This is going to be a messy post. The Malta bit of our trip is turning out to be a bizarrely messy experience. Not that we're not enjoying it. We are. But it has been somehow weirder than the previous sectors.

Before I get into the blow-by-blow, there are a couple of things to say about Malta, which, for us, is Island No. 4... It's quite a bit smaller than the Isle of Man (316 sq km, as against 572 sq km). But the population is wildly bigger (553,000, as against 85,000).

And, like so many of our other islands, it has had a very chequered past. Until 1530, Malta was an extension of Sicily, so the Normans, Aragonese, and all the others we've come across already on this trip also trooped through here. In 1530, though, Charles V (then the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Sicily), gave Malta to the Sovereign Military Order of St John of Jerusalem. These Knights -- whose progress we have been intermittently following for a long time now -- then ruled the island until 1798, when Napoleon Bonaparte arrived. He didn't last long, however, because the Maltese asked the British for help to evict him. And the British readily obliged. Malta initially became a protectorate, and in 1813 a colony (which is why they drive on the left here, and -- alongside Maltese, which is related to Arabic -- speak English). Malta became independent in 1964, and a republic in 1974.

Yesterday, Tuesday, we started to explore something of all this by heading across Valletta harbour to Senglea, one of the so-called "three cities" that were the Knights' original base (Senglea, the fatter of the two peninsulas, was established in 1551).

Normally, you can take a ferry across the harbour, but weather conditions were such that they weren't running today. So we bought bus run-around tickets at the bus station, and waited for the bus. We waited quite a while, actually. The electronic signboards kept advertising buses, which then failed to turn up. Quite a crowd was gathering by this point. But, finally, we were under way.

And Senglea is spectacular:















There's ride-hailing here, so we caught an Uber back home, as we were due out again later, and couldn't spend too much time trundling home from Senglea.

What we were due to do later was go to the doctor, as Nigel's troublesome foot was still causing problems. Maltese doctors take a similar approach to their equivalents in Sarawak, so this was a long, long business. (But it seemed to bear fruit, with noticeable progress today.)

While I was waiting for him, I went to sit in the very beautiful Church of Saint Francis of Assisi across the street:



We emerged into TORRENTIAL rain... A rainstorm that really couldn't have been bettered in Sarawak. We dived straight into the nearest coffee place, but we were wet after just 10 metres.


Once home, we found that the quite extraordinary rain had squeezed its way in through our patio doors, so there was a bit of mopping up to do.

This morning looked iffy, but wasn't threatening rain. So we decided to use our bus cards to get to Mdina, a dramatically walled city in the centre of the island.

On the way to the bus station, we were confronted with this:


I try not to be judgemental, but there are no two ways about it: This thing is obscenely humongous. It's the size of a block of flats; and it completely blocks any view over to the three cities. Nigel tells me that it accommodates over 6,000 passengers, and carries a crew of 2,500; it's the eighth largest cruise ship in the world; and it does a weekly tour of the Mediterranean, docking in Valletta every Wednesday.

We start to wonder how many of its passengers we're going to encounter today...

This time, we don't have to wait long for the bus. And the ride is very interesting. You go past yet more of these graceful yellow stone churches; you follow the 17th-century Wignacourt Aqueduct for many miles; and you start to see fields, separated by exquisite dry-stone walling.

Mdina was the old capital: "In the year 870 A.D, the Saracens attacked the island and the town took its modern name L-Imdina, meaning town surrounded by a wall. For defence purposes, the Arabs separated L-Imdina from Ir-Rabat with a deep ditch, and surrounded the city with new walls. From this time onwards, L-Imdina barely changed. The structure and plan of the streets is practically the same as the one of a thousand years ago."

Life under the Normans and successive dynasties was not always easy; the city walls were needed for protection from piratical attacks, and the space inside was used for the administration of Malta (which was given internal autonomy by the viceroy of Sicily).


The advent of the Knights, the Great Siege of 1565, and the construction of Valletta all contributed to diverting attention from Mdina, which nevertheless continued as an enclave of the nobility. It seems it's often referred to as the "silent city". No cars are allowed to enter, and only 250 people live within its walls.

Not so silent today, though... I don't know if it was the effect of the cruiseboat, but Mdina was packed. We'd been surprised on Monday by the number of tourists thronging central Valletta. It's January; we're already out of the Christmas holiday season; it was a weekday. But the main roads were awash. (Senglea, by contrast, had been very peaceful yesterday.) The swarms in Mdina were at another level again, though:


Now, it's not that I expect to have everything to myself. Of course, everyone else has just as much right to see things as I do. But crowds very definitely impact on our enjoyment of a place, so we deliberately seek out localities that aren't inundated, and this time we got it slightly wrong.

Nevertheless, it's incredibly impressive in here:









But a little bit of dodging people and cameras goes a long way, and we were soon heading down the hill to the non-fortified Rabat, which is a living settlement with a population of over 11,000:





During this whole trip, today is the day when we've most felt the press of tourists. And, indeed, tourism is a big deal here: "Inbound tourists for the first eleven months of 2024 amounted to 3,371,249, while total nights spent almost reached 21.7 million. Total tourism expenditure for the period January-November 2024 was estimated at €3.2 billion..." And, yes, the issue of overtourism is starting to raise its head, with all the old familiar refrains: "So far, Malta’s tourism policymakers have not defined any measures to deal with overtourism that is disrupting the lives of many locals... Overtourism is now eroding the cultural soul that draws visitors to popular destinations in the first place."

As always, it's a tricky one to address. And here we are, adding our bit to the problem...