surreal and the music was extremely catchy, we attempted to join in and Pat made some comments about the lack lustre press ups that Popeye was doing. 

Entertained we headed to the Coral Lagoon. This a collapsed sea cave, where you can jump off the cliff into the lagoon and swim out of a tunnel connecting to the sea. Unfortunately it was a bit chilly and too rough to actually climb out again. 

We got into the queue for the ferry and headed over to Gozo. First stop was the Blue Lagoon, situated next to the Inland Sea and formerly the Azure Window, which sadly no longer exists. Again it was too rough to get into the sea but it was impressive to watch the waves ricochet in though the archway.

We then headed to Żebbuġ for a lovely beach-front lunch, although we had to sit back from the terrace which had the occasional wave washing over it. We then drove along the coast and saw some interesting salt pans, carved into the soft limestone cliffs.

We next headed to the citadel in Victoria, this was amazing to look around, and the history was fascinating. In 1551 an Ottoman fleet initially landed on Malta, on realising that three of the cities were too well fortified to be conquered easily the Ottoman decided to attack nearby Gozo. 6,000 people were taken captive and ended up in slavery with only 300 people on the whole island escaping by climbing down the citadel walls and hiding. Gozo was slowly repopulated from Malta but it took 150 years for the population to reach pre-1551 numbers.

After this dose of history we decided visit one more bay before getting the ferry back. Here at Mġarr ix-Xini it was finally sheltered enough for swimming, although only Olly (who was actually the only one not to bring swimming trunks) got in the sea.

So a jam packed two days was over and we had an unsociably early flight back to Exeter.