Sliema; Wednesday, 20 January, 2016

The hotels breakfast room is located on the 8th floor, with stunning views over Sliema Bay and Valletta, consequently everyone appeared to take much longer than people normally do in a hotel to eat their breakfasts, myself included.

With the first round of sightseeing done of the morning I headed out of the hotel and across the road to the kiosk for the hop-on-hop-off bus tours, where I purchased my ticket for the North tour and a discounted ticket for a later day (or Friday as I’d already decided) for the South tour of the island.

The North tour takes in many of the key sights, as its name suggests, in the North of the Island. Travelling out via the stunning domed church at Mostar and the cities or Rabat and Mdina before heading inland to the town of Mgarr and its ancient temples. Then it’s a quick detour down to the sands of Golden Bay on the countries North West coast before traversing the whole width of the island (at this point not more than a couple of Kilometres) to the North East coast at St Paul’s Bay.

From St Paul’s Bay the bus continued down the coast, passing through the near continuous costal development and back into Sliema.

I hopped off in Sliema and found a nice seaside restaurant for a light lunch before heading back up to the bus stop to repeat the tour, this time taking in the views from the opposite side of the bus.

As the tours take nearly three hours to do a full circuit (you do get value for money from them), it was almost dusk by the time I made it back to Sliema again.

From the open-top bus I headed the short distance to the regular bus stop and picked up a bus into Valletta where I went for a bit of a wander and stopped to have dinner.

After dinner I went for a bit more of a wander, taking in some of the areas of the city that have seen significant refurbishment to the fortifications since I was last hear 9 years ago, in particular the area around the Prime Ministers offices.

By now my legs were starting to ache so I headed down to the bus station and picked up the bus back into Sliema and my welcoming bed.