Hagar Qim Day

Today is the only fully free day of the tour - others have things on in the evening.  We took this as an opportunity to go further afield and so took a three-bus journey tour down to Hagar Qim.  These are megalithic temple ruins dating to before Stonehenge.  (See extra)

Our day started with the local tourist information office.  We found the bus route through to Hagar Qim which involved three buses with changes at various places.  We got on the first bus and took the trip through to Mosta where there is a church with a large dome, even bigger than the one we saw yesterday.

From there we caught another bus through to Mdina (which we're visiting with the band tomorrow).  We had a sausage roll for lunch here, after spotting a large "food and drink" sign.  It turned out that the sign was bigger than the shop!  From there we took a third bus down to Hagar Qim.

Here there are two ruin sites, both of which are covered to prevent damage from sun and rain.  On the way back up from the second site we took a detour down a nature trail, ending up in a cafe for tea and cake.

We discovered today that buses in Malta see the timetable as a work of fiction.  If they're early, they're early - they won't wait until the timetabled time.  If they're late, they're late!  At least it's cheap, charging only one and half euros for each trip, with subsequent ones within two hours free.

Our journey back to Mdina started about 20 minutes late, on a bus that runs only once and hour, but we had a good connection at Mdina and quickly got another bus.  Mosta was a longer wait for the most frequent bus service of the day.  It was supposed to be every 15 minutes, but we ended up waiting about 40 minutes.  The first one that arrived was (very) full, whilst the second had space for us.

After arriving back in Mellieha (and walking part way back up the hill after missing our stop!) we ate a lovely pizza at Greystone's restauraunt.  The name was inspired by He Man - "By The Power of Greyskull" - misheard as Greystone.  The owner liked the name!

After that we returned to the hotel and took long exposures of the bay from the balcony.