Gozo in brief

It's wild flower season in Gozo. On Friday and Saturday of last week, it was sunny and the garigue and meadows glittered with deep greens and the yellows of fennel flowers, daisies and sorrel. The photo is of a rubble wall on one of this weekend's walks with Malta Ramblers.

On Friday morning I had an English language class with a young woman from Hamburg. We set off together on the journey to Gozo because when we were practicing conditional clauses she revealed that if she were to return to Malta, she would like to visit Gozo.

I always underestimate the travel time. We lingered at the news agent in Merchant street and that made us miss the bus that might have connected with the 11.15 ferry. As we waited for the next bus, two other friends arrived who were also joining the Ramblers on Gozo for the weekend. We stood next to the 45 bus (there were several 45s and no-one had revealed which was to leave first) and chatted in the sun. History might reveal that this was the beginning of a fascinating EU project involving older women and craft!

The crossing was calm although still cold from the plummeting temperatures we have had lately. I left my friends to deal with negotiations for the taxi we planned to share to get us to Xlendi and guided my student to the Green bus for her tour of Gozo. The arrival of the ferry in Gozo is always as confused and bustling as the arrival of ferries everywhere. Taxi drivers vie for trade and visitors try to look as though they know exactly what they are doing.

In Xlendi, the whole world was sitting in the sun on the sea front. My brother, who now rents a small flat in this small fishing village, had booked me into St Patrick's hotel. He has made this hotel on the front his hang-out and spends many hours here enjoying the life of the bay or chatting with people inside the bar/restaurant when the wind is up. On Friday he was feeling miserable because he was having trouble with his teeth and couldn't find an available dentist in Rabat to deal with it.

I left him to continue his dental quest and joined the Ramblers for their afternoon walk. The planned circular route lead out of Xlendi, past the knights' tower and along the cliffs towards the channel we had just crossed from Malta. We then headed back through Sannat and down to Xlendi along the side of the valley running down from Rabat As soon as we got going, I had to peel off the multiple layers of clothing that I was wearing against the cold.

The cliffs along this side of Gozo are magnificent - weathered and jagged, white and shear - and the garigue sparkled with the blossoms of small heathers and wild flowers.

That evening, I enjoyed dinner with my brother who had not solved the dentist problem but had worked out a holding pattern with his tooth until he could deal with it the following day. We ate at St Patrick's with one of his friends and discussed the complexities of family and the world.

Saturday's walk was planned as an 8 hour marathon but my intention was to leave halfway through and return to Xlendi to meet up again with my brother and pick up my overnight things ready to return to Valletta. I had booked in for the Malta Council for Culture and the Arts Sunday tour and that will be the subject of my next post.

This time we left from Rabat and I just managed to catch a lift to the starting point after breakfast with my brother. We walked down through an interesting little valley in the outskirts of Rabat and then up some very steep inclines. I'm not sure where the route went but we passed through some lovely countryside as we appeared to walk in a large circle around the citadel. Eventually we came down along the cliffs into Marsalforn. It was sad to pick out the spire of the old church now completely hidden by the engulfing blocks of flats that surround the sweep of the bay.

I left the group at that point and joined with others who needed to finish the walk there. We shared a minibus back to Rabat and then I got a lift down to Xlendi to meet up with my brother, now shorn of two teeth but feeling much better. We lingered over lunch and I got back to Valletta late in the evening.

There continues to be discussion about various means of speeding up the journey to and from Gozo. Ideas for airstrips and bridges and tunnels and chairlifts are bandied about. For me, the journey is part of the pleasure of Gozo. Turning Gozo into a suburb of Malta with the inevitable increase in cars and blocks of flats would be a disaster both for the people of Malta and Gozo and for the tourists who visit Gozo because it is different from the built up Northern areas of Malta.