Malta Day 5 - Mdina and Rabat

Wednesday 27 February

As this was our last full day on Malta, we were determined to see as much as possible, so set off early to catch the bus to Rabat. There are only 2 buses an hour, and we arrived with plenty of time to spare, so of course the bus was more than 15 minutes late. However, there was plenty of space inside, so we had seats for the hour long journey. When we arrived in Rabat, we wasted quite some time wandering up and down before finding what we had gone to see, the Domus Romana (which was not well signposted from the point of view of pedestrians getting off the buses). 

This is a Roman town house, which was discovered at the end of the 19th Century. The finds are housed in a small Museum at the site. There are some beautiful finds in it - not all from the site, some from other sites, and some from goodness knows where.

Archeology was not too precise at the end of the 19th Century. The mosaics from the site are said to rival those of Pompeii. They certainly were beautiful, though nothing like the size of those we saw in Sicily.

We then walked back into Rabat, whose narrow streets we found very picturesque

We paused for a coffee break in a delightful café we found quite by chance in a back alley. It was tiny, and we had to climb a very narrow spiral staircase to sit at one of about 6 tables on a balcony which overhung the interior of a shop. The kind lady inside directed us towards the Catacombs of St Paul's cathedral, which we then found without difficulty. The streets were so narrow we found it hard to believe we were indeed in a main street, but we were. The cathedral, when we found it, was shut. We wondered if churches were ever open in Malta; perhaps, as in Britain, there is a problem with theft and vandalism and they have to be kept locked to foil such crimes.

Anyway, we found the catacombs open, so we went there. The audio guide we were given referred to the catacombs as 'hypogea', and they were certainly dug out of the rock by Romans and early Christians, and some were cut out to imitate things found in the world above - not megaliths but tables at which meals could be taken. No flash photos could be taken in the main area, but there was a much smaller area to which we were directed first, and there seemed to be no such prohibition there.

This first photo shows the table, used perhaps for a funeral feast. This type of table apparently started as a Roman dining area, a triclinium, but in Malta the table and benches became fused together. There is also a rim round the table, which would seem to indicate it was used for liquid, and the break in the rim might have allowed the liquid to drain out into something. 

The tombs themselves were of different types. The photo shows some through the small arch which were cut almost to resemble beds. Sometimes these small 'rooms' could contain a number of tombs and could be sealed off with a stone, like the one in the next photo.

It is carved to show surgeon's tools, indicating the profession of those buried behind it.

Other tombs could be cut like a sarcophagus, and closed with a stone lid, or even roof tiles. Some people, especially children, could be buried in niches cut in the wall. 

After some time spent wandering about in the dark underground we were thoroughly chilled and very glad to emerge out again into the sunlight and make our way out of Rabat, across the bus terminus and into Mdina.

Mdina is tinier than I had imagined, in fact it has only 400 inhabitants. It is a walled city, surrounded once by a moat (currently being renovated) and with an imposing city gate. It dates from well before the times of the Knights of St John. It was originally built by the Romans, and reduced in size and re-fortified by the Arabs. When Aragon ruled Malta it became a medieval city, and has retained much of this medieval character. The main street runs more or less down the centre - after a left and then a right turn, but most of the streets built off it are narrow and angled. This was deliberate, to deflect arrows and make shooting difficult.

We went into the Cathedral Museum and then the Cathedral. We were really too tired to appreciate the museum by the time we got there. It houses medieval choir books, silver plate, and a very interesting coin collection spanning 2000 years, where we spent some time. There is also a collection of paintings which we hardly had the energy to examine, apart from some very fine Dürer engravings. Photographs are not allowed at all, but I snatched this of a particularly exquisite one.

The Cathedral is across the square from the museum, and had to be re-built after an earthquake in 1693. It is another fine Baroque building, and somewhat reminiscent of the Cathedral in Valletta inside, though considerably less grand and less decorated. It also has a floor made of decorated marble tombstones, but these ones can be walked on and photographed. Not too many are adorned with the skulls and skeletons of the ones in Valletta cathedral, but I managed to find one!

We were too tired by then to do a lot more. We wandered the streets to the far end of the town, pausing to admire the view over central Malta and the huge sweep of the landscape. We also wandered into a few shops selling Mdina glass, but were too tired to buy anything. Eventually we accepted the fact that it was time to go back, and caught a bus for the long journey back to Sliema - over an hour this time, because of heavy traffic. This meant that there was no trip to Valletta today to use the Wi-Fi in McDonalds, so I'm not sure when this and last night's one can be posted - not tonight anyway. And tomorrow we set off back home.

