Malta and Jordan

We arrived late on a Friday evening and stayed in Gżira, across the harbour from Valletta. The next morning we walked around the water into the capital.

Valletta was built by the Knights of St John after the Great Siege of 1565, and it still looks like a fortress: massive bastions of golden limestone, deep ditches and straight streets running down to the sea on both sides. From the Upper Barrakka Gardens a lift drops to the Grand Harbour, with the Three Cities on the other shore. In between, there are narrow alleys, closed wooden balconies and the odd red British phone box.

On Easter Sunday we took the bus to the north of the island, to Ċirkewwa and Mellieħa Bay.

On Monday we hired a car and drove around the island. We started in the south at Wied iż-Żurrieq, a narrow inlet with fishermen’s boathouses where the boats leave for the Blue Grotto, and continued along the cliffs to Ħaġar Qim and Mnajdra, temples built more than five thousand years ago, older than the pyramids.

Inland we walked through Mdina, the silent walled city on a hill, and in the afternoon we drove to the north-west: to Popeye Village, the film set built for the 1980 musical, now a colourful little town above a turquoise bay, and to Golden Bay. On the way home a storm was gathering over the National Aquarium in Qawra.

Early on Tuesday we flew to Jordan and drove along the Desert Highway, past shepherds with their flocks, to Wadi Musa and Petra.

Petra was the capital of the Nabataeans, desert traders who carved their city into the pink sandstone two thousand years ago. You enter through the Siq, a winding gorge more than a kilometre long, and at its end the Treasury suddenly appears in the gap between the rock walls. Beyond it the valley opens up: royal tombs cut into the cliffs, a colonnaded street, goats on every ledge, and eight hundred steps up to the Monastery. We came back out through the Siq in the evening light.

After dark we drove south to Wadi Rum and slept in a Bedouin camp of black-and-white tents in the middle of the desert.

In the morning we went out in an old four-wheel drive across the red sand, between sandstone mountains that rise straight out of the valley floor. There were dunes to climb, rock bridges and mushroom-shaped boulders. Lawrence of Arabia passed this way, and the landscape has stood in for Mars in several films. The tour ended with a visit to a family in Wadi Rum village.

From the desert we drove down to Aqaba, Jordan’s only port, on the Red Sea. Two lazy days at the hotel by the beach, with the mountains of Sinai and Israel across the water and a sunset over the gulf.

On the last day we drove north up the long road through Wadi Araba, past camels and fruit stalls, down to the Dead Sea, the lowest place on earth at more than four hundred metres below sea level. Its shore is crusted with salt crystals.

In the evening we climbed Mount Nebo, where Moses is said to have seen the Promised Land, stopped in Madaba and finished the day in Amman. Early the next morning we flew back to Malta.

The last weekend was spent in Sliema, on the waterfront facing Valletta. We swam off the flat rocks, took a boat trip around the harbours, and on the way back from St Julian’s walked into a parade of knights, drummers and horse-drawn carriages.

On Sunday evening we flew home.