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Round Gozo in Five Days
An adventure narrative story about a kayaking trip around Gozo
The mistral hit us when we cleared the headland at Ras Il-Wardija. Tufted waves, riding on larger swells, came constantly and energetically, yanking us sideways, and tossing us towards the cliff where the choppy water hissed and frothed. We had been going for two hours since we left our campsite in a creek at Xlendi, and now, bracing our legs for a firm grip and clenching our torso muscles, we paddled more furiously and resolutely. The water splashing on our faces was distracting. The perfect buoyancy of our kayak, so easily flung by the waves, threw our rhythm into disarray. With Bernard barking instructions, it took us a frantic fifteen minutes before we developed a knack for riding the waves. Now the waves were manageable, and we moved in a seesaw gallop, but there was no margin for slacking here – at every pause of uncertainty or composure, we felt the receding waves and whirlpools sucking us towards the cliff.
The cliff to our right reared its rugged and unforgiving mass of limestone 150 metres into the air. There was nowhere to go but forwards, and on the brief moments on the crests of the waves, we could see the tantalising nibbles in the coastline that marked the inlets at Dwejra, where we would stop for lunch. There was about three kilometres of water between the headland and Dwejra, yet we were crawling ahead at a frustratingly slow pace.
This is the moment we had been dreading, and I was feeling momentary bouts of panic. The mistral is the dominant wind pattern fearfully respected by Mediterranean fishermen. In Gozo, Malta’s sister island in the center of the Mediterranean, it blows on seven out of ten days, battering the island so incessantly that trees and reeds stoop permanently toward the southeast. According to the weather forecast, the mistral that day was blowing at a feeble 25km per hour, but even at this strength, the wind threw up quite an insidiously choppy sea on Gozo’s exposed northwestern coast. The confusion created by cross-currents and swell receding from the cliff made our predicament more grim.
***
We were on the second day of our five-day kayak tour round the coasts of Gozo and Comino, the two smallest islands in the Maltese Islands. The idea for the trip had come to me when I stumbled on a story written in the 1950s in the Times of Malta about a group of British adventurers who used to canoe round the Gozo in an annual event. I had grown up in Gozo and knew the place intimately, and paddling round the island would give me the opportunity to see the coast from the sea. I put the proposition to Bernard Bonnici, an outdoor fiend who has extensive experience in the outdoors – scuba diving, rock climbing, trekking, mountain biking, and kayaking – and who hadn’t kayaked round Gozo. It was an invitation he couldn’t refuse: there is something complete about doing a whole loop. Using a buoyant, two-person open water kayak, our supplies packed in waterproof plastic tanks, we planned to complete the trip in five days, moving counter-clockwise, starting and finishing at Mgarr Harbor. That’s an average of fifteen kilometres daily, which allows plenty of time to go ashore and explore along the way.
The first day, skirting the protected south coast, had been untroubled. We had left Mgarr Harbor early, slipping past clay bluffs and gently sloping land of wheat fields and pausing for an early lunch at Mgarr Ix-Xini, a mini-fjord winding half a kilometre to its inner mouth. This was once an ancient river; ahead of us, the ribbon of water gave way to the dry valley bottom, where the fifty-meter-deep meandering gorge disappeared into the interior. The water in the fjord was so clear that we could see the sharp shadow of our kayak on the pebbly bottom eight meters down. The plants growing on the limestone sides of the fjord, tree spurges and Mediterranean heaths, hardly stirred; the splashes of our paddles were the only disturbance. It was a serene spot, the crumbling fort at the mouth of the fjord the only testimony to the medieval corsairs (the state-sanctioned and regulated pirates of the Medieval Ages) who regularly sneaked towards land here in surprise raids. Mgarr Ix-Xini translates into The Harbour of the Galleys, the inlet where the marauders found unhindered, surreptitious anchorage – until the fort was built to repel them in the 1650s.
