Seaweed and boathouses

A brief post to promise more later.  I seem to be spending a lot of time pottering at home in Marsaxlokk and attending to things to help with my trip back to Australia, the purchase of my flat in Valletta and following up on possibilities for part-time work when I return to Malta next year.  I'm also spending a lot of time on a new family website that we've set up.  Electronic media open so many doors!

The photo was taken in Gozo at Dahlet Qorrot and shows the boathouses carved out of the globigerina limestone and the seaweed piled up on the rocks around the beach. 

A different place

There has been a subtle change in the way I view the world.  I have been busy with arranging fund transfers and all the minutiae of buying property in a new country.  I'm also still a bit flat from my cold.  But there is something else.  I have started to see Malta as my base from which I hope to visit other places in a world that continues to fascinate and entice me.  Last week, Australia was my base and I was traveling for a year.  

As I have been photocopying documents (I go to the local news agent) and emailing, a couple of other things have been surfacing.  Firstly, the planning of my trip to Australia during April/May is more settled with the Egypt leg in place.  I still need to sort out six days in Dubai/Oman and three days in Singapore but I'm getting a clearer picture of the possibilities.

The other aspect is that I have started to think about finding some part-time work when I return to Malta at the start of 2010.  There is an advertisement for TEFL teachers in the closed immigrant centres and I am looking into that as a way of finding out what employment processes are in place here.  I don't want to take on too much as I still like playing with my writing and I've enrolled in an on-line course for a year on the novel with Queensland Writers.

This week I've still managed to fit in some concerts.  Thursday's lunchtime at St Catherine's was baroque music for flute and harpsichord and on Sunday a string quartet playing Rossini and a quintet playing Dvorjak.  I am so glad that I have discovered late in life the pleasure of classical music!

I stayed on in Valletta on Sunday and went to a concert by the Vallette Clarinet Quartet in the Music Room at St James Cavalier.  This was 20th century music including a piece by Maltese composer Charles Camilleri who has only recently died.

The photo is of a fishing boat at rest in Marsaxlokk.  I will find ways of continuing to enjoy Marsaxlokk when I am living in Valletta.  

A turning point

The photo is taken off Delimara and shows fishing boats returning to Marsaxlokk.

My cold has kept me at home this week but the sun has been warm so I have spent a lot of time on the roof reading.  On Sunday I missed the Ramblers walk.  It was to be another circuit of the Valletta bastions but this time continuing through Marsa to the Marsovin winery in Paola for a lunchtime  wine-tasting.  Some friends in Australia were also having lunch on Sunday, so I missed lunches at both ends of the world!

I also missed a course on Maltese trees to be held at Mosta and an open day at San Pawl Milqi which is built on the site of a Roman villa owned by Publius who welcomed St Paul when he was shipwrecked here in 60AD.  To make up for it, I've finished reading a book by the scuba diver, Mark Gatt, called "Pawlus - the shipwreck" that is an interesting collection of historical research, marine archaeological finds and stories related to St Paul.

But I managed to drag my cold to Valletta on two days.  On Thursday, I made it to the concert of flute and harpsichord sonatas at St Catherine's and on Tuesday I went up for the signing of our convenium on the purchase of my flat in Valletta!  The convenium is like a promise of commitment to buying and selling property here in Malta.  It is a process whereby buyer and seller come together to clarify all the details related to the transfer of ownership.  I now have six months to make sure that all the necessary steps are taken so that I have a place to live when I return in 2010.  

I feel anxious about it all but know that it is a good decision for me.  Now the things that I do over the coming year will be informed by my return to Malta at the end of the year.  I've made my choice at the fork in the road!

Around and under Valletta

I've been nursing a cold this week as Malta begins to warm towards Spring.  But I didn't want to miss two new perspectives on Valletta.  On Wednesday afternoon, Malta Geographic organised a walk around the Valletta bastions starting from Floriana.  Then on Thursday evening Din l-Art Helwa were hosting a lecture by Architect Edward Said on Subterranean Valletta.

The photo is of hewn rock on the Grand Harbour side of Valletta.  In the bottom right hand corner you can see an arch entrance and I think this might be the entrance to one of the tunnels that Edward Said talked about.

