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I was lost. Again. Signs for Malta's police headquarters in Floriana, which heretofore pointed right, now inexplicably pointed left, meaning that between the sign in front of me and the last one I passed, there should have been a police station. But unless officers hang their laundry from the second-floor balcony and sell fruit and vegetables out front, I had missed it.
Help, however, was at hand. "Yoohoo, dearie," a nearby voice called.
I turned and saw a cheerful group of elderly Maltese resting in the shade of a pink-blossomed oleander bush.
"Are you engaged, dearie?" one of the women asked.
Being of an age and coming from a place where this question is not usually the first, I was nonplused, but when she asked a second time, I told her I wasn't. Smiles disappeared. One of the women fumbled for a hanky and wiped away a tear. Surely it was not polite to make the octogenarians on the island weep.
"I'm almost engaged," I lied.
Smiles broke out all around. I asked for directions, and before I knew it and despite my protestations, we were moving, very slowly, canes and all, toward an imposing structure a block away.
When we got there, I didn't want to go in. I was in Malta to research and write a murder mystery, you see, and although I needed to know the location of the police headquarters, I didn't have to get up close and personal with the sullen officer inside the gate. Mumbling my thanks, I turned tail and ran, leaving them standing there. For all I know, they're still telling their grandchildren about the peculiar tourist who changed her mind about needing the police and was unclear about her marital status.
Or maybe not. The Maltese are more than accustomed to visitors, strange or otherwise, invading their homeland. Almost every nation with interests in the Mediterranean, from the Phoenicians in the 9th century BC to the British in the 20th century, has claimed Malta as its own, lured by one of the world's great natural harbors and a location smack dab in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea between Sicily and Tunisia. Some of the towering figures of history—St. Paul, Napoleon, Count Roger the Norman—have set foot on Malta's rocky shores. All have left their stamp on the island's landscape, and as a result, Malta is a living, breathing museum, a place where the sweep of Mediterranean history, thousands of years worth, can be seen and touched and smelled.
For a writer, Malta's particular blend of history is irresistible. For an author like me who writes archeological mysteries, there are enough crypts, caves and catacombs to hide a hundred bodies. But even for a writer, it's difficult to capture the essence of the place.
The Maltese are fond of food analogies to define themselves. They will say their culture is, like their food, a mélange, referring to the fact that until recently Maltese housewives took the family supper to the local bakery, where it joined everyone else's in the brick oven, the food acquiring the aromas and tastes of all the other meals. They will tell you their personality is like Maltese bread: crusty on the outside, soft on the inside.
Whether the food analogy works or not, it takes a certain kind of people to endure what the Maltese have. They have suffered in conflicts not of their making, most recently almost starved and bombed to near extinction during World War II. Conquered but never truly subjugated, overrun but not assimilated, the almost 400,000 people of the Maltese islands are stubbornly, happily and, occasionally, infuriatingly Maltese.
I've been coming here for 25 years, and yet I confess that I spend much of my time in Malta hopelessly lost, an embarrassing admission considering the island is only about 17 miles at its longest point, nine at the widest. I know where everything is—I just can't necessarily find it. I blame this partly on an approach to road signage that, despite recent improvements, is essentially whimsical. To my mind, both the signs and Maltese, a language the rest of us can neither comprehend nor pronounce correctly, are designed to keep invaders on their toes. We modern-day invaders are fortunate, indeed, that almost everyone speaks English.
I am not alone in my directional dyslexia. Nearly all independent travelers to Malta spend part of the time wondering where they are, a source of mirth for the locals. A Canadian friend who worked here discovered an office tradition of placing bets on how late newcomers would arrive on their first day at work.
When I made a nostalgic return for a week last spring, I was determined not to get lost again. The plan, therefore, was this: To keep myself in line, archeologically speaking, I would start at the beginning, or at least at the dawn of human habitation, and work my way forward through the major eras in the island's history. That is one of the wonders of Malta: You can cover several millenniums in just a few days. As to my geographic ineptitude, I would travel by public bus.
