If you haven’t already got it from this story let me repeat it here that Roberta is a whiz at planning a busy day. I won’t tell you the plan in advance, but keep watching to see how many things we did in this one day. That was mostly Roberta’s planning.
Our day started early with the Segway tour. Roberta had arranged it for 0945 and we took a taxi there to save time. We met our host Sam in Nadur. We were the only ones in this tour because I don’t think many people like to get started this early when on holiday. We met very few other tourists in the next two hours. Sam was waiting for us when we arrived.
When you do something day in day out you become really good at it with practice. But only if you like doing what you do. Having been a teacher for many years, I know how easy it becomes to teach the same thing over and over again to different people. Sam was a good example of that. He had been teaching newbies to ride a Segway for a long time and he was so good at it that he took only fifteen minutes to teach both of us in turns. I had never ridden a Segway before but I knew I would like it and I was right. It was a hoot!
After teaching us the basics, Sam took us around the neighbourhood for a practice run then led us out for the actual Gozo tour. We rode on all different kind of roads, more on that later. Sam said hello to pretty much every driver, farmer and pedestrian on the way. He told us that Gozo is a small place and everybody knows everybody. I think it is to do with his personality and the people. He was a very friendly, sociable person. All through the tour he managed to keep three conversations going, one with me, one with Roberta and one with both of us. The people also were very friendly and we got smiles and “good morning” from the native people whenever we rode past them.
Every so often Sam stopped and gave us a tour of the local
flora as well as the buildings around. He also gave us a good background of the
Maltese culture. The first sight we saw which was photo-worthy was “
It was a beautiful beach way down from where we were and got a great view of it for the cameras.
Then he took us to a cave called “Mixta cave” (pronounced Mishta cave) which looked down on
It was great for photos.
It was totally my fault, of course. I had been loving riding the Segway and was getting so confident that on the smooth roads I could ride hands-free. I could not yet steer it with my body like Sam could but I would get there. No, I did not get overconfident, I got underconfident which caused the accident.
Not sure if you know how a Segway works but basically it’s a
very easy to ride transport because it balances itself. Now, to be fair, we
were travelling some very challenging roads right after a ten-minute training,
like rally level roads. So many of them had very steep up or down slopes, most
were narrow and almost all had rocky hurdles to a varying degree. Still, the
Segway was doing fine and it would have carried on doing fine if I hadn’t
applied my own mind to it.
You drive the Segway, back and forward by leaning in that direction. It’s that simple. But the way the Segway was leaning to compensate for the steep down slope did not compute in my little brain. I thought I was about to topple over (I wasn’t) and instead of working on my balance I tried to get off the Segway. That also I managed without injury but then I turned the Segway towards the wall to avoid it running into the other two riders. There was no chance of that anyway. The final genius move I made was that I kept the Segway handle in my grip even after turning it towards the wall.
It should not be a surprise to anyone then that my left hand got squashed between the Segway handle and the wall. I don’t know what word to use here, squashed, crushed, squeezed, they all sound too drastic. It was not that bad. The worst that I suffered was that the skin on my middle knuckle split and you could see blood. That was the extent of it. My hand was working fine and continued working fine. Mere scratches. I just screamed like a little girl every time I washed my hands for the next two days because the soap would get into the cut and that hurt much worse than the original injury.
The biggest damage was to my confidence and pride because I thought I was doing great on the Segway. Anyway, I got back on my Segway and we carried on. Cancel the air ambulance. I forgot to mention that Sam was taking photos with his phone here and there when we were on level stretches of roads. He was good. Not only could he balance well enough to go low on his Segway, I could see that he was composing the shots well. They were nice shots when we got them.
Our final stop was a bakery where Sam had already placed an order for our “Cheese things.” We didn’t have time to eat them then so he put them in a front bag on one of the Segways.
By the time we rolled back (literally) into Nadur, Phyl was already waiting for us in her taxi. We said farewell to Sam, he handed us the cheese things and two bottles of water. We had to pay him in cash which we knew already. The whole two hour tour of Gozo on Segway cost us €70 total. It included everything from Segway use to water bottles. Considering we got a private tour, I think it was a great deal. It was a memorable tour and worth the money as well as getting up early.
But the mind-blowing part of
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