On Wednesday we set off from Floriana and walked down the side of the Hotel Phoenicia.  I was surprised to see how quickly we were looking out over Marsamxetto harbour towards Sliema.  A huge hotel has been built here but it is below the sight line from the ramparts.  At the bottom, we walked past an old bar with a Cisk sign and picked our way along a curious cutting with a terrace of boat sheds.  Beyond this area we came onto the globigerina limestone rock ledge at the base of the bastions.  We followed the base of the bastion round using steps cut into the rocks in places until we reached the headland where the breakwater for Grand Harbour points a finger to Fort Ricosoli.

The breakwater is separated from the headland by a channel that is deep enough to allow ferry boats through.  There used to be a bridge over here to access the breakwater but it was destroyed in a U-boat attack during WW2.  Now there is only the rusting remains of the central support and steps up to the old bridge access.  There is talk in the papers of EU funds to build another bridge to the breakwater and make it a peace bridge.

Soon after the breakwater we climbed up and over a new footbridge at the base of the ramparts and continued to follow the base of the ramparts on the Grand Harbour side.  Here there is a lot of rock hewn areas that seem to be slipways from the time of the knights.  There are also old capstans and quays, probably from the British period.  A large wooden door at the base of the ramparts has a sign announcing "Boom Defence" and our guide explained that this was where the boom gates across the entrance to Grand Harbour were operated from during WW2.

As we came round at the base of the rampart that now houses the Malta Experience we came to the fisherman's village that I have noted with interest before when I walked along the top of the bastion past the old knights hospital now the Mediterranean Conference centre.  Here there is a small group of boat sheds built into the ledges of rock and each one complete with a neat front yard.  Small boats winter on the narrow streets and there is a legion of cats sleeping the afternoon away.  At the far end along a mini headland covered with sheds, a mural of four different kinds of ship has been painted on the hewn rock.

After the village, we climbed back up to the top of the bastion and walked past the giant bell at the war memorial and down the rampart to Victoria Gate.  I have walked this way before coming up from the dhaijsa drop-off at the old fish market.  We walked past the wharf where the Sicily ferry comes in and I remembered my landing there in September last year.  It seems so long ago!

From here we walked back up the hill to Floriana and strolled through the park at the top of the bastions there, looking over the cruise line terminal to Cottonera.  I have walked along here before when I first explored the walk around Grand Harbour to Marsa and then the three cities.

We completed the circuit by cutting across Floriana to go back down the Msida bastion and past the Librerija Pubblika Centrali where I noticed they have a separate Melitensia section that I have made a note to visit again soon.  We came out at a car park outside the massive hotel Excelsior that we noticed at the start of the walk.  The group broke up here but another rambler showed me a route up through a cutting to the bus terminus.

On Thursday night, the lecture on subterranean Valletta was fascinating.  I went up for the lunchtime concert at St Cat's and then spent the afternoon attending to some of the necessary steps for coming to live in Valletta in 2010.  I arrived at Din l-Art Helwa office at about 5.30 and already there were people gathering in the small lecture hall.  When they started the lecture scheduled for 6.00 the room was full and people were standing in the corridor hoping to hear what was said.

Before the coming of the knights in C16 there were probably cisterns and perhaps catacombs to serve the farming villages and temples on Mt Sceberras.  The knights continued the traditional Maltese practice of digging out large wells under a house to service the water requirements for the dwelling but also to provide stone for the building.  But they also added a road network of sewage tunnels under the grid system of the city streets.  This was at a time when the major cities of Europe were sinking under the streams of sewage running in the streets.  The British added pipe connections to this grid of tunnels to make an efficient sewage disposal system and re-direct the sewage outflow to a treatment plant rather than pouring out into Grand Harbour.

The network of underground tunnels, cellars, cisterns, reservoirs, granaries and access tunnels was further added to in WW2 to provide air raid shelters for the residents of Valletta.  These later additions are characterised by a zig-zag entrance to prevent bomb blast from penetrating.  The system is so extensive that it has not yet been fully explored and researched and even this week, new tunnels have been discovered.  Every way I look at it, Malta keeps on revealing hidden depths!

