Malta

 

Mgarr Harbor Malta

We walk to the car from the airport, following the driver, a small brown wrinkled man in sandals who had been holding the sign with my name, the indigo sea visible from the palm bordered parking lot. The driver turns on the air-conditioning. I roll down the window to smell the land and sea: scent of wild roses, dry odor of rocks heated by sun, dust, tarmac, rosemary, salt.

New construction on the airport access road, the main road winds through open country with rocky rolling hills, angelica growing wild, brambles, goldenrod, clumps of cactus and low hand laid stone walls everywhere demarcating small garden plots and fields growing leafy greens, carrots, corn, and a dozen unidentified vegetables, the Mediterranean
sea ever present a few hundred years to the right of the road. A village appears off to the left rising from a fold in the earth, stone blocks jumbled together – honey colored, tan, sand, beige, fifty shades of stone. We pass a crossroads sign with a half dozen unintelligible names, drive through a town the buildings all stone blocks with Italianesque facades, ornate stonework balconies at every window, architecture a blend of Italianate and Moorish, the overall impression North Africa with signs in English and no North Africans to be seen.

Bougainvillea cascades over walls and climbs rocks in more colors than I knew the plant possessed: the familiar crimson and deep purple, orange peel, lavender, blue, pale rose. Traffic keeps to the left, there’s little of it: Suzuki vans – miniature vans looking like Toon Town vehicles – battered Land Rovers, tiny Fiat sedans. A Honda 125 motorcycle buzzes past. The narrow road wanders over low hills into shallow defiles then winds up to a crest, the sea now on both sides of the road. Another mile and a village dominated by an enormous cathedral.

Then the harbor, the shallow water near the shore a shocking transparent turquoise eddying around smooth boulders, out in the channel shading to the exact shade of cobalt as an ancient Roman glass bead given to ML by a friend in Germany. Whitecaps rise in the fresh breeze. We board the ferry walk to the bow and see an island in the distance – Gozo.