Gorgeous Gozo

"In the first place, you can't see anything from a car; you've got to get out of the goddammed contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thorn bush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you'll see something, maybe.  Probably not."...Edward Abbey, 'Desert Solitaire' 

For the last few days we have been on the island of Gozo (pronounced Goat-zo here), a short 45 minute ferry ride north of Malta. Gozo is tiny; only about 10 by 6 miles. It is much less crowded than Malta; there are only about 30,000 Gozitans. It has a much richer landscape, as there is a lot more topsoil here. Farming terraces dot the landscape everywhere. While it is currently not the farming season and most of these terraces are bare, there are a lot of vineyards here producing wonderful wines, both white and red. 

We are in the little seaside village of Xlendi. While there are still a few fishing boats in town, by far the main industry is tourism and many hotels and restaurants are on the waterfront.  Just after we arrived and had checked into our hotel, a HUGE thunderstorm struck. There was flooding everwhere and the bay turned brown from all the dirt washed into it. One of the main streets was a virtual river that flowed into the bay. About a half hour after the storm stopped, crews in bulldozers, backhoes and dump trucks moved in and cleaned it up. 

Gozo is well known for its hiking paths. There are paths that go all around the island. We took three of them, covering much of the western part of the island. 

Wednesday afternoon, we went south. The path from town is at first a well paved path, but soon turns into a deep ravine and becomes dirt, with rock staircases climbing the cliffs along the bay. At one point there is an old tower, built by the Knights of Malta in the 16th Century to protect the island from Muslin corsairs. It sits on ancient sandstone, laid down 22 million years ago. You can see thousands of fossils in the sandstone of different sea shells. Further down the path, you come to some farming terraces, each with a little building that acts as a bird blind. The Maltese are serious bird hunters and are so skilled that they actually killed off the famous Maltese Falcon, which is extinct. The authorities are supposedly clamping down on the hunters, but we heard constant gun shots as we were hiking. That made us a bit nervous. 

The old tower...

Some of the bird blinds...

Walking back to town, we went below the tower on the sandstone. Everywhere you looked, there were sea shell fossils. There were also some old carved salt ponds, where the sea water washes up, evaporates, and just the salt is left. I have no idea how old these are. 

Sea shell fossil...

Carved salt ponds

Now about the food!  The food in Malta is excellent. But in Gozo, especially here in Xlendi, it's especially tasty. There are many restaurants that line the harbor. We ate at "The Boat House" twice. For lunch, we had stuffed mushrooms with shrimp, a plate of fried octopus and a delicious and rich fish soup. For dinner, we had a risotto with four cheeses and mushrooms and a spaghetti with seafood, including mussels, prawns and calamari. Oh my!

Thursday morning we took a hike in the opposite direction to Dwerja Bay. According to a hiking book we have, you can walk up a staircase next to the bay and go up the rock face of a 500 foot high cliff. Well, that didn't work as it is very steep and slippery. So we went to the back of town and went up the less steep part of the hill.  That sent us through some serious brambles and thorny brush, but up we went, over stone walls and farming terraces. The views were great, but the going was pretty hard. After about an hour of this, we passed by a little house with four dogs barking at us, but lucky for us not the biting kind. 

We finally made it to a road, travelled mostly by large dump trucks carrying loads of rock. Going over the hill we found out why. There are a couple of large quarries here, with huge, straight walls cut into the yellow limestone. 

We found a path off the road that took us down to Dwerja Bay. It's very beautiful, with a huge rock, called Fungus Rock. A plant grows on this rock that supposedly has great medicinal qualities and was used by the Knights of Malta in their hospitals. 

The wind was blowing hard and the sea was very rough. As we came over the hill to where we were to take a bus up to the capitol town of Victoria, there were hundreds of people milling around this huge natural rock arch. What he heck?  I wasn't expecting anyone here, but there were many tour buses and lots of cars. Turns out this is the Azure Window and is listed in Lonely Planet as the number one thing to see in Malta. 

So now we took the bus to the ruins of Ggantija, a temple built over 5,600 years ago. This is the oldest free standing structure in the world. In the world!  There is a nice museum here with objects found at the site. No one knows who the people were who built it, as with the other old sites in Malta. Until a century or so ago, it was thought that an ancient race of giants had to have built it, as so many of the stones used for the walls are huge. Thus the name, Ggantija. 

Some old graffiti...

View from the site...

In Search of Cart Ruts

Friday morning started out with a few bus rides around the island. First, we went to Ta Pinu church, which is a huge church out in he countryside. The Virgin Mary is all over the place and inside there are many paintings dedicated to her for one miraculous event or another. So here Amy has called her Our Lady of Perpetual Miraculosity. We then bused down to the bustling resort town of Marsalforn, which was once a nice fishing village but is now the biggest resort town in Gozo. Lots of little boats, beach umbrellas and pot bellied tourists. We didn't stop. 

For our Friday hike, we started from the wonderful little cove of Mgaar Ix Xini. There is a tiny beach here and a nice restaurant serving fresh fish. So fresh, that the menu is a chalkboard that they write on everyday the available fresh fish. Unfortunately, they don't take credit cards and we only had 30€ on us, so we had to split a nice grilled sea bream. 

The hike went up around the gorgeous little inlet, where we had nice views of the islands of Camino and Malta. You could also see the ferrys going across the Gozo Channel. It was here, in is very inlet of Ix Xini in the 1550s, that Algerian corsairs kidnapped about 5,000 Gozitans and took them to the slave markets. After this, the Knights of Malta built many towers that still dot the coast. Today, instead of corsairs, there are luxury yachts that come to this beautiful place. 

We saw on our map of Gozo, that there was an ancient burial temple and some of those mysterious cart ruts at the top of one of the hills. So we headed up the trail, clearly marked by little red dots and arrows. The trail was pretty good and the views from the cliff tops was spectacular. 

We continued to where it looked like, on the map, the cart ruts should be. We both looked all over the place wherever the limestone was bare. After half an hour, I found this...

One darned cart rut, without a twin. The mystery of the cart ruts continues. 

But near a ravine, not too far from here, we did find the burial site, or what may have been a burial site. A few large stones showed that the ancients had been here. 

Looking for cart ruts...

Ancient site...

Well at least we found this. 

We continued to the town of Sannat and asked for directions to Xlendi from an old man. He said to go down to the church, turn left and continue on the road. Well, this eventually led us to some fields with large stone walls which was obviously not the correct way. Yikes!  Asking a farmer where to go, as he was the first person we met who didn't speak english. But eventually, we found the road to Xlendi. 

Descending to our beautiful bay, we had had a nice, although difficult 4 hour hike over hill and dale, through farmers' fields and through the garrigue of Gozo. But we ended in civilization and went straight to the gelateria. What a perfect ending. 

Kudos to my adventurous wife, Amy, for discovering these trails and leading me around the hills of Gozo. We saw much more than just the beaches and tourist spots, hiking on trails for hours and hours without seeing another tourist. We may not have found our cart ruts, but the adventure is one I'll remember forever.