 

Renovating St Cat's

The photo is of the cart ruts above Dwejra in Gozo. What ancient need is behind these stone cut tracks that can be found all over Malta and Gozo?  They are always the same distance apart so must be man-made.  My own feeling is that they are not caused by the erosion of wheels or sledges but were cut into the rock to serve like tram tracks for whatever needed to be transported from one place to another on a regular basis.

I want to do a short post on St Catherine of Italy.  The programme for March is now out and it is a celebration of the start of the renovation of the fresco in the cupola.  At this time of recession, Bank of Valletta have put up the funds to complete the work and the scaffolding is now in place as well as some curious hanging equipment to measure the climate in the chapel so that the painstaking work of restoring the beautiful grey on grey workmanship can begin.  There are several panels around the dome and each one depicts an aspect of the life of St Catherine.

The scaffolding has meant some rearrangement of the seating and the stage area so when the house is full, as it was today, the small round chapel is tightly packed.  Today I tried a different location and sat on the front row of the nave.  The full St James consort were playing two Haydn concerti - the Piano concerto with Ramona Zammit Formosa and the Trumpet concerto with Sigmund Mifsud - and I felt like I was right in the thick of it!  I am so privileged to be able to enjoy these great concerts in such a lovely, small location.

So far this March I've enjoyed flute trio sonatas (one of my favourite instruments) and L'Arte del Recitativo with the powerful soprano Andriano Fenech Yordnova.  Next Thursday we have the visiting Valparisio University Concert Band.  I think they will have to work out a way of doubling up the scaffolding to be used as tiered seating for the rest of the year's programme!

Dwejra to San Dimitri

Our final Gozo walk on Sunday morning stretched into a five hour hike over the cliffs at the northern end of Malta's sister island.  This part is also rich in natural heritage as well as ancient cultural additions to the landscape.  Once again our guide was John Mizzi and his way of expressing this intermingling of culture and nature is "Feel the energy!"

We set off from Dwejra, a tiny village built around a small inland cove that connects to the Mediterranean sea through a tunnel.  I visited this area last year when I stayed in Gharb with my brother and his family.  He and my niece went out on one of the little boats that take people through the tunnel to explore the caves and natural arches.  My brother and I also went snorkeling along the fault line drop-off here.  Fungus rock and Crocodile rock are internationally known as scuba-diving sites and Fungus rock was protected by the knights of Malta because of the plant that grows there and is reputed to have medicinal properties.

We climbed up over the globigerina cliffs at the back of the small chapel.  Here there are good examples of the enigmatic cart ruts that are found throughout Malta and Gozo.  We also noticed that the limestone we were walking over was peppered with fossilised sea shells.  When we reached the garigue, there was plenty of Maltese spurge and edible plants for John to demonstrate survival techniques!  There was even a small meadow of yellow jonquils.

After walking along the headlands with the sea on our left, we dropped down into a valley with an irrigation stream running quite strongly.  The valley ends at a cliff so when there is a big wet season, there is a waterfall into the sea.  As we climbed up the globigerina limestone cliffs on the opposite side, John showed us a small cave that he thought was carved out in the bronze age.  It was certainly man-made but some of the more sceptical ramblers thought it was more likely to be a fisherman's cave.  Malta has such a tradition of re-cycling that my own feeling is that it has been carved thousands of years ago and re-used through the centuries.

We continued on along several headlands, dropping down into the valleys between.  At one valley, a small group of ramblers left us to walk up the valley and back to their cars to catch the earlier ferry back to Malta, but most people stayed to continue on to San Dimitri.  On several of the headlands along here there are piles and circles of coralline blocks of stone which John thinks are undocumented temples.  The photo that heads the post is of one of these sites.  

I stumbled on one of these temples when I walked down a country road from Gharb on last year's visit to Gozo.  It was this road that we walked up to complete the circle and return to Dwijra.  We stopped at a small chapel that I had visited before and John told the tale of a hermit priest who lived by the chapel and had a son who was abducted by pirates.  I'm not sure about the rest of the tale but I have made a note to start exploring the myths and legends of Malta and Gozo.

