Treasure Islands

February 2025

Gozo

Yes, the second largest of the two main islands of Malta, a place called Gozo, was our  destination for the next day. It was named after the Aragonese word for joy.

Completely aptly.

Carmen, Claudi and I strolled down the great walled city to our ferry.

It was another beautiful day. We've been blessed with sunshine the whole time we've been here.

Left: The big festa is this weekend.

Left: Pulling in to Gozo

Centre: Why thank you

Right: Once arriving at Gozo we immediately left the small port town of Mgarr behind us, and strolled along the coast.

Shouldn't let some prick get in the way of true love.

Centre: Claudi had a swim near here. She's keen, as the water's very cold.

Left: Bottom shelf

We walked to the cute little town of Ghajnsielem.

We had a coffee at the café on the right, and chatted with David, the old guy sitting there. He's a lovely northern Englishman who's lived here for 40 years. He and his wife brought up there three kids here, now they've all disappeared around the globe, to Australia, the US, and England.

Left: Good luck with that one

Centre: The inside of the café, complete with barbie

Carmen and Claudi had plans to go to a permaculture farm, so I left them to it, and wandered off down the road to the town of Rabat, which lies pretty much in the centre of Gozo.

Left: Animal pens

Centre: Cool old cemetery

Right: This windmill was pumping up water from a well, and the trucks were collecting it. I imagine water is a hugely valuable resource around here, especially outside the wetter winter period.

Strolling through Rabat

Left: The whole place is enshrined with, well, shrines

He's got the whole football, in his hands. Or it's the unroundest world in history.

I went in to the incredible Basilica of St George. I felt completely domeinated, and blown away.

San Ġorg and his dragon.

Slay.

Eventually I climbed the hill to the incredible citadella, the ancient fortified town, protected by huge and massively thick walls. There was a whole small city within the walls, and they even had their own crop areas inside. It was originally built as a fortress against all those invaders from the sea, and eventually became a huge medieval city.

Left: An air raid shelter used by locals to protect themselves and their kids during the tragic and relentless bombing campaigns by the Axis powers during World War II. Malta was one of the most bombed places in all of Europe.

The views were amazing from the top.

These guys were painting this wall, standing on planks of wood that were dangling from two ropes. When they painted the ends of the wall, they'd hang right out over the edge, holding on to the rope with one arm, and onto their paint rollers in the other. It was quite scary watching them, especially earlier, when they were up higher.

I took the local bus back to the port town, and then jumped back on the ferry to Valletta.

They gave us all a pass for this lift. It saved a lot of stair climbing, I can tell ya.

The top of our street.

That night the fiesta commenced, with a music performance at a large band room in the old city.

I went there looking for it after dinner, and basically found it by chance. When I arrived I was the only tourist. The place was pretty much full of chubby and balding short men, many of them smoking cigarettes and drinking beer. They were a friendly bunch. The whole centre of the room was full of empty chairs and music stands, ready for the huge band.

Then the band leader called the band to their seats, and I realised that all the balding men weren't, in fact, the audience, but the band itself, as there was hardly anyone left in the place after they all took their seats.

But that didn't last long, because as soon as they started playing the place filled up quickly. There were no seats to be had though.

It was a great cultural experience, but after a half a dozen songs of exactly the same type of music, I decided to take my leave. As I was to discover later on during the weekend, these bands have huge repertoires of songs, and can play for hours, but stylistically they hardly ever vary - it's all sort of military sounding band marches, mostly using nursery-rhyme-ish major chord combinations.

The locals love it though, I even noticed young people on the streets dancing to it on the weekend sometimes.

Getting ready to party.

The Three Cities

The next morn, after coffee and cakes at Claudi's favourite café, we took the ferry across the harbour. I tried Maltese coffee there, which is black coffee spiced with cloves and aniseed, and served in a tall glass. It's forbidden to add milk. It's not my fave flavour, and was a little weak. Not sure if they're all like that, or whether I just got a not-so-good one.

We sailed by these super duper expensive yachts. Very oligarchical.

The ferry arrived at Birgu, and we climbed the hill into the old town. Many houses have shrines and wall hangings on the front walls of their homes. They're everywhere.

There's loads of great knockers around too.

Left: Now that's random

Right: An auberge is a hostel specifically set up for aubergines, oh wait, no it's not, it's for people, sorry. Each of the different branches of the Knights of St John had their own auberges. This is a French one, which is handy because at least they'd know what it actually is.

Above Right: Why the special treatment for renderers?

Above Left: Maltese people love birds. We've seen loads in cages around the place.

Oh, does that mean they love them or hate them?

Apparently Maltese are known for netting migratory songbirds too, and eating them, which certainly ruffles the feathers of environmentalists (and rightly so, as many of them are rare or endangered). And anyway most of the birds are quite small, and not really a meal anyway, just a snack, like chips. Finch and chips.

