Sliema; Thursday, 21 January, 2016

Using some of the knowledge I’d picked up the previous day from the open-top tour I was heading out to visit several of the key sights, using the public buses so that I wasn’t so reliant on the open-top bus. After breakfast I headed over to the bus stop and picked up the bus out to Mostar to change for a bus round to Mgarr.

I hopped off on the edge of town and wandered up to the Skorba Temple where I found that to visit you have to buy a ticket from the council offices in Mgarr itself. I had a wander around the outside of the site – in reality there isn’t much to see at this site – and then walked the mile or so down into Mgarr itself and to the Council offices to pick up a ticket to look round the Ta’ Hagrat Temples, located in the centre of town.

Having looked round those temples, which were worth the entrance fee, I headed back to the bus stop and picked up the bus over to Mostar to have a look around the spectacular domed church. Unfortunately, the church takes an extended lunch break from 11:45 to 15:00 and I’d arrived at 12:30 so there was no chance to have a look inside.

Instead, with good luck, as I was pondering what to do, the bus heading to Rabat turned up so I hopped on that and headed up to the old capital where I picked up another land train to take a tour of Rabat and the surrounding countryside, from which there were some stunning views.

Back in Rabat I headed over to look round some of the Catacombs, starting at the small St Catald Catacombs and then moving on to the much larger collection at St Pauls.

With the Catacombs done I wandered back towards Mdina, stopping for a brief late lunch in a café overlooking the walls of the city, before heading into the fortified old capital (or very old capital – it has been over 400 years since Valletta became the capital) for a wander round. At the far end of Mdina the bastions come to a point from which there are stunning views down most of the length of the East coast of the island from St Pauls Bay in the North (the very North of the island and Gozo being hidden by a hill) down to Freeport at the Southernmost tip. I sat taking in the view for quite a long time, at which point I realised that I needed to make a move back if I didn’t want to miss the hourly bus back to Sliema.

The bus managed to catch the back end of the Maltese rush-hour, particularly along the coast road and crawled back to Sliema, so by the time I got back to the hotel I was really quite hungry. Rather than heading somewhere else for dinner I instead stopped off at the restaurant attached to the hotel and had a very nice dinner there, before turning in for an early night.