Malta - Day 4

Tuesday 26th February

We woke this morning with the sun streaming in through our balcony window, to our great joy. It's much better than being in an inner room with a window that looks out only into some kind of a shaft. We did a little dance of joy out onto our balcony, which was a bit of a mistake, as there had been heavy rain in the night and there was a deep puddle on the balcony, which I did not at first notice until my slippers were sopping wet! I took a photo of our lovely view though.

Another drawback with the new room which we encountered this morning was the lack of hot water - the water had been scalding hot in our old room. However, the water is scalding hot tonight, so we are hoping it was just a minor aberration - there was no phone or Internet last night either - so we'll see what it's like tomorrow morning. 

We caught a bus into Valletta this morning, then a second bus into Vittoriosa, otherwise known as Birgù. It is a picturesque small walled town opposite Valletta, which has many beautiful ancient houses

as well as a number of places to visit. My sister particularly wanted to visit the church of St Lawrence, but on the way there, we passed the Inquisitor's Palace, so we went there first. The palace was originally built in the 1530s, and was used by the Inquisitors as their official residence from 1574. Today, it focuses partly on Maltese life, such as costume or rural artefacts, or religious culture - like these delightful nativity figurines.

There are are also many relics of the time of the Inquisition, like the dungeons for instance. 

We were interested to see the original flooring, even in the piano nobile, of square flagstones. Our guide in the Casa Rocca Piccola yesterday had pointed out one room of original flagstones remaining in that house, saying that other rooms now had more modern and comfortable floors. The guide had also pointed out the original wooden ceiling in the same room yesterday, explaining that, as there were no trees on Malta, only rich people could afford wood, which had to be imported; we noticed today that the Inquisitors had no wooden ceilings.

This is the Chief Inquisitor's bedroom - note the flagstones on the floor and lack of luxuries. The whole building was neither luxurious nor even comfortable.

You can see this reflected in the kitchen.

On my travels, I seem to have photographed a number of kitchens, but never one in which I would have had so little desire to cook - or to wash up, for that matter!

There were interesting displays on life in Malta, as well as some explaining the different social classes in Malta in the early 1900s. Apparently, the working classes spoke Maltese, 'regarded by the higher echelons of society as a vulgar kitchen-tongue' and they tended to be pro-British. The middle classes promoted Malta's cultural connection with Italy and upheld Italian as one of Malta's official languages.

We spent some time looking at the dungeons, which were quite dreary little cells with doors less than 5 feet high; we failed to spot the graffiti which the guide book claimed was there. The much trumpeted torture chamber was just a room with a rope hanging up in it. You were tortured by having you hands tied behind your back and were hauled off the floor by this rope. There was an hourglass to time how long this went on.

After all this, we went to find the church of St Lawrence, which wasn't far away. Unfortunately, it was also shut! We suspect that more things might be open in the summer - or perhaps, those in charge had just gone for an early lunch. We weren't able to hang about to find out though, as we planned to see other things and had to find the Hypogeum before the time on our timed ticket, so we walked back to the bus stop.

Our next bus journey was something of a triumph, as we had to catch a bus to a nearby town called Paola, and a further bus to the next site, that of the Tarxien Temples. This is the largest prehistoric temple site on Malta, though I must say I did not enjoy it nearly as much as the Gganttija temples on Gozo, which we saw on Sunday. I think this was because the Tarxien site had been the subject of a good deal of re-construction, during which somewhat disastrous attempts had been made to save the stones from erosion by covering them with cement. These temples are considered to be a few hundred years younger than the ones we saw on Gozo - these ones were built between 3000 BC and 2500 BC - and some of the more striking finds are now in the Museum of Archeology. This is a replica of a broken female figure which was found on the site, possibly associated with fertility.

There were also replicas of some of the wonderful carved monoliths - a couple of the originals were in my posting for Saturday 23rd. This is one I didn't photograph on that visit.

The purpose of the carving is unknown; it could have been celebrating the lives of the sheep and goats, or just depicting animals for sacrifice.

We had been so efficient in getting to the temples that we had time to stop for some lunch and sit in the sun in the town square before it was time to go off and find the Hypogeum, for which we had timed tickets. The Hypogeum is a labyrinth of underground chambers which were excavated in prehistoric times, and whose exact purpose is not known. It seems to be a temple complex used as a burial site and perhaps a religious centre. Certainly, the remains of over 7000 bodies were found here.  What is remarkable about it is that it was dug from the living rock between about 3300 BC and 3000 BC (it is considered to be a little older than the Tarxien site) with tools of flint and bone and was carved so as to represent the architectural features of the temples above ground. There are representations of doorways made from three monoliths and corbelled ceilings, fragments of spiral carvings, and spiral wall paintings. It is a world heritage site, and under considerable threat from visitors, so it is climate controlled and very dark and only 80 people a day are allowed to visit, in groups of 10 at a time. You can see why sometimes you have to apply for tickets two weeks beforehand; we were very lucky to get our tickets at such short notice.

