Malta Trip #2 - Day 1 - Journey Starts

 

Goes to show you what lengths I would go to for photography, I had slept a few hours in the evening so I could leave in the early hours of the morning. I am one of those people who can sleep at any time, you will hate me. The flight was at 0725 but as I live in Oxford I needed two hours to get to London Gatwick airport as well as some buffer time. Roberta and I agree on that, always get to the airport earlier than you need to. There is a bus that goes from Oxford to London airports called Oxford Airline. It's a nice, comfortable coach that costs between £23 and £28. It used to cost me much less when I was a student but...sigh. Moving on. I took the bus service that picked me up just before 0300 and deposited me at the London Gatwick airport North terminal just before 0500.

 

Roberta had deliberately not picked the cheapest flights this time. She had gone for the flights that could give us the maximum time in Malta for our travel dates and also worked with our accommodation choices. More on that later. We checked-in and dropped our suitcases then directly went to the security rather than hang around.

 

I was really nervous about airport security, I always am. Most of my worry is about holding up the queue behind me. Quick tip, when you get to security, turn left if you can, most people turn right as its their dominant side and as a result the queues are longer on that side. I carry a lot of electronics so I am worried about taking time to take them out of the backpack. No problem this time. I had packed my liquids (just lip balm) in a plastic bag already. My electronics were also packed in small travel boxes with transparent tops. My strategy is to put everything that I can, including my phone, in my jacket pockets before getting to the security conveyor belt. After putting the jacket in a separate tray I walked through the metal detector. I winced as I went through it as I remembered I was still wearing my smartwatch. Then I worried that my expression might trigger an alarm in the security lady watching me walk through the scanner. None of that happened. No beeps or alarms and she didn't pull me aside for personal manhandling. On the return journey, when I was taking my smartwatch off, the security agent there told me not to do it. So, I guess they don't trigger the alarm. My watch is a Ticwatch Pro 3 which is mostly a plastic body anyway.

 

After we went through the security and immigration checks, we still had about half an hour to hang out. So, we had a coffee and shared our Etsy shops with each other. Roberta and I are both new Etsy sellers and didn't know that about each other. Links for our shops in case you want to check them out:

 

Sunny: https://g7printables.etsy.com

Roberta: https://chromaticautomatic.etsy.com

 

The flight was almost full but we got lucky that we didn’t have anybody sitting in the third seat in our row so we had some extra space. Photos from the flight are hardly ever worth the trouble but the views are so amazing that you have to try. I think the ones I got this time were better than I have had before, partially because of my new phone Samsung Note 20 Ultra which has a great camera module, but I am also becoming a better photographer with practice. Some examples here from the airport and the flight.

Malta Trip - Why Malta?

[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.