In fact, not only do the Maltese eat songbirds in their traditional dishes, but they also like to keep them in cages as pets. And so do Italians. The Maltese have captured and killed so many finches in Malta that there's now very few left, and so they actually buy smuggled ones from Italy, which provides motivation to bird smugglers in Italy.

You see loads of budgie smugglers on the beaches in Italy.

Between October and December it's still actually legal to capture songbirds in Malta, but many people are trying to change this.

Below Left: This is a bocca club, that game where you roll weighted balls, like lawn bowls.

Above Right: Frankie's café was closed. Bummer, I miss him.

Left: Eventually we strolled right over to the north coast, and looked out towards southern Sicily. No way we could see it though, as it's about 100km away, as the ferry ploughs.

Centre: This is some kind of a forge. We think. But we couldn't quite work out what was once forged here. Maybe military stuff.

Right: Lucky cockerels, in such a green place.

Eventually we ferried ourselves back to our side of the harbour, passed through Victoria Gate, another entrance into the old city, and headed home, for our last night of hanging out together.

It's been so nice being with Carmen and Claudi for the past week, we've explored lots of Malta together, had some nice music sessions (not enough though), and, of course, we've eaten like royalty.

The city put on a fireworks display to mark the occasion of their leaving.

You're On Your Own Kid

The very next morning they left way too early, to take the ferry back to Pozzallo in Sicily, and then faced a long series of buses back home to Germany, via a day in Catania, and a day in Rome.

So, my long period of hanging out with friends, which I've been doing for over two months now, has finally come to an end.

I love how this long convoluted trip of mine has been so varied. I've had periods of time alone, time socialising or being on the road with other travellers, time staying with friends at their homes, periods of catching up with old friends who've come to visit me from elsewhere, and a stint of working as well.

It's been amazing, and exactly the sort of mix I like.

So, just to soak up the luxury of having my own space, I decided to stay in the apartment in Valletta for a few more days, alone.

Alone and Unlonely

I'm a lucky boy. A gusting rainy front came in last night, and today is stormy and blustery.

So it brought me a rainbow.

I spent a lot of the day at home, but went wandering in Floriana later, brolly in tow. I like the Floriana area, it's quiet and open, with gardens and sculptures and lots of places to wander.

Below Right: Yeah, it's an Anzac memorial. Remember that Malta was still part of the UK when Anzac troops got slaughtered in Gallipoli.

I went to the Spazju Kreativ, a beautiful Contemporary Arts Centre in the old town.

Local artists have been very creative in there.

Above Right: The steps into the beautiful old building

Above Centre: This was an actual old television, with a version of one of the first computer games, sort of like a tennis game, with the ball bouncing off your little movable wall, and then getting bounced off the other person's movable wall. You move the wall up and down so the slow moving ball can't get through.

But the ball in this case is a boatload of refugees, getting bounced around from country to country, unable to land.

Above Left: The arrival of refugees is a hot topic in Europe. There's a lot of them, and some political parties use racism and bias against them to gain votes.

There's been a number of crazy attacks on innocent civilians in Germany recently, and in other countries like France, Belgium and the UK for a number of years now. Some have been carried out by refugees, for a whole variety of reasons, including radicalisation, severe trauma from war, and mental health issues.

European citizens are genuinely worried about the problem, but often their mainstream political representatives don't seem to listen to them, so many voters have been turning to racist far right parties as a result.

One of the main problems is trying to separate political from economic refugees. Political refugees need to leave their country of origin because their lives are in danger from state armies or other armed groups. There's a genuine responsibility to help these people.

Economic refugees often leave their country because there's no chance of a good life there for themselves or their kids, due to their lack of money, or education, or being born in the wrong end of town. And, in fact, often the economic refugees aren't actually the extremely poor, as they've had at least some access to money, in order to pay for their smuggled passage.

Governments are legally bound to protect political refugees, but they often don't. And political parties deliberately muddy the difference between the two refugee groups, and use strategies such as blaming crime on whole ethnic groups, rather than on individuals.

And, of course, the root cause of most refugee movement across the globe is either gross inequality, war or discrimination.

I mean, it's all gross really.

There happened to be a lot of fannies hanging around the walls of the gallery today.

This was the best artwork ever, by a local female artist. The screen on the right showed a film of a puppet vulva, its moving lips and a Londoner's female voice verbalising a huge array of different names for female genitalia that she'd heard, one by one. Some of them were hilarious, so I recorded the whole spiel on my phone.

Some of the names (most of which I'd never heard) included : mop, goochie coochie, cookie, cocksocket, beef curtains, penis fly trap, wizard's sleeve, penis glove, fishlips, vertical bacon sandwich, cocksqueezer, the notorious VAG, sausage wallet, scrambled eggs between the legs, furburger, love rug, Velcro love triangle, flesh cabin, vertical smile, man in the mud, slotball, cockholster, calamari cockring, spermsucker, fortune cookie, spunkpot, tuna time, land down under, the plunger, bearded cannon, bikini biscuit, hairy furnace, furry purse, cockpot, fuzzybucket, the jaws of life, baby oven, bush tucker, field of dreams, cherry cocktail, seafood canyon, devil's hole, vacuum cleaner, condom holder, Lawrence of Arabia, the toothless blowjob, ham slice, cock turtleneck, pussy cushion, cockzilla, dirty hamster, breadbox, tampon holder, the temple of cream, easybake oven, and, of course, map of Tassie.