It was a very eerie experience; it was cold and clammy and mostly quite dark. The light flickered, only illuminating features as you approached, and it was silent because the commentary is on the little hand-held device you hold up to your ear. It was not very hard to imagine the fear in the mind of a stone-age person in such a cold dark place - though at least we didn't have to contend with the smell of decomposing bodies as well. And we had wooden walkways and metal handrails, we weren't stumbling about in the dark only illuminated by flickering torches.

No photos are allowed, so this is the best I can do, a photo of a photo.

It shows the chamber known as the 'Holy of Holies', and is carved in some detail. You can see the walks are carved to resemble monoliths. There are traces of red ochre on the walls, so it has been suggested that this was both a burial place and a shrine. Many different items, possibly grave goods or cult items, have been found in these chambers. 

After this chilling experience we went back to the bus stop and caught the bus back to Valletta, where we paid our daily coffee-drinking visit to McDonalds to use their free Wi-Fi and I posted yesterday's blog. I'm not sure when I can post this one, I'm not sure it will be convenient to go into Valletta tomorrow. If aren't reading this until the weekend, you'll know why!

Malta - Valletta

Monday 25th February

We decided that today was a day for Valletta, so set off for the bus stop. Something went wrong today though, because for the first time we had to wait for the bus, about 25 minutes, and since it was the first bus for ages, it was absolutely packed and we had to stand all the way to Valletta, a journey that takes about 20 minutes. 

We began the day by visiting the Museum of Fine Arts so as to buy tickets for the Hypogeum. We hadn't realised that we should have bought these tickets on-line more than a week ago! However, we managed to get 2 last minute tickets for tomorrow afternoon. We though we might as well begin by seeing the Museum of Fine Arts, so we just started there. The Museum is housed in what my sister's guide book has described as a fine Baroque Palazzo, which I seem, unaccountably, not to have photographed - I can't quite think why, I seem to have photographed just about every other building in the town! It is just as imposing inside though; this is the main staircase.

It houses a great many paintings by Mattia Preti, a painter who was much influenced by Caravaggio. One of the highlights is Christ the Redeemer by Guido Reni, but the light reflected from it in the centre and spoiled my photo. Other photos of painting I liked, such as one by Ribera, were similarly spoiled by the light reflections, as was the great treasure of this museum, a watercolour by Turner of the Grand Harbour. It is behind glass, so photos are impossible. 

After this visit, we went to see the Cathedral, the Co-Cathedral of St John. This is a very plain, rather severe building, built in 1572.

It originally had an equally plain interior, but the severe inside was transformed nearly a century later and is now more ornately Baroque than I can easily describe. There is not one inch of wall that is not ornamented with something - huge paintings by Mattia Preti, ornate carving, gilded scrolls and curlicues everywhere; even the floors are completely covered with the inlaid marble tombstones of the Knights of St John.

The side chapels are also richly decorated, each one dedicated to one of the 'langues' into which the knights are divided, and mostly housing memorials to various Grand Masters of the order, covered in carved marble and bronze statues, not to mention more gilding and curlicues.

The two great treasures housed in the cathedral oratory are two paintings by Caravaggio, which you are not allowed to photograph, even without a flash. I was very glad to see them, as they do not leave the Cathedral, so you are not likely to see them on exhibition elsewhere. The Beheading of St John is huge, dominating the room, very theatrical as the light strikes the executioner and other figures are in shadow, and very gory as the blood pours from St John's neck. A woman stands nearby with a shallow metal dish ready to receive the head once it has been cut off. St Jerome, on the opposite wall, is much calmer but no less striking, the saint sitting on his bed half naked, wrapped in a bright red cloak. I bought postcards of both pictures, since I wasn't allowed to take photos. 

Other items we weren't allowed to photograph were the huge Belgian tapestries based on painting by Poussin and Reubens.

Being by then rather full of art, we had a quick bite to eat. Then we headed off for the State Rooms of the Grand Palace. The Grand Palace, like the Cathedral, also has quite a severe exterior, but is far more ornate inside. It was used by all the Grand Masters of the Order from the time of its completion in 1571 until the Order left Malta in 1789 when the island was captured by Napoleon. It became the official residence of the British Governors in the early 1800s, and is now Malta's Parliament House. This gives you some idea of the interior,

though I have to say I preferred the delightful courtyards.

