One of the things I said I wanted to do was walk the entire perimeter of Malta. There is a book, The Coastal Walk, that divides the 150+ miles of coastline into about 17 sections. Well, I don’t really think circumnavigating the whole island is going to happen, as per that book, but we are doing chunks of coastal walks. Today, we walked from Caghaq to St. George’s Bay. I had read about this short walk, about 4 miles, in another book I have about walks in Malta.
We took the #13 bus to Caghaq, a little town with not much going for it. There is a beach club under renovation, some food stalls, a bunch of houses, a small water park, and not much else, except the beautiful sea. From the bus stop we walked north so that we could walk around the little peninsula where St. Mark’s Tower is.
This little peninsula, which apparently is also a campground, has nice views of Qalet Marku Bay. The water is such a gorgeous turquoise color. This is clearly the “locals” hangout spot and,unfortunately, there is quite a bit of trash strewn all over the place. I have been surprised by the amount of garbage left lying around nearly everywhere.
We made our way out to St. Mark’s Tower, one of the 13 watchtowers that were built by Grand Master de Redin between 1658 and 1659. You’ve seen pictures over the past weeks of watchtowers. Some were garrisons, like the Wignacourt Watchtower at the edge of St. Paul’s Bay. But de Redin wanted to improve defenses around Malta, both in terms of looking for pirates and watching out for invading enemies. What made these watchtowers kind of unique is their placement. De Redin wanted each watchtower to be able to see the next watchtower to its right and to its left in order to more rapidly communicate any danger. They used canon shots by day and fire by night to send alerts to the next tower, that then would alert the tower after that, and so on down the line. Here’s a map that I found online.
The other thing we found interesting is that one entered the watchtower by means of a ladder to the second level. And, at any one time, there would be 4 soldiers in each watchtower.
Here’s a little video showing the coastline from St. Mark’s Tower to Madliena Tower. There isn’t any path to follow so we had to create our own.
We made our way around the peninsula back to near the main highway. This was slow going, as was the entire walk, due to the rocks. This was not the smooth limestone we walk when we go around Exile Point and walk down to Ghar id-Dud Bay during our evening strolls. No, this was all sorts of rocks, big and little, jagged, some smooth, with sections of red dirt and scrub vegetation. One needed to be constantly watching where you’re stepping. But it was kind of fun to be trailblazing, especially since we were close to the sea. The down side was that it was hot today and this walk had almost no shade the entire duration. But we saw some beautiful little inlets.
Here are some views up and down the coastline. It was quite barren, but all along much of these rocks, known as White Rocks in a particular section, is the most popular “beach” spot for locals.
Right around Caghaq we found one of the few sandy beaches in Malta. It looked like a really nice place to swim; easy to get in to the water as opposed to all the rocky places. There was the water park there, closed still until the summer season. We walked along a little caravan holiday park. We also saw more salt pans. The pattern of these pans was lovely to see, with the added nicety of an old fisherman sitting at the edge of the pans.
We stumbled our way along the rocks heading toward the next watchtower, Madliena. Along the way were more nice inlets where the water is such a fantastic turquoise color. And in several places, we found our lovely limestone to walk on.
Here’s a video Christine took showing the little inlet with the small caves. I’ll tell you, I was so hot all I want to do was jump in one of those inlets. The water looked so inviting.
It is such an amazing aspect of nature to see things growing right out of the limestone. There was quite a bit of scrubby stuff growing everywhere. But then there was also all these gorgeous flowers and other interesting plant life.
After looking up at Madliena Tower, we kept going. We found an old military firing range and walked through that. It did have an old row of huts under a portico, so we had a little sit down in some much needed shade. Just past the firing range was a rather large reverse osmosis plant. We saw a mile of pipeline from the sea to the plant.
Reverse osmosis is a process through which filtered seawater is forced under very high pressure against permeable membranes. The membranes are so fine that they can filter out molecules, including salt and some bacteria, purifying the source water to potable standards. The process however, is extremely energy intensive and leaves a huge carbon footprint due to its high energy consumption. But Malta has little choice because it has little freshwater available.
And then, the Radisson and Corinthia hotels were in our sightline. Yipee!
We headed to the hotels and had the nice opportunity to walk through Pembroke Park again. The sprinklers were on, watering the grass, and it was a nice refreshing thing to walk through, as well as see the water flowing through the park down all the mini-falls and sluiceways.
We then decided to have lunch at the Corinthia, which might be our favorite hotel to date. To begin lunch, we had a lovely drink.
It was a pleasant lunch and we patted ourselves on the back for completing the whole hike. I didn’t think we’d actually make it all the way to the hotels, and I was really proud of Christine for enduring a hot, challenging walk. But, it was actually beautiful and fun.
After lunch we took the #14 bus back to our flat where Christine did some work and I went off to the mini mart for supplies. We had a big salad for dinner and now we’re resting up for another big adventure tomorrow. Can’t wait!