Malteasers

Our first new country of Z2A2 was up next, Malta.

But before we even took flight, we pretty quickly changed our opinion of Cagliari airport, as we moved on from Lea’s afore mentioned best sandwich of the trip, to barely making it onto our first ever Ryan Air flight. The amazing sandwich was a surprise, the hour or so delay certainly wasn’t a surprise. But it was a surprise when, full bellied, we wandered to the gate 30 minutes or so before the updated departure time (with no direction saying we needed to do so) and saw “LAST CALL” and managed to sneak on in last place. Perhaps we missed the announcements of “STEINART, STEINART”. We then departed the gate exactly 17 minutes earlier than on the display (but still 63 minutes later than on the ticket). The flight to Valletta was almost long enough to start feeling better about what might have been (had we missed the delayed flight) only to be shocked into the present by the “spontaneous” applause upon landing…apparently a feature of flying this airline. I guess we’ll find out next time…hopefully.

Malta was our first country where they drive on the left side of the road, so, of course…we didn’t hire a car in order to keep our: “James sits left, Lea sits right” streak going. It was a very quick stop, just two Knights of Malta, a bit of a Malt-teaser. After a plethora of pork, boar, snails and pigeon on the menus so far, James was delighted to finally find some Maltese rabbit, but was a bit sad not to have found any of the famed Falcon on the menus. The most likely opportunity for the latter would be for Lea to continue her streak and be struck in the head by a stray local cork…a Maltese Falcon if you will, but without a previously mentioned former chandler handy, we were unlikely to Cross this off our Maltese list. Ok that’s it for these terrier-able Maltese puns. Turns out that, despite having a friend for over a quarter of a century whose family is from there, I really didn’t know anything about Malta…I had thought Gozo was a TV clown from the 60s.

In less than 2 days:

We were greeted with a real first, the pleasure of a PAYG aircon, where we used our last spare 1 and 2 Euro toilet coins to prevent us from not-so-spontaneous combustion in one of the most recognisably hottest islands of the world
Lea got to have cheese with her lobster pasta, making the most of not being in Italy…but again taking it too far by ordering a pecorino wine
We spent a day on Gozo in a pink tuk-tuk named Barbie
- Whose widower driver was very quick to point out he was no longer allowed to do any “hard work” due to all his heart attacks, while hurtling through the streets of Gozo
- Got confused by his super ocker Aussie accent until we found out he’d been married to an Aussie for 40 years before she sadly passed, after somehow managing herself to pick up Maltese and all it’s 30 odd letters including SIX vowels
- Got taken out in a tiny boat through the caves where our skipper was kind enough to tell you about all the recent collapsing caves
- Met a Brit who was even more impressed to score an extra carafe of free house wine than we were (I cant’t do justice to how excited this guy was, and how embarrassed his wife was…but we felt it IRL as he offered to share it with me and then I saw Lea’s face as she looked at his wife with empathy)
- Had to pretend we had children to get smuggled onto a early boat back to Malta because our “Aussie” guide did us a solid after we left (judging by the hug he gave Lea) the biggest tip he’s had for a while, and the Spanish ladies we’d shared a van with (sans enfants) were not impressed by our cutting in…and certainly weren’t impressed with me bidding them “farewell and adieu”, only to end up back in the same van o Valletta and pretending we don’t speak English as they berated us all the way home…maybe, but we don’t speak eSpanish so they may have been talking about swimming in the blue lagoon of Camino.
Then, the next day, nine years on from Scorpio v Scorpion, poor Lea was bitten by a wasp for the first time ever causing us to consider is it time for her to take up smoking…again? (see Z2A1)
Thought we’d found a winery on Malta only to be dropped off on yet another garden path, with our Uber driver asking “Are you sure you want to get out here?” (200m of baking hot sun in the middle of nowhere on an island in the middle of nowhere we were finally confident on our previously pretend confident answer of ‘maybe…’)
Avoided a nightmare as our ferry to Sicily departed…17 minutes (again!) ahead of what we, and the entire internet, port etc…thought was the schedule
Had a very strange lost in translation moment on our ferry when James tried to order white wine, only for it to be confused with “Wifi”. I was so confused, but can only feel for the poor Filipina girl trying to deal with a mumbling Australian asking for 2 glasses of Wifi, and pointing to the plastic cups with his phone over and over
And given this potential pain point, the early departure and attempts to drink wifi, we had never been so pleased to see a silver map of Tassie, signalling this intrepid ship, St John Paull II, was made in Hobart and not land locked Poland as one might have expected.