At 4 o'clock, we took a tour of the Casa Rocca Piccola, a 16th century palace which is still lived in by a noble Maltese family. The central courtyard was particularly charming,

and we saw 12 rooms in the piano nobile, which are furnished with antique furniture, some of whuch was very old indeed.

This chest is dated to the time the Knights arrived in Malta - about 1570.

Some of the rooms are still in use by the family. This is the summer dining room.

We were able to see how the noble family lived - not very comfortably I would say, since they had to use portable heaters and electricity was only installed in the 1980s. Beneath the house were what had been huge cisterns, which were converted into air-raid shelters in the last war. I found them too claustrophobic and had to go out quite quickly - thank heavens I didn't have to shelter there during the bombing of Malta.

The tour took about 75 minutes, and we enjoyed it very much, but we were completely exhausted by the end. We had been on our feet fairly continuously for 7 hours, and it was far too long! We adjourned to McDonalds to use their free Wi-Fi, since the Internet connection in our hotel is so poor. I've hardly ever been inside a McDonalds in my life, but can now report that the coffee is quite acceptable but the hot chocolate is fairly horrible. Still, at least I was able post 2 days worth of blog.

We caught a bus back to our hotel, where, to our great joy, we were able to move to a room with a sea view. No more having to keep the light on all day and wondering what the weather is like outside!

Gozo

Sunday 24th February

Today was the day for our trip to Gozo. It was supposed to be a beautiful sunny day, and it certainly was very bright and sunny, with a dazzling blue sky. Unfortunately, there was a really cold wind, which cut like a knife - and we were supposed to be going out in an open-topped bus!

Our pickup arrived promptly in our hotel as arranged, and was a coach for this part, rather than an open-topped bus; it took us to the north of the island to the ferry departure point for Gozo. The trip up to the north of the island took about an hour, and gave us a chance to appreciate this less populated part of Malta. It is rural in parts, with Mediterranean vegetation such as prickly pears, and very rocky; in some areas, dry-stone walls are used to demarcate the fields. It might seem that agriculture doesn't necessarily pay; we passed what looked like an abandoned sisal farm, with sisal plants in rows, but all overgrown and gone to seed, so there were huge poles sprouting from many of them. The lack of agricultural success in this part of the island could account for the fact that in some areas it almost looks as if Malta might sink under the weight of new tourist hotels clustered thickly round every bay or patch of sand beach.

The ferry across the 8 km to Gozo took around half an hour, so we barely had time to drink a cup of coffee and consult the guide book before it was time to get off. This was where we were met by the open-topped bus, but quite a few of us played safe and stayed downstairs inside the bus where it was a bit warmer.

Many of the older villages in Gozo were on heavily fortified hill tops, so the villagers could protect themselves from pirates. This is Mgarr town, just above the harbour.

Our first optional stop was at Nadur, a village that had a Maritime museum, but we knew we didn't have time to get off there if we wanted to see the whole island. Likewise, nobody got off at Ramla Bay, one of the places Napoleon landed when he captured the island on his way to Egypt. However, half the people on the bus got off at at the next stop, Xaghra, to see the prehistoric Gganttija temples. I mentioned the temple builders yesterday, as the temples are dated to 3600 BC and hence are older than the Great Pyramid (2530 BC) or Stonehenge, for that matter (2000 BC). 

The best way to describe these temples is to show a birds-eye view of them - this model is in the Archeology museum, which we visited later.

You can see there are two temples, each of which is divided into a series of 'rooms'. The stones used to build them are really massive, making you wonder how they were moved in the first place.

Some of the rooms have stone tables or altars,

but everything that is suggested about their use or their building is only speculation, since the people who built them seem completely to have disappeared. Later bronze age peoples and even Romans seem to have reused the temples as a cremation site, but nobody knows what became of the original people.

After this, we encountered something of a problem. Our tour is described as 'hop off, hop on. And we had hopped off; however, we failed to hop on! The bus we intended to hop on to was more than 5 minutes early, so when 4 of us arrived with a couple of minutes to spare, the bus had already gone. When this became clear about 20 minutes later, we all shared a taxi into Victoria, missing out a photo stop in the north at a place referred to as 'Calypso's Cave'. We were very irritated by this, but we might miss seeing other things if we didn't manage to catch up with the bus.

Victoria is the capital and has a citadel, and the surrounding houses near the citadel are also old and rather charming. 

This is typical Maltese architecture, with balconies, some of which are enclosed.

