Gozo; Monday, 15 October, 2018

By the morning the storm had blown itself out and the skies were clear with bright sunshine. After breakfast we walked up the hill to catch the bus down into the harbour to pick up the Open Top bus tour of the island.

The bus completed the first part of the tour round the Eastern side of the island and back into Rabat, where it was promptly curtailed due to a road closure that prevented it from heading west, so instead we went straight back to Mgarr and headed back out as the next tour!

By the time we made it back to Rabat for the second time the traffic closure was over and we were able to continue round to the west side of the island taking in the Ta ‘Pinu church and the former site of the Azure window.

When I’d visited in 2015 the Azure window was one of the highlights of the island – a large limestone arch over the sea on the western end of the island it was one of the main tourist sites, but during storms in March 2017 the arch collapsed and nothing of interest is now left, though it doesn’t appear to have stopped everyone pouring off the buses here or the vast number of tourist tat stalls.

We stayed on the bus to complete the full circuit back to Mgarr and then caught the bus back up to the hotel for a late afternoon drink on the terrace.

We’d decided to head back to Xlendi for dinner, and the hotel very kindly booked us a taxi to get out there, which was a lot quicker and easier than the two buses that would otherwise have been required. The very nice taxi driver dropped us off right by all the restaurants and gave us his card so we could call him back when we were finished.

We had another nice sunset drink in the harbour before walking round to a different, but equally excellent restaurant for dinner.

Stuffed again we food I called for the taxi and we waddled the short distance back to where the taxi was able to pick us up from which whisked us back to the hotel.