Sliema; Sunday, 28 May, 2017

A bit more of a lie-in this morning as we went for a later breakfast and then out in time to catch the first harbour tour of the morning at 10am.

The tour went round the Grand Harbour and then the Marsamxett Harbour taking in all the key sights of Sliema, Valletta and the three cities of Senglea, Cospicua and Birgu.

Back in Sliema we had a quick cup of coffee before picking up the local bus back into Rabat and changing there onto the bus towards the blue grotto. The bus runs along a spectacular cliff top road by the Dingly cliffs before heading down the steep switchback road down to Wied Iz-Zurrieq and the harbour for trips out to the blue grotto.

We weren’t going to visit the grotto, but on the tour the previous day had noticed a number of decent looking restaurants so we headed to one of them for a very pleasant lunch.

Lunch completed we caught the bus on towards the airport where we changed and were aiming to catch the bus back into Sliema.

Unfortunately, political rallies in preparation for the following week, were taking place in Sliema and had managed to completely jam up all the roads so after waiting nearly an hour for a bus we instead hopped in a cab and headed back into Sliema that way.

After freshening up we headed back out to a restaurant near to the hotel for dinner, and to watch all the political activists go past on their open-top buses and cars with their flags flying and horns blaring – it made for a noisy dinner.