We climbed up the steep hill to the citadel (quite glad we didn't have to do it in medieval armour, it's very steep). There is a cathedral which is apparently worth a visit, but it was shut today - it's Sunday... 

We very much enjoyed wandering round the citadel. All the streets are little narrow medieval alleyways with almost no windows overlooking them, so they are more easily defended.

They clearly haven't changed much in centuries. The views from the ramparts to surrounding towns are wonderful, though we were nearly blown off at various spots, the wind was so strong.

The archeology museum had some interesting exhibits.

I was particularly interested in this one above, because I have no idea what it is. Neither does the museum I suppose, as it has no label. It is a solid piece of stone, with those two cup-shaped depressions in the top, and a little hole bored through the stone leading into each cup. All suggestions welcome!


We also visited the Folklore Museum, for relics of the island's agricultural past. The apparatus below was used for grinding the wheat to flour; there's a harness for the missing donkey, and the sack to catch the flour is out of sight, on the left.

When we came down from the citadel, we did manage to find the Church of St George which was open. It had a very baroque interior, with what my sister thinks is a copy of the Baldicchino in St Peter's in Rome.

We took care to be VERY early for the next bus, so we were able to see the rest of the island, though there wasn't time to hop off anywhere else. We braved the top of the bus this time, but we weren't able to manage it for long, it was just too cold. 

We visited the 'Inland Sea', a shallow lagoon popular for swimming which is connected to the sea by a cave; it was too cold to contemplate any swimming today, and anyway the extreme beauty of the spot had been spoiled by strange buildings that looked like nothing so much as concrete shipping containers. 

Another charming spot where we might have spent time was the village of Xlendi, which used to be a little fishing village and is now a tourist spot. It is lovely at present, but there are many more hotels to come.

After this, we were on our way home through the countryside and back to Mgarr for the 5.15 ferry; when we arrived back in Malta, another coach picked us up and drove us back to our hotel. There is more to see on Gozo, we enjoyed it very much and just wished we had had more time.

Malta Day 1

Saturday 23rd February

We were up in good time for breakfast, on what turned out to be a beautiful sunny day. Our hotel is on the sea front, right across the road from the sea.

Our hotel is the grey and blue onenear the centre of this photo. Our room has no sea view though - in fact, no view at all; it looks out onto a kind of light-well in the centre of the building. However, we hope to be able to move to a room with a sea view later in a day or two, when one becomes available. The hotel is full at the moment. 

We had intended to go directly into Valetta to the tourist information office, as there is no tourist information office in Sliema, where we are staying. However, we only got as far as the bus stop, where we were offered a very cheap price for a day trip to Gozo. So we arranged for that tomorrow, which, according to the weather reports, will be a warm and sunny day. As part of the special deal, we also had a free harbour cruise, so we took that this morning.

A bus collected us and delivered us to the ferry port, and we boarded the boat for the cruise. We had a bit of a wait until it filled up, but it was quite pleasant sitting in the harbour admiring the views. At length, about an hour later, we set off, and I must say the trip was well worth waiting for. It lasted for about 90 minutes, and took us round two harbours and into a number of different creeks - 10, apparently.

The town of Valletta is on a high rocky promontory which is completely surrounded by harbours on both sides. On the north west is Marsamxetto Harbour, with the town where we are staying, Sliema, to the north west of Valletta. There is another promontory close to the north-most end of the Valletta promontory so that the harbour is almost enclosed; there is only a small gap out to the open sea. We sailed round this northern harbour, then out past Fort St Elmo

which is on the very tip of the Valletta promontory, into the open sea, and the back into the Grand Harbour which is to the south east of Valletta. The Grand Harbour is similarly almost enclosed, with just a narrow entrance.

As we sailed around the promontory, we had some beautiful views of the city. This shows the dome of the cathedral

This trip really illustrated how impregnable Valletta must have been in times gone by. It is completely enclosed by massive walls. Below is the site of the gun battery; if this photo isnt posted too small, you may be able to see the crowds of people waiting for the midday gun from the battery just below.

and on the land side, a huge deep ditch cut from the rock as well. 

There are several rocky promontories which jut out into the Grand Harbour, which further protect it. Fort St Angelo is built on the highest of these - it is the place where the painter Caravaggio was imprisoned when he fell foul of the Knights of St John, who then governed Malta.

The Grand Harbour is also where the big cruise ships come in. Some of it is quite industrial, and there is a huge area for ship repair; along with other things, there's a rather unattractive oil rig being repaired at present.