After touching the outskirts of San Dimitri, we walked back out to the cliff edge and completed the circuit walking back along the headlands with the sea on our right.  I was dawdling at the rear as we dropped back down into Dwejra and my lift had already started the car and was heading towards me.  We had a bit of a race to the ferry and missed the 2.30 but got into the queue for the 3.00 o-clock.  I had a lift all the way back to Birkikarra where my hosts offered me tea in their lovely big house and I changed cars to go with another of the ramblers who lives at Marsascala.  She dropped me off at Paula to catch the Marsaxlokk bus home.  Once again, I felt a surge of happiness at the wonder of the Maltese landscape and the warmth of the Maltese people.

Xaghra plateau and Dahlet Qorrot

The emphasis on Saturday was on walking!  We walked for seven and a half hours with very few breaks and the pace was cracking!  But the countryside was dramatic and I was able to get a good set of photos when the trailing edge of the walkers had to wait as the front runners went through a particularly tricky part in single file.  There were places where we even had to use a bit of rock climbing.

We set off from closer to the suburbs of Rabat than we had the day before and walked to Xaghra plateau.  The village of Xaghra is isolated on the top of the plateau and the whole area is peppered with ancient temples and villages.  It also has an interesting recent history and I have read about the story of how the plague was introduced from Malta and the village closed its gates to the rest of Gozo to prevent the disease from spreading.  Mary Grech (1991) has written an intriguing tale called "The Stolen Faldetta."

From the plateau, we descended and found ourselves walking in the opposite direction to our walk up the valley from Nuffara the previous day.  The reflections in streams and dams were even more startling as it was a lovely sunny day.  Two valleys, Wied Bingemma and Wied San Blas join to go down to Ramla Bay.  

We crossed the valley and climbed up steeply to walk along the ridge to Nadur where we marched through the lovely square to the public toilets.   As people waited their turn, I ducked back to the square and discovered that the area around Nadur has been identified as a European Destination of Excellence as the best emerging rural zone.  For some reason, all the flags around the church and the square were at half mast.  

When I got back to the toilets, the front walkers had already set off again and those who were still waiting in line, sitting on the pavement, were getting distressed.  So there was some whistle-blowing, shouting and use of mobile phones to get the leader to stop and wait for us.  Once we were all gathered again, we dropped down into another valley and then up a very steep climb.  

We came out at the ta' Tocc garigue which is reputed to be the most beautiful in Gozo.  The wild fennel was in bloom and covered the plateau in a lovely soft green.  The almond trees were a mass of blossom and the rubble walls were peppered with wild flowers.  Below us in the valley, the Nadur fields were neat, well cultivated and the orange groves have bamboo wind breaks around them.  We walked along a country road for a while with the valley fields on one side and the garigue on the other and then we left the road to cross the garigue in single file and walk along the ridge towards the sea.

When we descended on the boulder cliffs, the sea looked stunning - a lovely turquoise blue that I am coming to associate with the Mediterranean whatever shore it washes up against.  We followed the path that you can see in the photo above so I was able to look up from my feet and admire the headlands as we walked.  

After an hour or so of delightful walking, we rounded one of the headlands to find Dahlet (inlet) Qorrot.  There was a single luzzu unloading at the small jetty.  The tiny inlet has several boathouses carved into the globigerina limestone cliffs on one side, a small beach that is piled high with seaweed at this time of year and a single road curving down the cliffs on the other side.  We all sat down on the steps leading down to the beach to wait for the delivery of our pizza or ftira that we had ordered the night before for delivery to this lovely spot.

Everyone was pretty exhausted at this point and stretched out in the sun.  I found a shady spot by the boathouses but it was very wet here with water seeping through the limestone so I walked down along the beach front and admired how the seaweed was piled into amazing shapes on the rocks.  After a while, everyone got up apparently without discussion and started plodding up the road.  When I said nervously that I thought we were going to have lunch at this lovely spot I was told that everyone had decided to walk a little further before lunch.  I think the mobiles must have been in use again!

