The fall of 2008 was my first exposure to the “budget airline”. The US has Southwest, Jetblue, and Virgin …but they have nothing on the budget airlines of the EU. Who knew you could fly from Venice to Dublin or from London to Geneva for 5 Euro flat, with NO taxes?
Yes, there are some catches, but that’s another post entirely. Because I was studying abroad in Padova, Italy at the time, our closest airport was Venice Marco Polo or Treviso. I only had a few short months in Europe and wanted to make sure I booked all my flights early… Ryanair (among others) came up quickly. Despite the negativity I’ve read about the airline, including numerous canceled, delayed,and “haha-screw you” flights…we went with the Dublin based airline. I’m happy to report that I’ve never had an issue with Ryanair, yet.
Ryanair was offering their notorious, limited time, no tax flights, and one of the options was Malta. After some Google-ing , I learn that Malta is one of the smallest countries in the world, and it is south of Italy. Yea, an actual country! Here’s emphasizing how my geography education has failed me.
The amazing offer was about to expire, so we booked the flight on a whim. We book for early winter and hope that Malta, being south of Italy, will still be supporting warm weather. I figured, 10 Euro roundtrip? If something comes up that weekend and we have to cancel, so be it…but we couldn’t miss out on the chance of a lifetime going to, uh Malta? I’m very glad we followed through with it.

By we, I mean myself and my traveling buddy for many a Euro-weekend trips, Karen. After booking our plans well in advance, the next issue was finding a place to stay. After checking the usual hostel sites, it was looking like Malta wasn’t a budget friendly place afterall. That definitely lowered the cost effectiveness of our cheap flights if our hostels were going to be so high! I dabbled with Couchsurfing and was determined to find someone…unfortunately, there are very few Malta CS hosts. I was just about to accept that this weekend get-a-way would burn away our travel savings a bit more than expected, but to my luck, Jorge took us. I can easily say, we wouldn’t of had half the experience in Malta without him!
That same weekend as our arrival, his friends from Portugal were flying into visit him. He obviously wanted to his 2 friends around that weekend + 5 people to a car = perfect for Karen and I to tag along for every adventure. We saw more in that weekend in Malta than I think we would’ve been able to see in a week that to Jorge.
(Pictures to post soon)
We checked out Valletta, the capital of the tiny country and a beautiful harbor city. It was also one of the earliest sites inscribed by UNESCO on the World Heritage list.
Valletta was the first place we located the numerous signs for “The Malta Experience”. We never paid for the overpriced learning experience, but the name definitely enticed us throughout our trip. We did, however, make it to St. John’s Co Cathedral. The audio guide is very helpful to a tourist’s ignorance of Maltese history, and the cathedral itself is beautiful with knights’ colorful graves lining the floor (that has been referred to as the “most beautiful floor in the world”) and a single huge fresco ceiling. My old camera definitely didn’t do it justice.
After trying to make sense of their bus routes (their buses are already unique), we take took the leap of faith to try and find Mdina. I am so happy we made it there. The well-preserved, quiet capital has an amazing view of the hills below and is beautiful – and creepy – as the sun sets. One could have many fun nights playing hide and seek in the small corridors.
For nightlife, we hit St. Julian’s.
On our final journey day, we somehow made it to the Blue Grotto. The rock formations are amazing photo-ops and we also found…._____?
Photos coming …..