To facilitate the plan, I found a hotel an easy walk from the central terminal just outside the main gate of the capital, Valletta. The bus I optimistically boarded the first morning looked almost as old as the prehistoric sites I planned to visit: a rotund little number with custom grille work and two shrines on the dashboard—one to the Virgin Mary, the other to an Italian football team. The man beside me explained that buses are privately owned, often by their drivers, and operate on a hub-and-spoke model. There is a posted schedule, he added, but drivers leave when they feel like it.
"You can't get lost," he assured me as we pulled out of the terminal with a macho honking of the horn and a belch of black exhaust. "Stay on the bus long enough, and you'll come back here."
Freed from the terror that driving in Malta instills—they drive on the left, roundabouts are scary and there is never, ever a parking spot—I sat back to enjoy the ride to my destination, the temples of Hagar Qim and Mnajdra. We made our way through a string of little towns, with the buttery yellow tint of the local stone. I peered into storefronts where bakers, bankers, cobblers and coffin makers plied their trade as they had for centuries. I watched children in their smart uniforms playing in the schoolyards, the priest greeting his parishioners, women lining up to buy bread, and men in the cafes arguing loudly, probably over politics.
Soon the towns gave way to countryside, tiny plots of red-tinged farmland marked off by stone walls. The terrain is remarkably varied considering the island's mere 120 square miles, with rugged ridges, deep valleys and a coastline that varies from beach to sheer cliffs. Dusty roads are lined with oleander, bougainvillea and hibiscus, bright contrasts to the stony ground. I was too entranced to notice the sign for my destination until it receded into the distance. Fortunately, the walk back was not too long.
Hagar Qim and Mnajdra are ancient stone temples on Malta's south coast: Hagar Qim high atop a slope overlooking the sea, Mnajdra nestled on a promontory more than 500 yards downhill. About 3600 BC, or about 1,500 years after the island's first inhabitants arrived (probably from Sicily), something extraordinary happened. Using only stone implements, they began to carve circular, multichambered temples from the island's limestone, structures so large that 17th century travelers thought they were the work of giants. The ruins of several dot Malta and its sister island, Gozo.
Help, however, was at hand. "Yoohoo, dearie," a nearby voice called.
I turned and saw a cheerful group of elderly Maltese resting in the shade of a pink-blossomed oleander bush.
"Are you engaged, dearie?" one of the women asked.
Being of an age and coming from a place where this question is not usually the first, I was nonplused, but when she asked a second time, I told her I wasn't. Smiles disappeared. One of the women fumbled for a hanky and wiped away a tear. Surely it was not polite to make the octogenarians on the island weep.
"I'm almost engaged," I lied.
Smiles broke out all around. I asked for directions, and before I knew it and despite my protestations, we were moving, very slowly, canes and all, toward an imposing structure a block away.
When we got there, I didn't want to go in. I was in Malta to research and write a murder mystery, you see, and although I needed to know the location of the police headquarters, I didn't have to get up close and personal with the sullen officer inside the gate. Mumbling my thanks, I turned tail and ran, leaving them standing there. For all I know, they're still telling their grandchildren about the peculiar tourist who changed her mind about needing the police and was unclear about her marital status.
Or maybe not. The Maltese are more than accustomed to visitors, strange or otherwise, invading their homeland. Almost every nation with interests in the Mediterranean, from the Phoenicians in the 9th century BC to the British in the 20th century, has claimed Malta as its own, lured by one of the world's great natural harbors and a location smack dab in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea between Sicily and Tunisia. Some of the towering figures of history—St. Paul, Napoleon, Count Roger the Norman—have set foot on Malta's rocky shores. All have left their stamp on the island's landscape, and as a result, Malta is a living, breathing museum, a place where the sweep of Mediterranean history, thousands of years worth, can be seen and touched and smelled.
For a writer, Malta's particular blend of history is irresistible. For an author like me who writes archeological mysteries, there are enough crypts, caves and catacombs to hide a hundred bodies. But even for a writer, it's difficult to capture the essence of the place.
