Diana and Brian's Holidays: Malta

We were almost an hour late arriving at Malta airport and once we had landed we seamed to be taxying around for ever, but once stopped it was only a short bus ride to the terminal. That was all very efficient with about 6 Boarder Force officers checking and stamping passports regardless of what Country issued it. It wasn’t very long before the bags arrive and we walked out to meet the Newmarket Holiday rep to see us onto our coach that took us to our hotel, I think there were less than a dozen of us.
It was the best part of an hours drive to our hotel, The Santana at St Pauls bay, Qawra and we arrived far too late for dinner , so were very pleased to find two cold meals with wine in our room waiting for us.
Our room was set back above the main entrance on the top floor with a balcony looking out across the town. On the roof of the hotel, right at the right hand side of the hotel there was a roof top swimming pool but we didn’t see it used until the last day.

We spent a day in St Pauls Bay walking the full length of the sea front from opposite the salt pans and west along the rocky coast line. We spent a bit of time in there

wonderful aquarium dodging the school parties. They had some interesting exhibits including an albino ray who had lost his tail, he wasn't trying to jump out of his tank, just impatient for been fed.

Lunch was taken at a very nice restaurant overlooking a private hotel swimming pool along the sea front.

One thing the Maties are very keen on is their cats and on lots of little pieces of waste land toy will find people have erected shelters for them and put out food an water, this one was a step above the rest with a cats playground

Malta is only about 122 miles square and at the moment about 300,000 tourists arrive every month on 2000 flights, but rising by about 20% per year so in a very few years it will be very crowded. Due to this there is a lot of construction taking place.

Malta has a couple of hop on hop off bus routes that go all round the island and conveniently picked up right outside our hotel so we had a day on each visiting Sant Anton’s Gardens before catching the next bus. They are not really very convenient to use as they run every hour which makes planning difficult so you have to chose where you want to stop, bearing in mind you can only really do it twice.