We walked slowly up the road until we came to a hairpin bend with a track leading off the road to go around the headland.  Here we all sat down at the edge of the road and a car arrived to unload big boxes of pizza.  Now there was the drama of making sure that everybody got what they had ordered.  When my vegetarian ftira eventually emerged from the boxes and the crowd, I was startled to see how big it was.  A ftira is like a small pizza and it was loaded with topping and olive oil.   But I still managed to eat it all!

After lunch we set off down the track and around the headland.  By this time, I was starting to think that I had done enough walking for one day and this was reinforced  when we again left a small country road and climbed up onto the garigue.  There was no track and at one point we had to rock climb to get up a section of the coralline limestone cliff.  Things were descending into an every-man-for-himself effort!

We came out again on the country road and plodded along until we reached a cross roads.  At this point there was something of a revolution.  The plan was to set off down to Ramla bay to our right but a large majority wanted to go straight ahead back to Rabat on the main road.  I decided to go along with the majority since my lift was in that group and I thought Rabat must only be half an hour away.

It was another hour and a half before we made it!  We got back to our hotel in Xlendi at 5.30 and the group that walked round to Ramla bay were only an hour behind us.  My room mate went to sleep before dinner and I ran myself a bath to enjoy a long steep!  But it was a great day, I felt pleased that I had managed such a long, fast walk and I came to love Gozo even more.

Nuffara - man who scares

Our walk on Friday afternoon was lead by John Mizzi who stars in the photo above.  John has a website at www.gozo-excursions.com

We set off from the main Gozo city of Rabat to climb the Nuffara plateau.  The meaning is man who scares or scarecrow.  The countryside looks stunning just now and John's specialties are edible plants and ancient temples so there were plenty of interesting things to see and taste.  I enjoyed the fresh new shoots of wild fennel, the lemon taste of the stalks of sorrel and the flowers of several legumes and other plants.  In the photo John is demonstrating how to eat wild oats.

The climb up was steep but there were lovely views of the valley and John stopped frequently to demonstrate edibility or show us examples of different kinds of ancient pottery sherds that can be found (and left behind) all across this area.  The garigue at the top is stunning and there are girna (gorbelled stone shelters) and ancient rubble walls.   I noticed that the hunting hides in Gozo are different from in Malta and are built on a platform with a ladder to reach them.

Looking across the valley we were on the same level as Gigantija temple that I visited last year with the archaeologist, Dr David Trump.  It was easy to imagine the people who lived in the ancient rubble stone village that we walked through following the same path that we descended to go across the valley to their temple.  We also wondered about the purpose of a large boulder that had been carved into a V shape and the libation holes carved into another massive boulder.

The walk up the valley floor back to Rabat was very wet but presented another interesting side of Gozo landscape.  At this time of year the stream is running strongly and the dams were full and formed small lakes that reflected the globigerina limestone cliff edges to the valley.  It was a great beginning to our weekend of walking.

A weekend in Gozo

Gozo is lovely at this time of year.  I went over for the weekend with Malta Ramblers and we stayed at the San Andrea hotel in Xlendi.  I have avoided the tiny bay of Xlendi before because I heard that it got very crowded and busy with tourists in the summer.  At this time of year, the blocks of flats that cover one side of the cliffs surrounding the inlet are still there and the tiny promenade around the beach is still dominated by hotels but the beauty of the valley, the inlet and the small, old village can be enjoyed without the crowds.

We had a very full programme of walks on Friday afternoon, all day Saturday and Sunday morning so there wasn't a lot of time to appreciate the hotel and Xlendi itself but when we were there, the food was excellent, the service great and the sound of the sea on the beach lulled us to sleep.  There were over 60 ramblers on the trip and the hotel was booked out with some late comers spilling over into St Patrick's hotel next door.

I travelled over by bus and then used my KartAncjan to get free travel on the ferry across.  I picked up with some of the ramblers on the ferry and so found transport to get to the hotel.  To keep expenses down, I was sharing with another rambler who was also traveling on her own.  Those people who brought over their cars gave lifts to those who didn't so the weekend worked well in getting to the start of each day's walk and it didn't break my budget!  

I will do a separate post for each of the walks that we did and I'll add photos as soon as I've transferred from my camera to the computer.