And I could go on. That's only the first half of the recording, you get the idea.

The vulva. Something so talked about, so desired, and so revered. And so infinitely named (mainly by men of course).

Our Divine Vulvacious Mother

Daphne

This is a pic of the memorial to Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was assassinated in 2017 when hitmen detonated a bomb hidden under her car. Daphne was a Maltese investigative journalist, who was exposing corruption within the Maltese government. The attack that killed her wasn't the first time she'd faced death in her many years of writing brave exposés about people in power.

Some months earlier her house was set alight while she and her family slept, and car tyres had been piled against the door to prevent them escaping. They managed to get out anyway.

In 2016, the Panama Papers, a series of leaks which exposed the financial dealings and tax evasion practices of many politicians and wealthy elite around the world, made possible through the creation of shelf companies, also allegedly revealed a number of payments to the Maltese PM's wife from the Azerbaijani government, which is highly illegal. Daphne exposed this, and many other crimes, and eventually paid for it with her life.

Local Maltese citizens immediately built a memorial to Daphne at a site that pays tribute to the Great Siege of Malta in 1565, and citizens laid flowers there daily, but the government dismantled the memorial every day, with the people who lay them often shouted at or even assaulted by government supporters.

Not only that, but a number of government ministers and other wealthy people in Malta sued Daphne for libel after her murder, adding to a whole suite of libel suits she'd been facing before she was killed.

The EU and the Maltese Constitutional Court have made a number of rulings about the case, supporting protestors' rights to create a memorial for her, and expressing concern about legal processes in the country.

The three hitmen who killed Daphne have been jailed, but the wealthy businessman who was charged with ordering the killing, whose power company's contraversial contract with the government had been exposed by Daphne shortly before her murder, was recently released on bail, without a judge having been appointed for the trial within the specified limit.

A 2021 public enquiry into the case ruled that the state should bear responsibility for her death, because it provided a culture of impunity for those that had silenced her. Well yeah, that's obvious, but a fat lot of good that ruling did, as the government just ignores it anyway.

Widespread protests however did eventually lead to the resignation of the PM a couple of years ago, but, according to media reports, corruption is alive and well here.

Below: An exhibition by ceramicist Paul Scerri.

The rain stopped and there was a big church service for the weekend's religious festival, celebrating the Maltese patron saint, St Paul the Apostle.

Above Left: I've been living on these delicious pastries, stuffed with every beautiful thing you could imagine.

Above Right: Later I watched this young band play really good covers of various jazz, blues and rock classics.

Snap Quiz

Ok, fun time. Name these famous people ...

Answers: Michael Jackson, Snoop Dogg, Jim Carrey, I don't know - let me know if u do, Elton John, Gigi D'Agostino (a famous Italian DJ and music producer), Walt Disney, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

And E.T. of course.

Yeah, some of them are pretty iffy.

Iffy you ask me anyway.

The next day the apartment doorphone rang, and it was Frans, a lovely local man who came to deliver Claudi's phone, which she'd left on the rooftop, and he'd found. It was such a relief for Claudi (even though she was already gone, back to Germany). She'd looked everywhere for it, and thought it was gone forever.

But Frans asked around our large apartment block, and finally tracked us down. I thanked him profusely, and told Claudi I'll send it back to her.

There were happenings in town at night, as the weather had improved. Before I knew it I was in the midst of the setting up of a band parade, which eventually began moving through the crowded streets, the huge band playing loud brass tunes which everyone knew, and the parade getting bigger and bigger after every turn into a new street, as more and more people joined in.

The parade I was in then met up with another band parade, coming from another direction, and then suddenly we were all one fat long moving caterpillar, made of fiesta-ing raucous celebratory people. It was an absolute hoot!

The parade culminated in a massive fireworks display at the waterfront. Everyone was in such a great mood, and by chance I met up with Frans, the local guy who'd delivered Claudi's phone to me that morning, and I hung out with him and his wonderful family for awhile.

People are incredibly friendly here.

The fireworks were going off in the streets too.

Space Travel

Yeah, it's so good to have some space, my very own space.

I haven't had too much of that lately actually, because I've been staying with friends, and not doing my normal cycling, and staying in my tent or in my own room.

So it feels good to hang here in Malta a little longer.

I could definitely stay way longer than that, because the place is so beautiful, and it feels so relaxed here.

But the thing is, I already have a few other plans, to meet other friends, and I wanna get back to my bike.

So sometimes you just have to make the difficult choice between an amazing option and another amazing option.

Life's tough innit.

But someone's gotta eat it❤️

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