Home time!

We caught a local bus to Valletta – traffic here is as bad as Sydney! It’s another hot day which seems to be made worse by the fact that all the buildings are made of a light sandstone type of material which reflects the heat.
There were some very interesting sculptures at the city entrance gate. Valletta reminded me a Lisbon because the walk took use up and down very steep hills. It seems to be a city of churches. Sue had downloaded the walking tour on her phone so that we never made a wrong step and were told about all the main points of interest. We visited the main Cathedral and listened, via hand held devices, to the information about it. It is a very grand place – with so many sculptures and paintings. I’m not into the old style art works but there was a painting about the beheading of John the Baptist by Caravaggio which blew me away.
We have tried a couple of Maltese restaurants – tasty fish but I gave rabbit a miss! Food is reasonably priced here which is interesting as very little is produced here bar potatoes!
After debating whether we should have a day trip to the island of Gozo we gave it a miss. If we had wanted to spend the day with a boat load of drunken, sunburnt ‘youngies’ it would have been easy. But to spend a more peaceful day was going to be more complicated so we decided on a chill out day. I walked into the main area of Sliema and was semi amazed at the number of English stores there were.
Finally braved the very rocky terrain, no sand here, to have a swim. You had to search carefully for a safe place to enter the water.  Once in it was quite pleasant, the water was warm and the swell not too bad. It’s so salty that you  just floated. You could tell, by the rock formations that they were used to collect the salt as the water evaporated. How people just lay flat out on these rocks all day sunning themselves I don’t know!
Yesterday we all left to go in different directions. I headed to England. A 3.5 hour flight from Malta was made very exciting as just as we were about to land we shot back up into the air and made a big loop – another plane taking off aborted the landing according to the pilot! I then caught a bus to Heathrow as I’d landed at Luton. I spent the night in a hotel  at Heathrow and have a couple more hours until check-in.
I have enjoyed my trip and although happy to go home just hope it’s not too cold – I can hear my sister’s reaction to that comment 😆