After the harbour cruise, we caught a bus into Valletta, had a late lunch, and embarked on more sightseeing. We saw an audio-visual presentation called 'Living History' to give us the general background, then we went to the Archaeology Museum, which was small but interesting. The first settlers were farmers who arrived in Malta about 7000 years ago, about 5000 BC, and in 3600 BC built the first temples. These are some of the carved slabs that adorned them.

These temples were built before the Great Pyramid in Egypt. Not a lot was known about these people, though they seem to have honoured a female deity.

It is also not known what happened to them, as there does not seem, apparently, to have been any contact between them and Bronze Age settlers who were the next arrivals. There was pottery and other artefacts from the Bronze Age.

There were also Phoenician settlers, and artefacts from that time. We found it slightly strange that the museum didn't seem to have artefacts from later waves of settlers, but perhaps these will be found in other museums. I suppose it depends on when you think archeology stops and history begins.

We wandered around Valletta admiring the architecture, which is very beautiful; though, having seen in 'Living History' how much of Valletta was destroyed in the bombing of the Second World War, we wondered how much was history and how much was replica.

We had noticed that the cinema was showing 'The Quartet', which we had both missed seeing when it was shown in British cinemas, so we went to see that. We caught a bus back to our hotel after that; most of the other people in the bus were embarking on a night out, and we were going to bed!

Wireless difficulties in Malta Hotel

I'm having some difficulty in posting my blog from the hotel here. Perhaps the hotel Internet is not very satisfactory, or perhaps I have put in too many photographs.

I will have another try by going into Valletta and having coffee in McDonalds(!) and posting from there; their connection seemed better and I managed to post from there for Friday's post. If that doesn't work, I can see I will have to try cutting my posts in half and trying again in two halves. Amazing tnat things that worked all over the outback in Austalia and in tiny little places in New Zealand won't work in Europe!

Off to Malta

Friday 22nd February

When I woke up, I was horrified to see it was snowing! However, it wasn't snowing very hard at that point, so the snow was melting rather than lying. I had called a taxi, as it's quite a short drive to Gatwick, and at that time in the morning, the train is expensive so the cost was about the same. Anyway, it was a relief not to have to hump my suitcase up and down station stairs, as well as being a much shorter and quicker journey; from Oxted, one would have to catch one train into East Croydon, and another back out to Gatwick.

I met my sister at Gatwick, where we had a little retail therapy - I have replaced my broken sunglasses, which should virtually guarantee we see very little sun in Malta! We were dismayed to see the snow was much heavier and was starting to lie, and the plane, when we got onto it, had to be cleared from snow and sprayed with anti-freeze or whatever it is they use. However, once we were above the clouds it was beautifully sunny, so we began to be hopeful.

We landed to bright sunshine, and a beautifully blue sky, though the wind was a little cool. We were able to catch a bus to Sliema, and then it was only a short walk to our hotel, which is right on the sea front. The route from the airport was very busy, full of crowded roads with fast traffic and very built up. The houses are piled up one on another up the hillsides, and there are churches everywhere. 

After we had unpacked, we took a walk long along the sea front, though it was getting dark by then and we couldn't see much. We found an interesting pedestrian street on the way to the ferry, which had some amusing statues of people having tea, so we took some photographs of one another joining the party. This photo has neither of us in it though.

After that, we had a meal in a restaurant near our hotel advertising Maltese food - food good, wine awful.

Our hotel wi-fi is stupidly expensive, so this is being posted - I hope - using free wi-fi in the place we are having coffee.

Home again

Saturday 16 - Thursday 21st February

There's not a lot to say here, and not a lot to photograph. I left Edinburgh on Saturday morning to return home. The train journey was uneventful, apart from the difficulty of translation of the muffled train announcements. Since both my parents had Scottish accents, I generally have no difficulty, but the train's public address system was particularly muffled. And the café, in a possible attempt to puzzle tourists, was in coach J. Now the letter J (pronounced, English-fashion, Jay, to rhyme with 'lay') does not exist in Scotland. The Scottish version of the letter J is pronounced Jie, to rhyme with 'lie'). This, combined with the muffled tone of the announcements, led to the non-Scots speaking passengers asking everybody who passed them where the café coach was and the unfortunate train attendants having to count on their fingers before saying 'it's 3 coaches away in that direction' in order to be understood.

Once home, I had the usual post-holiday laundry festival. I walked into Oxted a couple of times for shopping and to visit the Library. I was delighted to see the first signs of spring in the lovely yellow Crocus in the lane.

There had been beautiful snowdrops at Edinburgh Zoo, but somehow yellow crocus seem more spring-like.

Later in the week, I had to start getting ready for my short visit to Malta. My sister has a horrible persistent cough, so we decide to go somewhere warmer for a few days to see if that would help to clear it up.