After Mgarr Ix-Xini, it was a straight run to Xlendi, past the limestone cliff that girdles much of the south coast. The cliff’s sheer drop, like the cross-section of a glass that has been cracked clean, was possibly formed by an earthquake triggered by land-crunching at the active Pantelleria Rift south of here, a major fault-line along the collision course of the European and African land masses. At Ta Cenc, the highest point in the south coast at around 150 meters, the beige rock face is studded with stunted Maltese salt-trees rooting in cracks, and gulls wheel silently on the uplift of the air current. I had admired this drop from the top, which is reached via a farmer’s road, countless times – a scene immortalised by Edward Lear, the eccentric and romantic British artist who roamed the world documenting nature in his paintings and poems, and who had chosen the painting of Ta Cenc (out of a lifetime collection of 10,000 paintings) in a short list of his 200 favourite places on Earth. (Lear, who liked to make up words to express precise feelings, wrote in 1866: “The coast of Gozo is pomskizillious and gromphiberrous, there being no other words to describe its magnificence.”) But floating at the base of the cliff as if helplessly suspended in mid-air, the towering wall seemed forbidden and claustrophobic, and for a moment, listening to the gentle swell lapping into the eroded caves along the water’s surface with long and loud sighs, I felt utterly insignificant and fragile in the grand scheme of nature.
***
Now, on the morning of the second day at Ras Il-Wardija, it took us forty minutes to cross the three kilometres of open water between the headland and Dwejra. But our problems weren’t over yet. Where was the tunnel that led to shore? There are large, black caves at the water lever, and the tunnel is one of them, but which one? We couldn’t take the risk of finding ourselves trapped in the raging water inside a cave. I was tetchy by anxiety by the time we finally spotted the small patch of light that alerted us to the tunnel that pierces 50 meters of limestone cliff and opens into a netherworld: a small lake of calm, greenish water, its pebbly shore fringed by boathouses where fishermen were painting their boats and mending their nets before the main summer fishing season.
We checked our gear, relieved to see that water hadn’t leaked into the two waterproof plastic tanks (this had been a factor that dissuaded us from taking cameras). After a quick lunch, we went for a short walk to see the Azure Window, a natural arch whose opening is twenty-two meters tall, and the horseshoe shaped bay beyond whose water is creepy black from the dead seaweed that the mistral constantly washes into the bay. These and other features are the result of the criss-cross of geologic faults in the region, producing the land subsidence and upheavals that have created a bleak and alien landscape of gorges, bowls, and bluffs. Dwejra has been the setting for countless fantasy films, including an epic Italian film about Homer’s Odyssey. But I could see that the area is in an advanced state of degradation; bird-trapping sites and jeep tracks were causing soil erosion, and a couple of stone quarries were shredding the hillsides in the hinterland.
In less than an hour our long johns and T-shirts had dried in the strong midday sun, and as we pushed out of the inland sea I was trying to ignore my apprehension. Between us and the next creek there were seven kilometres of cliffs where we couldn’t go ashore in case of trouble, and it was worse than open sea. In fact, the prime difficulty caused by these cliffs are the crosscurrents, and we decided that it might be easier to keep away from shore by a kilometre or so. We reached open sea in a burst of paddling, the cliffs receding behind us to an unthreatening distance. The restless sea was huge and deep, the colour of stagnant sewage in a sewer tank, but our decision was vindicated: it was easier here, if only because the waves were predictable. After a while my feet were cold, and my head hot. I was trying my best to pull my weight despite the muscle spasms in my lower back and upper arms, paddling mindlessly. We didn’t speak for what seemed to me a torturous four hours.
“You heard of the submerged town hereabouts?” Bernard said, breaking the silence as we approached the mouth of the mini-fjord at Wied Il-Ghasri. The waves were behind us now.
“Yes. What do you make of it?” I had come across the writings of the geographer Paolo Diacono who, sometime between 352 and 366AD, had written: “There was a generalised earthquake on earth, and the waters rushed out of their normal limits, and many islands around Sicily, and many cities and people were inundated by the waves; and it was at this time that at Cape San Dimitri, in the island of Gozo, close to Malta, several places were swallowed up, so that today, when the waters are calm, one can still see several houses, and the vestiges of places lying under the water.”
Bernard shrugged. “It is the same story mentioned in the legend of Saint Dimitri, and all these old legends must have a basis of truth.”
In the legend of Saint Dimitri – which was told to us in history class as fact – the saint had morphed out of his fresco in a nearby chapel and galloped across the sea to rescue a boy who had been snatched by Muslim corsairs. The boy’s mother thereafter expressed her gratitude by keeping an oil lamp alight twenty-four hours a day, and after an earthquake had plunged the chapel into the sea, the flame could be seen burning underwater by divine intervention. There was no point looking now: the deep sea was blue-black and opaque.
“Can we go ashore?” I shouted over my shoulder. “I am getting cramps. I need to stretch.”
