Awesome Adventure 2016: Malta - Hagar Qim, Blue Grotto and Gozo

As most historic sites are open on Mondays, we caught the bus out to Hagar Qim and the neighboring Mnajdra Temple. We tossed up between a local 119 bus to the airport and a change but decided to go via Valletta as there are more options out to Hagar Qim (including the 74) - although we were unlucky with connections and arrived around 11am. Hagar Qim (pronounced Hajar Im) is a Neolithic structure built about 1000 years before the pyramids and 1600+ years before Stonehenge. The 4D video and museum didn't take long to go through but had plenty of detail about the likely purpose of the buildings, from calendars to tracking the stars - with some carved dots showing the exact days between movement of planets and holes letting the sun through on summer and winter solstice. We had lunch at the cafe near the museum before exploring both of the sites.

We then walked down the hill to Blue Grotto. The boats weren't running but we had a good look down at the grotto from the hill above before we walked down to the water. We we planning on catching a bus back but a cab came past looking for a return fare - so we haggled and got him down to 15 euro ($23) for all four of us to save about and hour and a half of bus rides. We went out for dinner in Marsaxlokk - Duncan's wasn't open, so we opted for tables along the waterfront.

As storms were forecast for Wednesday, we went out to Gozo the following day (Tuesday), We again transited through Valletta and after the second bus, caught the ferry across to the other main Maltese island. We passed Comino which is the third largest island and has the Blue Lagoon. On Gozo, our easiest option was to catch the Big Red Bus. We went across to the Azure Window on the other side of the island, visited a small aquarium museum with a video that helps you to 'see under the ocean without getting wet' and then caught a local tourist boat out to the arch and into the caves with dark blue water. We changed buses back in Victoria (the old capital city of Gozo), after lunch in a cafe there, then saw the windmill (another historic site) and the Ggantija Temple - which is claimed to slightly pre-date Hagar Qim.