I arrive at Malta airport late at night. I’m here to dive off the northern island of Gozo. Having learnt my lesson from Sardinia, I agreed with the dive centre to have someone pick me up and deliver me to my B&B. This turns out to have been a good idea, as I would have had to navigate badly signposted back roads* across both Malta and Gozo to get there. Also, people’s driving here is atrocious**. My taxi driver – a professional chauffeur – is a case in point; he has grasped all the fundamentals of driving apart from steering. He oscillates hither and thither, with no apparent notion of where he belongs on the road. Not even oncoming traffic alters his erratic approach, and I thank the stars it’s close to midnight and not many people about. 

I make it to the B&B at one in the morning, only to be greeted as enthusiastically as I’ve ever been – by a white cat, who purrs her heart out as I pet her – and rather less enthusiastically by the owner, who doesn’t purr (and whom I don’t attempt to pet). 

The next day the dive instructor picks me up and drives me to the north coast. The landscape of Gozo is like the Holy land, arid, stony, terraced, poor. People look remarkably similar, whether beggars or burghers. Someone told me there are twelve family names that are predominant on the islands since the time of the Knights of the Order of St John, and it’s easy to believe when you see how alike people look. It’s also quite eerie, being watched by an unsmiling man on one street corner only to have him (or a close copy) appear at the table next to you, then in a field as you drive past, then in a shop…

And so we go diving. The dives here are all walk-ins, meaning you start from the coast rather than from a boat. The coast is steep rock, however, often dropping five to ten metres straight down into the water, so after traversing salt pans and razor-sharp rock formations you have to clamber down metal ladders to get into the Mediterranean. The first dive goes well, but at the second site local fishermen – who don’t like divers – have sawn off the ladder, making decent difficult and ascent absolutely impossible. 

So we change plans and drive on to another place where we dive into an underwater cave. A million years of stormy weather has carved out a dome inside the rock above the waterline, so you can ascend inside it and breathe the salt-laden air of this secret chamber. It’s even light inside, because the entrance is situated near the surface, which means light is reflected on the sand of the ocean floor of the cave and up into the dome. It’s rather good – just a shame no pirate has had the good sense to hide their treasure in there for us to discover. 

Le grand bleu.

The third and last dive of the day is a wreck dive on the south coast. Poor visibility after the storm last weekend means we swim out and descend into a featureless blue space, only to have the wreck materialise underneath us, like a ghost, which I guess it is. 

It’s all nice, and the people at the dive centre perfectly lovely, but it is rather underwhelming after the Andaman sea. I might have to change my plans for tomorrow, but that’s for later, now all I want is a scoldingly hot shower and All. The. Food. 

Old villages are situated on hilltops here, the better to defend against invaders. Xaghra, where I’m staying, is no exception. Houses are huddled together, limestone and sandstone, all of them coloured in nuances ranging from dirty cream to creamy dirt, nearly all of them with sturdy stone balconies, often enclosed so as to create little extensions to the room, enabling its inhabitants to sit and watch village life from the comfort of their living rooms. 

Having had my shower and a change of clothes, night has fallen, and I imagine unseen eyes (belonging to yet more Maltese clones) following my progress through winding alleys as I make my way to the city square for dinner. It’s easily visible from afar, because that is where the church is, literally mitten im Dorf, as the Germans would have it. 

Mitten im Dorf.

The church is enormous, towering over the village. The vaulted dome is lit, and it reflects off the roofs of the surrounding houses, mere shades in its divine light, further enhancing the impression of dominance. The boom of the bells rings out over the landscape, as insistent, sharp and domineering as the call of mujaheddin in Marrakesh. 

Once inside, the church’s interiors could match the finest in Rome in its gilded gaudiness, its opulence in stark contrast to the surroundings. And it’s well attended this Tuesday evening, too. None of this should come as a surprise in a country where 80% of inhabitants are practicing Catholics, but I am a little taken aback, even so. Small wonder divorce and abortion are (mostly unwelcome) novelties in this insular world. 

My hunger is more of the body than of the spirit, however, so I set off in search of a pastizi shop. Pastizi are local savoury delicacies, and it’s been impressed upon me by several Maltese colleagues that I must try them. Seeing them is a bit of a shock. Oval pastries tapering to a point at each end, filled with cheese or peas to overflowing, they look like to me like mummified mounds, withered vaginas, brown and brittle to the touch, but the cheesy inside is surprisingly warm, moist and creamy, and I devour them with gusto. 

Erm…….

I break my self-imposed drought of alcohol on the town square, enjoying a draft pint of local lager together with a sampling of other dishes of Maltese cuisine, topped off with home made fig ice cream. It’s sweet, but not too sweet, crumbly but richer than you might have thought, with a note of something that I can’t quite identify juxtaposed against the sugar and cream. Rather like Gozo, I think, the beer having clearly gone to my head. Then I have another one. 

