Gozo, Malta

One day, we decided to travel over to the other island of Malta called Gozo. This was the day we waited for the bus for an hour in front of our hotel. Then it was a 45 minute bumpy ride to the other side of the island where we promptly missed the ferry to Gozo by about 5 minutes. We waited almost an hour for the next ferry. In the meantime, we ran into some scuba divers....some of them were doing their first certification dives. I wish I would have had time to go with them. Its been so long since I have done a dive and the water there looked so clear.

Finally on to Gozo, the ferry ride was about 25 minutes. We heard there was a special bakery on Gozo that makes pizzas called ftira. Our concierge at the hotel knew the owners of the bakery and called our order in for a pickup. When we landed on Gozo, we got a taxi to take us to the bakery. For 5.82 euro we got two huge pizzas! We thought we were only getting one and we also thought we entered the wrong place. This bakery was literally a room filled with a brick oven and shelves (as you can see by the pic).

With pizzas in hand (literally as they didnt have boxes to carry them in), we got back in the taxi and told him to drop us off at Ramla Bay. This is the famous beach in Gozo where the sand is orange. It truly is colored orange (even though the pics dont reflect it). With no napkins, no silverware, no drinks and no place to sit, we 'copped a squat' on a rock and dug in to the pizza. Between the two of us, we finished one. There was no cheese or sauce on the pizza but there were thinly sliced potatoes. It was good, but different. Luckily, there was a family on the beach (the only other people out there with us) and they were Americans with 2 small kids. We gave them the other pizza and the crust from the first one to the stray cats hanging around.

The taxi was supposed to pick us up at 230pm but never showed. We started walking to the ferry, which turns out was directly opposite the beach on the island--about 2 miles or so, most of it uphill. We stopped at a farm to look at the donkey and the guy invited us to get closer to Colleen, so we got some pics of her. Then we trekked on where Denise used her girl scout skills and picked lemons and oranges for us to survive the hike! I was surprised at the amount of cactus I saw there..in fact, in all my years in the southwest, I never saw cactus planted the way it shows in the pic (do they really do that?) The wild flowers were all starting to bloom, so at least we had scenery as we walked. It was a long hike and with about 10 minutes before the ferry was leaving and no chance of making it, I threw out my thumb and hitched a ride (never done that before in my life--sorry mom and dad!)....it was me or the knee at that point. A nice kid who was going to meet his sister at the ferry took us the last bit and we arrived with about 2 minutes to spare.

When we arrived back at the hotel, we went directly to happy hour to celebrate our non conventional but interesting and cultural fun day in Gozo.