My first post for December! I must organise myself to send my season's greetings by snail mail. Already there are street decorations and Christmas cribs appearing around the villages and several of the cultural organisations that I've talked about in previous posts are running tours of crib displays and medieval churches.
This post is about a ramble around Zebbieh and Mgarr lead by Dr Gunter from Ramblers Malta. When the bus driver put me off the bus at Zebbieh parish church, I wandered up a road where he had pointed even though I couldn't see the familiar dome I have come to expect in a church here. I was early and so I dropped in to a busy bar at the top where locals were ordering pasta for lunch and I had coffee with a date slice. The German woman who had got off the bus with me and was looking for Skorba temple also turned up there and we chatted for a while. She was staying for a week at a hotel up near the Gozo ferry and was enjoying walking around the headlands in that area. Malta in the winter is great for walking - cheaper hotel rates, cool temperatures and less crowded.
I got directions to the church from the woman behind the bar and crossed the road to find a modern church, recently built with massive curved buttresses. In this era of declining church attendance, Malta remains strongly catholic and religion is a significant part of daily life. Even on the buses, people often cross themselves as we set off and repeat the sign as we pass particular shrines along the way.
I was still early at the meeting place and had a chance to chat with the walk leader who was briefing himself on his walk notes using a book by David Trump, the archaeologist I had spent a week with a month or so ago. The route for the walk took us past the temple of Skorba where David Trump had done most of his work in the 1950s and 60s. It was the first time I had been there but we weren't able to go in. We looked through the wire mesh fence at the jumble of massive slabs of globigerina limestone that now seems so familiar to me. Gunter was keen to tell his stories about Grey Skorba and Red Skorba pottery but everyone else was keen to get walking particularly as a few drops of rain were threatening so we didn't linger long.
We did a lovely three hour circular walk down through the valley past the wetland that features in the photo. After the rain, there was running water in the stream and I was glad to see the kind of habitat that I leant about in the course I completed at Mosta the night before. I didn't quite believe that such areas existed in dry, rocky, overbuilt Malta and I love discovering these secret, hidden places that are made even more significant by their transitory nature.
The valley is named after the wild fennel that grows everywhere with its pungent aniseed smell. I spotted lots of Holm oaks and carob trees but also plantations of eucalypts which looked lovely but I now know have been recognised as a threat to the endemic trees. On the way back up through the valley we passed a huge quarry to cross a major road and a woman told me with pride that she had formed an NGO with other women in Mgarr where she lived, to grow thousands of native trees which they were planting around the quarry.
When we got back to the more traditional church in Mgarr, I found the bus stop to wait for the Valletta bus. Two other walkers were also going that way and we waited happily as the sun reddened the sky behind the lovely dome of the church. On the bus, I was greeted by the German woman, her face glowing from the excitement of her walk around the temples, Roman baths and out to the cliffs. So four women from all parts of the world chatted in various languages, a French woman now living in Floriana, a Maltese woman from Zejtun, an Australian now living in Marsaxlokk and the German tourist who got off at Mosta to make her connection to the northern end of the island. Another brief, magic encounter on a bus!
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