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!
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