Sun, Sea and Occasional Sand

Yesterday, our latest travelling party of Chelmer, Curly, Yorkie and me (George,) was up bright and early to make our way to Gatwick Airport where we had a happy re-union with our friend Rodney, the Harrods door bear. We introduced Chelmer and Curly as they don’t do as much travelling as Yorkie and I, so hadn’t previously had the pleasure of Rodney’s acquaintance.


As we walked out to the departure gate, we could see the rain lashing down outside and knew that it was an icy rain. We were very pleased to be flying out to a much warmer place.

At one point our very informative captain told us that we were about to fly over the Italian island where the cruise liner recently capsized. We couldn’t see it because of the clouds, and probably our altitude as well. Shortly after flying over Sicily, we started our descent into the lovely Mediterranean island of Malta, our destination for the week.

From the airport we were minibussed off to our self-catering apartment in the resort of Buggiba, whose name we quickly learnt, is not pronounced as if it starts with the word bug. It was dark as we travelled, so we didn’t see much apart from lots of lights.

We’ll no doubt talk more about our home from home later in the week. We didn’t spend too long inside before we went out in search of food and beer (us bears have our priorities). We are about 1 minute from the sea, so we strolled along the front, battling against the wind! As it is only January, lots of places were shut, but we found a pleasant Italian restaurant and got stuck into the local Cisk beer and enormous pizzas laden with loads of lovely toppings, at a very reasonable price too.


This morning we treated ourselves to a full English breakfast in the breakfast room, again very reasonable at €4 for everything. We then saw our rep briefly before heading to the bus station to buy a weekly ticket and hop on a bus for our first island adventure. Sadly the characterful Maltese buses have just been replaced and Arriva have taken over, and are operating all of the island’s services with modern buses. This is a little problematical as all the walks in our walk book tell you which of the old buses to catch and the new ones are different. The changes are all so recent that no timetables or route maps are available, so we will have to be ingenious. Fortunately everyone speaks English and seems to want to help, so it is easy to ask.

Find out where we went next time.

Lots of love the Malteser Bears xxx