A last minute change of plan on Saturday saw me on a bus to Mdina / Rabat. I'd planned to go to Gozo but didn't sleep well, awoke late & left the hotel an hour later than planned. So changed my day plan to go somewhere closer. Mdina was great! It's a walled medieval city on top of a hill with narrow silent alleyways flanked by tall pale yellow buildings and outstanding views from the city walls across the countryside all around. It was a delight to wander in, at 9am, before many other day trippers arrived. It reminded me of Venice, with the capacity to get lost in the alleyways & to discover the real character & charm by plunging at random down intriguing looking streets. After this, a couple of hours in Rabat, where the same was true- the town itself is larger and much more modern, but I discovered a couple of charming back alleyways, where I lingered taking photos. I'd planned to do a tour of a house in Rabat that my guidebook told me would be free but turned out to cost €8. The Lonely Planet Malta & Gozo has been considerably out of date / wrong on many things, including entrance fees, opening times, length of bus journeys and presence of natural features (see next entry- the "azure window" arch off Gozo- obviously still an arch when the book was written but collapsed by the time I got there! Actually it collapsed in 2017.) I think they need to bring out a new version of this guide. It was only a few years old yet as out of date as was my Italy guidebook, which I last used in 2016, 5 years after it was published.

I jumped on a bus heading south to the Dingli cliffs- high, silent, windy cliffs with views out to the little island of Filfla, the smallest of the Gozo archipelago basically

just a lump of rock yet home to endemic species of lizard. The buses are only once an hour so I had to spend an hour here, which was fine, apart from the next bus was 45minutes late GR. to be honest I’ve mostly been pleasantly surprised by the punctuality of Maltese buses. Perhaps because I'm often riding the bus from where it starts (so it hasn't had time to get late yet). The buses are comfortable and air conditioned and a brilliant way to see the scenery of Malta, including in between the actual spots I am specifically visiting.

Last stop on Saturday was the megalithic temples of Hagar Qim and Mnajdra, dated to 3000-3600BC (which makes them over 5,000 years old- older than the Egyptian pyramids). Situated on an otherwise deserted hilltop, the temples featured vast stones constructing walls, doorways, inner chambers and the remains of roofs. I saw alters and statuettes and carvings / markings on the stone. It was incredible to think not only that they've been here for over 5,000 years but that the people that built them must have done so without any machinery to lift the vast stones into place. Unlike Stone Henge, visitors could walk all around and into the temples. They are protected from the elements by vast tent structures over the top of them; no site I have visited in Malta has been unbearably busy but even the effect of a moderate number of tourists walking around them every day must take its toll, so I reflect as I am doing with a lot of things here, how long this level of access will last and whether I have seen something that might be significantly changed in ten years time.