[Photo courtesy: me. Real photo taken from my camera on this trip.]
I will be honest, Malta was not high on my list of places to visit and I didn't know much about it except that there is a fruit by the same name. But just about the time when I was feeling cabin fever from not having done any travel since December 2019, my friend Roberta was making a travel plan to Malta. She is great at planning such trips and my last trip in December 2019 was also with her to Copenhagen for the Christmas markets. Since she was planning the trip it gave me an incentive to look up Malta.
For those whose geography is as bad as mine, Malta is an archipelago, which means a group of islands, in the Mediterranean sea. Roberta had chosen it after her own research which showed that this was one of the rare places in Europe that still had sunshine and warm weather in November. I had very few leave days left because I had taken most of them for my studies earlier this year so I told Roberta that I would like to tag along but I could only go for 5 days including a weekend. She agreed to that. We both regretted that later because...you will see.
Travelling in 2021 has its own hassles and one of my main reasons for not travelling even after lockdown opened was that I didn't want to wear a mask on my travels and I didn't want to take photos of people in masks. But I give some of the blame to my friend Ania who had recently travelled to London and some blame to myself for staying too cooped up during lockdown until it became too depressing. In the words of Anais Nin
“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
So, I took the hassles. Malta was one of the few countries that was accepting UK visitors. But the condition was that you had to be fully vaccinated and bring evidence of it. The evidence in our case was to get the NHS app on the smartphone and get the "NHS Pass". I had to jump through so many hoops to prove my identity before I got the Pass. But I got it. You can save it on your phone as a PDF file or print it out. Both are acceptable at the airport. We also had to fill out a Passenger Locator Form on the Malta govt. website. Again, we could keep it as a PDF on the phone to show when asked.
Roberta is an expert in finding cheap flights and accommodation so I left those details to her and only insisted on one thing - advance seat booking in the front part of the plane. In case you don't know, the front seats get less turbulence in the plane. My research had warned me that Malta being an island gets a lot of winds and the landing can be a bit shaky. I am a coward when it comes to turbulence, and other things. You will see.