Edinburgh 6

Friday 15th February

It really was the most beautiful day, the sun shining and the sky the most amazing almost Mediterranean blue, so R. and I set off for the Zoo. Edinburgh Zoo is up a very steep hillside so we intended to take the Hilltop Safari Bus to the very top of the hill and then walk down. Unfortunately, the Hilltop Safari Bus had limited availability, which seemed an odd thing to do during half term week, when the zoo was guaranteed to be bursting with people with small children, pushchairs etc. Even odder, most of the eating places were closed. Fortunately, we had taken a picnic so all we needed was somewhere to sit down out of the wind. A woman in the safari bus queue told us that closed cafés were normal for holiday time, and we should be glad there was any café open at all. She said she had once brought her child there for a birthday treat, and they had to leave the zoo to get something to eat! This seemed very odd, and we began to get the impression of a place that had not really planned for so many visitors. There were too many people in the queue for the Hillside Safari Bus so we couldn't get on, and the driver was very grumpy. No doubt he was fed up with the disgruntled queues of people who couldn't fit into the bus! We walked up to the Monkey Walkthrough, where we were asked to use hand-wash gel to clean our hands - only there wasn't any as the container was empty! Later, we found the dirty Ladies loo with no toilet paper, so overall we got the impression of a place that was not well organised for receiving visitors in the numbers to be expected at half term. The zoo staff themselves, apart from the very grumpy bus driver, were uniformly friendly, charming and informative - though we did think that people placed in the enclosures to talk about the animals we were seeing might have said something to the large numbers of people who were disregarding the notices forbidding flash photography and frightening the animals. The glass through which you viewed the animals showed a great many reflections though, so often I took photos of myself, rather than the animal, so perhaps that explained why so many people were using flash.

All these complaints aside, we enjoyed the zoo very much, because we really enjoyed the animals. The Monkey Walkthrough began as a disappointment because the monkeys had not yet ventured out into the sun, and we had to see them indoors and behind glass, but they were very close.

They are White-faced Saki Monkeys, and really quite appealing; you can see we had disturbed them at lunch, but they didn't seem to care. Only the male has a white face, apparently. This was one of the photos that had reflections - of my face - but I think I have managed to cut most of it out with Photoshop.

After a brief pause to admire the rhea and some deer-like animal whose name we could not find (not all of the enclosures are as well labelled as they might be) we went to look at the chimpanzees. These were also indoors rather than in their enclosures, but we were able to see them eating and relaxing. Unfortunately, it was so bright outside that my photos are rubbish, so I won't post any here, but we stayed for quite a while watching them. Most were lying in their nests or along branches, or lazily toying with a few ropes; they looked as though they had just woken up, or perhaps they were just relaxing after an early lunch.

We spent some time in a walk-through aviary where there were some very brightly coloured birds, though mostly they stayed too deep in the foliage or flew past us too fast to photograph. There was a very helpful woman there who gave us information - the white bird that flashed past and made so much noise was a Balinese Starling apparently, though I think I saw one in a big walk-through aviary in Hong Kong where it was called a Balinese Mynah Bird. It flew too fast for a photo this time, so I can't be certain it was the same bird, but my Hong Kong picture of what looks like it is at http://paulandnorasworldtour.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/last-of-hong-kong.html

The woman in the aviary scattered some meal worms for a large Jungle Turkey which had the most incredibly beautiful iridescent feathers, and we were able to admire the feathers as the turkey picked around our feet. She was close enough for me to worry about the safety of my shoe laces! Again, she was hard to photograph because she moved her head so quickly to pick up the mealworms, so her head is out of focus in all my pictures. My phone camera clearly doesn't have a sufficiently fast lens. 

Another exhibit called 'Living Links' has Capuchin and Squirrel Monkeys, and they were mostly outside where they were scampering around and arguing over tasty bits of their lunch. The smaller baby squirrel monkeys were inside, and they were absolutely charming.

They leapt and played and tussled right on the window-sill in front of us, though again my photos are just streaks, they are so fast.

All this looking a monkeys having lunch had made us hungry, so we stopped to have our picnic. Then we went to see the Pygmy Mongooses (Mongeece? Mongice?) They are very appealing, and we spent a while looking at them, especially the four tiny babies which seemed to have got on top of their nest box and were wondering whether or not to jump down; it was a considerable drop for them, more than a foot, and they were only the size of mice. Then, all of a sudden there were only three of them on top of the box, and a bigger mongoose below the box seemed to be eating what looked like one of them. We departed hastily, feeling quite heart-broken.