The Maltese are fond of food analogies to define themselves. They will say their culture is, like their food, a mélange, referring to the fact that until recently Maltese housewives took the family supper to the local bakery, where it joined everyone else's in the brick oven, the food acquiring the aromas and tastes of all the other meals. They will tell you their personality is like Maltese bread: crusty on the outside, soft on the inside.
Whether the food analogy works or not, it takes a certain kind of people to endure what the Maltese have. They have suffered in conflicts not of their making, most recently almost starved and bombed to near extinction during World War II. Conquered but never truly subjugated, overrun but not assimilated, the almost 400,000 people of the Maltese islands are stubbornly, happily and, occasionally, infuriatingly Maltese.
I've been coming here for 25 years, and yet I confess that I spend much of my time in Malta hopelessly lost, an embarrassing admission considering the island is only about 17 miles at its longest point, nine at the widest. I know where everything is—I just can't necessarily find it. I blame this partly on an approach to road signage that, despite recent improvements, is essentially whimsical. To my mind, both the signs and Maltese, a language the rest of us can neither comprehend nor pronounce correctly, are designed to keep invaders on their toes. We modern-day invaders are fortunate, indeed, that almost everyone speaks English.
I am not alone in my directional dyslexia. Nearly all independent travelers to Malta spend part of the time wondering where they are, a source of mirth for the locals. A Canadian friend who worked here discovered an office tradition of placing bets on how late newcomers would arrive on their first day at work.
When I made a nostalgic return for a week last spring, I was determined not to get lost again. The plan, therefore, was this: To keep myself in line, archeologically speaking, I would start at the beginning, or at least at the dawn of human habitation, and work my way forward through the major eras in the island's history. That is one of the wonders of Malta: You can cover several millenniums in just a few days. As to my geographic ineptitude, I would travel by public bus.
To facilitate the plan, I found a hotel an easy walk from the central terminal just outside the main gate of the capital, Valletta. The bus I optimistically boarded the first morning looked almost as old as the prehistoric sites I planned to visit: a rotund little number with custom grille work and two shrines on the dashboard—one to the Virgin Mary, the other to an Italian football team. The man beside me explained that buses are privately owned, often by their drivers, and operate on a hub-and-spoke model. There is a posted schedule, he added, but drivers leave when they feel like it.
"You can't get lost," he assured me as we pulled out of the terminal with a macho honking of the horn and a belch of black exhaust. "Stay on the bus long enough, and you'll come back here."
Freed from the terror that driving in Malta instills—they drive on the left, roundabouts are scary and there is never, ever a parking spot—I sat back to enjoy the ride to my destination, the temples of Hagar Qim and Mnajdra. We made our way through a string of little towns, with the buttery yellow tint of the local stone. I peered into storefronts where bakers, bankers, cobblers and coffin makers plied their trade as they had for centuries. I watched children in their smart uniforms playing in the schoolyards, the priest greeting his parishioners, women lining up to buy bread, and men in the cafes arguing loudly, probably over politics.
Soon the towns gave way to countryside, tiny plots of red-tinged farmland marked off by stone walls. The terrain is remarkably varied considering the island's mere 120 square miles, with rugged ridges, deep valleys and a coastline that varies from beach to sheer cliffs. Dusty roads are lined with oleander, bougainvillea and hibiscus, bright contrasts to the stony ground. I was too entranced to notice the sign for my destination until it receded into the distance. Fortunately, the walk back was not too long.
Hagar Qim and Mnajdra are ancient stone temples on Malta's south coast: Hagar Qim high atop a slope overlooking the sea, Mnajdra nestled on a promontory more than 500 yards downhill. About 3600 BC, or about 1,500 years after the island's first inhabitants arrived (probably from Sicily), something extraordinary happened. Using only stone implements, they began to carve circular, multichambered temples from the island's limestone, structures so large that 17th century travelers thought they were the work of giants. The ruins of several dot Malta and its sister island, Gozo.
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