It is more poorer area of Malta, with smaller settlements, which are not too densely populated or tourist developed. For a change, you only meet tourist at two main attractions in this area, the Blue Grotto and Hagar Qim with Mnajdra Temples. They are connected with at times very well and in some sections disastrous rough roads. From Bugibba to another of the many well-know rock in Malta, Blue Grotto it’s 2 hour drive with a bus.
Time spent on these local buses, can be sometimes very joyful. Unbelievably crowd, air conditioning in full swing, amazing skills of drivers, which a lot of times ends up with a sudden breaking, which cause flying drop any of grandmother or weightless condition of many passengers 🙂 Given that we are already taking about local transport, we can tell you that drivers don’t care too much for the tickets, but there are some officials who unannounced enter the bus and check the tickets. Passenger without a ticket must pay € 10 fine.
Blue Grotto is a huge natural arch, which goes from the hill straight into the sea. Under it they can sail small boats on which you hop on in the nearby village. Despite the fact that this thing is really huge, we search it for about 15 minutes. Always friendly locals finally get us on track, so we must take a walk on a hot pedestrian in the hill to finally get to our destination. At first we were not sure whether we are in the right place or not, but then we at last see a desired image. It is just one of many »rocks« with strangely interesting shapes, which are located off the coast of Malta. Maltese, in our opinion, can’t exactly boast the diversity of attractions. All they can offer are different sizes of church built it the same style and one hundred and one rocky mass of unusual shapes along the coast.
After we took a few photos and waiting for a bus, we head toward the Hagar Qim temple, which is older than the pyramids in Cairo. Together with the Mnajdra temple form an important archaeological site on the island. But to weather conditions, both temples are covered with large white roof, that slightly disturbed us, nevertheless also € 10 entrance fee per person is too much for the thing that we were not attracted to, at the first sight. With this we closed our »research« in Malta. We saw all the areas, which were mentioned in our mandatory accessory – Lonely Planet or elsewhere on the web.
In short, wherever you turn you find a friendly people, who perfectly speak English, so you don’t know if they are tourist or locals, even manners are not foreign. Rarely you have the opportunity to listen to their mother language. We got the feeling that they using it only in situations, that are not for the ears of tourists. They even cook in English way. Food in the restaurants bases on the fast food, fried food, burgers, fries, pizza, English breakfast… in a little better restaurants offer enlivened with fresh fish, but unfortunately, despite the closeness of the sea they reach high prices. You have to be careful on their opening hours, as most only open for lunch or dinner. They don’t have the typical supermarket chains, such as in Slovenia Spar or Mercator, but only small markets in the private ownership. Prices vary and sometimes meet twice or three times the value compare with ours. During the entire trip to Malta, we only in Bugibba found one and only, for our pocket suitable supermarket – Carrefour and ultimately we didn’t spend as much money we initially thought.
Unfortunately, everything beautiful has come to an end.
See you!
S B &