The penguins were charming, as usual. They are having a new enclosure built, (which looks very smart indeed) so they are housed in a couple of temporary enclosures, and there is, sadly, no Penguin Walk at present. We were disappointed about this, and so, we thought, were the penguins. Some of them were pacing up and down as if waiting to be taken out to walk, so I imagine they look forward to it as well.

Next stop was the koalas. Apparently Edinburgh Zoo is the only zoo in the UK to have koalas, and they are certainly appealing. The smaller one had only just arrived and was clearly trying to get over her jet-lag, as she kept her eyes pressed tightly shut all the time; or perhaps she just hated all the camera flashes.

R. felt a bit cheated as the koalas we had seen on our visit to Australia in 1999 had all been asleep too; but fortunately the bigger male koala was awake and looked at us sleepily for a while before crawling up and branch and going back to sleep.

There are two huge rhinos in this zoo, and I have never been so close to a rhino in my life as I was to this one. It was convinced that the bushes bordering its enclosure must be especially delicious, so it was having them for lunch. It was so close I could have stroked it! In fact, it was so big I couldn't get all of it in the photo.

I knew rhinos were big, but this one seemed particularly huge, though as you can see, the horn isn't very big. We looked in on the tapirs next door, which were also bigger than I remember, but my photos weren't much use, and we went on to the big cats.

I did see quite a few of these, though often only briefly, as they move extremely fast. The Golden cat made only a brief appearance at the top of its enclosure, but I was very excited to see the Wolverine, which I have never seen before. Unfortunately, it hid behind a rock before I could get the camera out. The jaguars leapt about too fast to photograph, but they are very beautiful; the male appears to have a black coat, though when it catches the light, you can see the spots under it, so that he looks slightly mottled. The female just looks like a heavier version of a leopard. The tiger is enormous, but was lying quietly in a tree house at the far end of his enclosure, rather too far away to photograph. I managed several photos of the Amur Leopard as he was pacing about just in front of me, but he also was moving rather fast so my photos are mostly out of focus. Fortunately, he sat down at one point, so I managed a better one.

I spent quite a while with the otters who were also delightful, playing and wriggling and squeaking and whistling right beside me.

One of them heard the camera click and squeaked back at it. They were waiting to be fed, and when the food arrived, they had to fight the gull for it - seagulls like fish too!

We also spent some time with the Meerkats, as they are very entertaining; they played and ran and jumped and quarrelled and dug holes and stood on their hind legs, as usual. Then suddenly nearly all of them stood upright in a row; this was because the keeper was approaching, with their lunch. They obviously knew, to the minute, when to expect him!

The highlight of our zoo visit was obviously the pandas, and R. was very excited as she has never seen a live panda. She fully expected to be disappointed, but we were extremely lucky to see both of them awake and moving about. We had a timed ticket, and even then had to join a huge queue and be let in and taken round by a very enthusiastic and informative member of the zoo staff. We went indoors first, to where the pandas have their bedrooms. Tian Tian the female was sweetly asleep in her bedroom when we went in, with her paws curled over her nose, but Yang Guang the male had just woken up and was wandering about sleepily wondering what to do next. After looking out of his door, he decided to go outside into his enclosure and enjoy the sun, so we turned our attention to Tian Tian. As soon as he had gone out, she woke up and yawned, then decided to get down and go outside into her enclosure.

At that point, we all went outside too. Tian Tian wandered about in her enclosure, then went over to the gate between the two enclosures and looked through, to see what Yang Guang was doing. At this point, as soon as he noticed her, he went back inside! We had walked round to his enclosure by this time, and you can't go backwards because another group is following on, so that was our panda viewing over, though we were still able to ask questions about pandas. Still, we were very lucky to see so much of them, and very much closer than the ones I saw in Hong Kong.

We had hoped to see the Asiatic Lion, but R. was too exhausted to walk back uphill at that point, so we decided to have another go at the Safari Bus and set off down the hill. Unfortunately, it is not well signposted, and we wasted some time trying to find the way, so we missed the last bus up the hill by 2 minutes! Still we had a look at the Painted Hunting Dogs on the way down. They were in their den relaxing after lunch, so we had a good close up view of them; my photos are no good though, because of the reflections in the glass. We also had a good view of their lunch, which appeared to have been the carcass of something about the size of a sheep; it was currently being enjoyed by some ravens as we hurried past it.

So we left and caught the bus home, having enjoyed our day very much, in spite of a few problems. The animals are wonderful, we saw lots of interesting things and the zoo clearly does a lot of valuable research work, which was generally well-explained on the way round. We had the feeling that the zoo would benefit from some better visitor management though!< r />