Mellieha to Selmun

This has been another catch-up week.  I managed to do some writing, got my hair cut, went and had another look at a townhouse in Birgu, bought a gas heater although it's taking me longer to organise the gas bottle to go in it and did my laundry on the first sunny day for a week.  Yesterday and today have been fine, sunny days and I've been out and about for the weekend.  The photo is of wild flowers on the garigue between Mellieha and Selmun where I went walking yesterday with Malta Geographical.  That's what this post is about.  In my next post, I'll write about the Department of Arts and Culture tour to Mdina that I've just returned from.

Malta Geographical tours start with a bus pick-up from Valletta.  Yesterday there were two bus loads and more than 100 people set off on the walk.  Unlike Ramblers Malta, there is very little commentary on Malta Geographical walks and so I'm a bit hazy about where we actually started from and what we saw en route!  But we started out from a newly built up area at the top of the ridge before going down into Mellieha bay and we walked out along the cliff at the southern end of the entrance to the bay.  The garigue looks great - very green after a week's rain and the wild fennel which has looked dead up until now has sent out lovely green fronds.

When we turned off the country road onto the garigue path, we walked along a fault line valley that has been used for beehives for centuries.  We walked past honey hive holes carved into the rock face alongside neat doorways into cave dwellings where the honey gatherers must have stayed when they were collecting. 

We followed a kind of zig zag way out along the edge of Mellieha with great views to Gozo, back through honey valley and then out again to a small bay that is used for swimming in summer.  Yesterday, a group of off-road bike riders were making the most of the mud to ride their bikes up and down the edge of the embankment and the eroded carpark.  There were also some people camping there.  The terraces all round were lush and green and it was here that I took the photo above.

We walked back inland and then out again through fields with dry stone walls and tomato canes, then climbed steeply up through a tiny old hamlet.  At the top, we again walked along the ridge of the garigue to a collapsed tower on the headland.  This had formed part of the knights' early warning fortification system but had collapsed in the great earthquake whose date I can't remember.

Not surprisingly, the views from here are great - north to Gozo and south to St Paul's island with its huge statue.  The headland before St Paul's island is a good example of the green clay  that makes up one of the layers of Malta's geology but is rarely exposed to the extent it is here.

 Again, we walked back inland along a country road with views to St Paul's bay over Anchor Bay and what looked like a sewage treatment plant on the top of a ridge.  We arrived at Selmun Palace where our bus was waiting to take us back to Valletta.  The walk was about 3 hours and again it was an area that I hadn't explored before so another fragment of Malta fell into place.