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Wanderung 10

Boating around the Boot & Gallivanting through Gaul.

October 2005

Saturday October 15, Valletta, Malta

We glided quietly into Malta's huge harbor at Valetta about 8 a.m. Biorhythms being the unpredictable things they are, I had slept in so we had to quickly throw on some clothes and run up to the forward observation deck to watch our entrance to the harbor and the docking process. As we entered the harbor we saw the ruins of huge forts to our left and right. Many of those forts had modern buildings built right up next to them, but they were in surprisingly good shape for being 400+ years old and they were truly enormous. I could easily see that a large part of Malta's history was as a fortress island for the Knights Hospitalers.

After a quick breakfast we boarded the bus for a walking tour of Valetta. The old part of the town is in fact the interior of one huge fortress the Knights Hospitalers built on the western side of the harbor. Everything seemed to be built with gigantic blocks of what looked like sandstone. The stone had a light brown or buff color and it turned a pretty shade of gold when the sun illuminated it directly. Since all the major buildings as well as the remaining walls of the fort are built from the same stone, Valetta gives a curiously uniform impression. The city was also one of the first cities designed with a rectangular grid of streets, which made finding our way around quite easy.


 

We first walked uphill to a garden that in earlier times had been a training field for the knights. There was a colonnade with a pretty little fountain on top of a bluff, and from there we had great views of the harbor below. Our guide then led us back into the middle of the city, winding our way through throngs of people in sections of the main streets that had been converted to pedestrian promenades. The shops and street vendors had almost everything imaginable for sale, and it was fun just to watch the crowds milling around.

The next stop on the tour was the old Cathedral of St. John where the knights had worshipped and been buried. The furnishings of the cathedral were very sumptuous and expensive, so clearly the knights of the order didn't believe in stinting on their place of worship. The ceiling was a gilded vault with elaborate decorations and I saw absolutely gorgeous paintings and statuary everywhere I looked..


 

The most curious aspect of the cathedral, at least to my modern eyes, were the intricate mosaic coverings over the tombs of the knights that had been buried in the floor of the cathedral. The graves are chock a block across the floor of the cathedral, and every one is a unique and expensive looking work of mosaic art. Skeletons were very popular features of those mosaics, which made sense in a macabre way as they were essentially fancy tombstones.


 

I found I was really reluctant to walk on those mosaics. Partly that reluctance might have stemmed from aesthetic considerations. The mosaics were so beautiful that I didn't want to damage them by walking on them. But also I simply dislike walking over dead bodies. It just seems disrespectful, somehow, to walk on a dead body and I avoid it whenever I can. But dead bodies were pretty much everywhere in the floor of that cathedral, so I just had to suck it up and clomp right over their graves.


 


 

Next we stopped at the palace that houses the government of Malta.


 

We visited the assembly chambers and the reception areas of Malta's parliament, and they were quite fancy and impressive. In some ways the grandeur of the furnishings of this municipal building reminded me of Hamburg's Rathaus that we had toured with Lois on Wanderung 5. In both of these government buildings the frescoes and crystal chandeliers added to the sumptuous furnishings were intended, no doubt, to impress visitors.


 

After seeing the parliament building we wandered about the streets of old town Valetta a bit before we returned to our bus. The main avenues were crowded people patronizing both the kiosks situated in the center of the street and the boutiques along each side. It was fun walking through the bazaar like atmosphere, although I expect that driving in the old town would be nearly impossible. Like Venice, since the streets are essentially unusable Valetta is perforce a pedestrian city, which suited us very well.

The bus deposited us back at the boat for a quick lunch, and while we were there we downloaded pictures to clear the camera and were immediately off again for an afternoon harbor cruise. The drive to our embarkation point gave us a bit of a view of the city beyond the harbor. It seemed to be a hot, dry, dusty city, and I certainly noticed that every flat spot with bare dirt had been carefully converted into what looked like carefully watered vegetable gardens. Traffic was driving on the left, by the way, a hangover from the British occupation before Malta's independence in 1964. It made for some scary moments walking when we looked in precisely the wrong direction to check for traffic before stepping out into the street! Other vestiges of the British remained in the telephone booths that looked like they were straight from London and some of the odd shops and boutiques.


 

Arriving safely in the next inlet over from Valetta, we boarded a small tour boat that chugged around every branch of the harbor for about an hour and a half, poking its nose into each corner. The Valetta harbor is really big and had 5 dry docks that can work on ships up through the size that can pass through the Panama Canal locks. The Chinese government has even funded a huge dry dock so that their commercial ships could be repaired at Valetta. Scattered around the shallower parts of the harbor were several marinas accommodating around 1,000 total yachts, which appeared to be another industry of the area.

When we re-boarded the Astor after our tour, I conked out for a bit while Monika worked on processing pictures, after which we had a relaxed dinner with Heinke and Gustl. Most nights we sat at table 8 with Helga and Jim, but they had opted for sampling the international cuisine in the other dining area. During the meal Heinke taught me how to de-bone a trout using that weird, blunt little fish knife. So Old Yeller learned another new trick that was immediately useful, besides which the rainbow trout tasted great! Finally we returned to the cabin where I once again updated the journal until we hit the sack for the night.

Copyright2006 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt
Prolog
Map
October 2005
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Epilog

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