Ancient and modern, temples and cities

I hauled myself out of bed, feeling like it was much earlier than it actually was. Between Ohio, the change to daylight savings, and another hour lost between London time and Malta, somehow mid-morning has begun to feel like hours before daybreak. But I had a long list of places I wanted to see in the few days that I am in Malta, so I grabbed breakfast at the hotel and headed out, equipped with Lonely Planet guide and a bus map.

My first destination was the south coast of the island, far opposite from the northeast corner where I'm staying. I caught a bus back into Valetta, then a second bus back out toward the far coast. The buses aren't entirely comfortable - most of them predate the Kennedy assassination, and probably haven't got new shocks since the first Bush administration - but they are a fine way to see the scenery go by. And though Northern European tourists fill the seats on certain routes on the circuit with their sensible shoes and cruise-wear get-ups, the bus system is actually designed for local mass transit and is thus a pretty cheap way to get around.

I wasn't entirely sure where to get off the bus (the stops are sometimes marked, and sometimes seem to be determined by the driver's whim), but I figured all the other tourists on this rural bus line were headed for the same place, so I could just follow them when the whole crowd hopped off. And I was right. The bus stopped at a nondescript crossroad, and I followed a couple dozen camera-laden toward the signs marked Mnajdra and Hagar Qim.

The dual ruins of Mnajdra and Hagar Qim make up an ancient temple complex, one of the oldest stone buildings still standing on earth. They far predate the Egyptian pyramids and were built not long before Stonehenge. They sit on an arid slope above the Mediterranean blue, long buried but now re-excavated and partly re-built in the modern interpretation of what they might have originally looked like. Not unlike Stonehenge, their orientation captures certain dawn light on the two solstices - or so say the guide books.

Between the two temples, a stone-paved path rolled out down the hillside. Several less ancient remnants - a fortification tower built only several hundred years ago, and a monument to twentieth-century Maltese governor - so I hiked cross-country to see those too. From there, the tiny island of Fifla peaked up out of the sea; like most small marine islands, it's home to thousands of seabirds who've staked out claim on the breeding grounds - and was once (though no longer) a target of shooting practice for the British military during their tenure on Malta.

With it's location in the middle of the sea, not much farther from Africa than it is from Europe, Malta has been occupied by just about every European empire worth it's salt - the Phoenicians, the Carthaginians, the Romans, Byzantines from the east, Arabs from the south, Normans on their way to conquering Sicily, Castilians, the French, the Spanish, the Turks, the French again under Napolean (who was born not far away on Corsica), and finally the British. When Britain let Malta go a few decades back, it marked the first time that the Maltese people ruled Malta in written history.

In between all that, a few centuries back, the island was gifted to the Knights of Saint John, an order founded during the crusades to alternately wage war on various infidels and provide medical help along the crusade routes to Christians battling the same enemy. They still exist as a peculiar political entity, a nation without a homeland, being recognized as sovereign and existing outside Italian law within its enclaves in Rome.

Or so I paraphrase from the eminent scholarly work known as the Lonely Planet guide book.

In any case, the Maltese language reminds me very much of Catalan, that linguistic oddity you find in the north of Spain, backed right up against the neighboring (and totally unrelated) Basque language. Only, with Catalan I always felt I could possibly understand it if I listened just that much harder, as it derives from every language that was in sailing distance from Barcelona: Spanish, Italian, French, even German and the like. But Malti, while similarly derived from the boundaries of its historical trade, is far more deeply rooted in the Semitic ethnic stew - Arabic, Hebrew, languages where I can't pick out more than a word or two, or even guess the pronunciation from the script. Some believe that Malti is the closest living language to what the Phoenicians spoke all those millennia ago.

I took a long lunch at a restaurant on the crest of the hill above the ruins. It didn't have a view of the ocean, but of the landscape of the island's interior. Most of the land is terraced in row upon row of rough stone walls that might have been put up yesterday or might have been put up a thousand years ago and you couldn't tell the difference. With row on row of stone, it almost appears as if the entire land is made of stone, unless you look down on it from above to see the patches of green between.

After lunch I caught the bus back again, via the coast where aquamarine waters overlie white Mediterranean sand and remnant arches of eroding limestone still hang precariously from what was once cliffs. Back in Valetta, I thought I'd see the some of the city before going back north to Qawra. But the city was hot and dusty, and though there are many sights to see, I didn't spend long there. The tap water in Malta is quite drinkable but so heavily chlorinated that it's less of a taste and more of a texture; I hadn't been drinking much, and with the heat I'm not accustomed to after winter in London, I probably should have been more careful.

Back at the hotel, I took a nap and went out again for dinner. I got Italian food down on the tourist strip by the beach, then walked the length of the short peninsula that houses the towns of Qawra and Bugibba. Night had turned the air from warm to chilly, a nice break from the day. I went back to the hotel, read a little, and turned in.