I stagger home, full and content, give the pussy cat a good cuddle, and pass out on my bed well before ten.

I wake at 0430, and can’t get back to sleep, so instead I go running. One of the two reasons I wanted to stay in Xaghra is that Calypso, the nymph that seduced Ulysses, is said to have lived in a cave right next to Ramla l-Hamra, the red beach below the village***. This is where I’m headed. Before six in the morning there is only me, birdsong and the report of rifles, as the happy hunters of Gozo do their damnedest to reduce the birdsong to zero. 

Alas, once I reach the site of the cave, there is a sign informing me that it’s “temporarily closed due to geological movement”. In my experience, when a sign is rusted and the inevitable cafés have turned to ruins, there is nothing temporary about things, and this proves to be the case. Try as I might, I cannot reach the cave. Possibly disheartened by previous experiences, Calypso is not seeing visitors.

There’s nothing for it. I turn and trot back up the hill, just in time for breakfast before the second day of diving begins. I do two dives, and they couldn’t have been more different. The first one marred by incidents, and abandoned before it really begins due to one of the participants having a blackout at fifteen metres, it’s as bad as the second one is good. The sun shines high in the sky, and visibility and colours are therefore very good, and since it’s just me and another diver we explore a long stretch of the coastline, teeming with fishy things. 

I decide to end my diving on a high note, so head back to the village for a quick change of clothes, lunch in the town square and the other reason I picked Xaghra: the Ggantija temples, or Temples of the Giants. There are two of them, and they are right here in this village. Older than Stonehenge and the Pyramids, some of the megaliths erected here exceed five metres in length and weigh over fifty tons. 

How people did this 5,500 years ago no one knows, but it is somehow reassuring that people were as ingenious then as they are now. People being people even back then, one can safely assume that Neolithic Monolith Works Ltd. came in over budget and a couple of months late, but that’s another story.  

Neolithic Lego!

The temples are a sight to behold. As so often is the case, all that is known about them is guesswork, but even five and a half millennia after the fact, it’s clear they were built to impress. Standing pairs of stone slabs mark the doorways between chambers, and the way they use perspective and height differences between apses serve to increase the monumentality of the innermost sanctums in quite a sophisticated manner. 

My last excursion for the day takes me to Rabat, the island’s capital that the British impetuously renamed Victoria in honour of the queen during her jubilee, something which the inhabitants never bothered to pay any attention to. Perched high above it is the Citadella, a seemingly impenetrable fortress. And yet it was taken by Turkish corsairs in 1551, and the entire population of the island – all the 5,000 who had fled inside its walls – were hauled off to slavery.  

Here I also find an example of ingenious indigenous architecture. The centrepiece of the citadel is a church, and the centrepiece of the church is a vaulted dome. Or would have been, had the construction not cost so much money that they couldn’t afford it. What to do? Every self-respecting church here has one, after all. The church fathers came upon a brilliant solution: they had a painter do a canvas depicting a faux perspective of the interior of an opulent dome, and placed it in the ceiling! If you didn’t know, you would never guess it wasn’t real. A bit like religion, then.

Fake it ’til you make it.

I decide to walk home, having just missed the bus. Hiking along the road at dusk I couldn’t help but feel like an even bigger target than I had that morning. But I made it home alright, and since that evening was customer night at Bubbles, the dive centre, and I was placed next to Danish Eva, instructor-to-be, incandescently beautiful and a latter-day Calypso, I feel it’s safe to say the day ended very well. 

—-

And so my brief sojourn here is at an end. I’m sorry to report that it ends not with a bang, but with a whimper. Two chilli pizzas and far too much red wine meant little sleep, in spite of the lack of company, and so it’s with weak legs, rumbling tummy and bleary eyes that this Ulysses waves goodbye to the Isle of Calypso from the ferry deck. 

As it recedes behind me, it’s easy to see why people have sought to possess this speck in the middle of the sea for millennia – unprepossessing, low key and rural, it is nonetheless a little emerald and gold gem set in azure waters, a treasure. 

*****

*Or poorly signposted in Maltese, which amounts to much the same thing. The language is a bastard mixture of Arabic, Italian and English, with letters and letter combinations unheard of in any other part of Europe. Here they don’t dot the i’s and bar the t’s but rather dot the g’s and bar the h’s.

**I have this confirmed the day after by one of the instructors: “Driving is mayhem. All rules are regarded as the slightest of suggestions, right of way an unknown entity, giving way is a sign of weakness, and might makes right.” So that’s nice.

*** I have a special place in my heart for this story, as I once fell in love with a Maltese girl, but elected not to pursue it any further since I was married with children. More the fool me.

Waving Calypso goodbye.