The cliffs had petered out to a lip of land twenty metres high, and we slipped into the mini-fjord that meandered inland for 200 metres, entering a sudden respite of crystal clear water where we could make out the large boulders at the bottom. We beached at the small pebbly shore at the creek’s interior, and climbed up the stairs that had been cut into the rocky side to the top to look for the Saltpans of the Clockmaker, which we found on the plateau overhead near the outer mouth of the fjord. In 1773, a clockmaker had invested his life’s savings in salt-pans on top of an underwater cave that penetrated underneath the plateau to a depth of about 40 metres; the idea was to dig a pair of shafts through the roof of the cave so that water could be hauled up to fill the salt-pans. I counted 75 salt-pans, and they were well measured and aligned, neatly set in three columns. It was an ingenious idea: the clockmaker got several crops of salt throughout the first summer. But when the wind awoke from its dormancy in autumn, the sea rushed into the cave as if through a funnel and exploded into a geyser that shot from the shafts. The spout of water, rising 20 meters, was blown inland on the wind in a fine mist of seawater which scorched the vegetation, ravaging crops within a radius of three kilometres. The farmers bandied together and angrily demanded compensation. Their claims bankrupted the clockmaker, and he died a few years later.
“The horrifying noise made by each of these explosions re-echoed both inside and outside the cave, and was altogether like cannons of different calibre being discharged in rapid succession,” wrote Jean Houel, a French traveller who witnessed the plumes of water exploding from the shafts in 1777. “The echoes, being repeated by the surrounding landscape produce an effect similar to that of a peal of thunder or even of several peals of thunder, clashing together. It was terrifying and at every moment it seemed that the cliffs, where this storm was breaking continuously when the winds were extremely strong, were going to come crashing down.”
The farmers attempted to block the shafts with stones and mud, but the tremendous waves exploded the shafts open again. Only years later was the farmers’ problem solved when the roof of the cave collapsed as far inland as the shafts in a fierce storm. Now we stood on the edge of the broken shafts, peering towards the sea in the cave lashing about like crocodiles trapped in a small space. The sea was breaking into what remained of the cave with a clap followed by a thunderous echo which made the ground underfoot shiver.
We covered the remaining two kilometres to Xwejni in less than thirty minutes, and it was almost dark by the time we scrambled ashore and pitched out tent in a grove of tamarisk trees. My feet were numbly cold – in the clear sky, the warm day had been superseded by a biting chill within an hour of sunset. Bernard made some pasta and I prepared some malt wine (wine simmered with cinnamon, orange, sugar, apple, cloves). Warmed by the wine – a treat to celebrate the passage of the hardest day – we sat outside in the crispy and clear starlit night. The visibility was good, and peering towards the horizon we could just make out the smudge pinpricks of light in Sicily, 80km north. By the time we got up the next morning the sun had already warmed the grass, and we crawled out of our tent to find a world of light and openness. Set before us was an amber plateau of limestone riddled by hundreds of small water pools spreading both ways of the hundred-metre-wide plateau. These were manmade salt-pans that produced all the salt Gozo needed, created by pickaxing depressions on the surface – rough copies of the doomed salt-pans of the clockmaker. During mistral windstorms, the waves engulf this whole plateau, and seawater fills the pans that would eventually dry in the summer, when the salt is scraped and collected. The sea beyond was a deep blue, the band of sun glittering across its surface in a dazzling highway of light. The warm quality of the light – especially the crimson-and-purple sunsets – is one of the Mediterranean’s unique delights.
Stiff from the previous day’s exertion, we set off at a leisurely pace, anticipating an easy paddle downwind, over long and gentle swells, skirting around the zigzagging north coast. In Marsalforn, the seaside resort of bland four-storey apartment blocks that cater for most of the tourists who visit Gozo, we stocked up on food and water. The town is backed by the Marsalforn Valley, a wide and undulating valley of terraced fields, fringed by buttes. Towns sprouted on the two largest hills, pinned by the large baroque churches that tower head and shoulders over the two-storey limestone houses – townscapes that are characteristically Gozitan, the extravagant churches testimony to the islanders’ devout Catholicism.
It took us a lazy hour to reach the cove at Ghajn Barrani, which means “The Foreigners’ Spring” after another legend. The half-submerged boulders were tricky to navigate around, and it would have been impossible to get to the small strip of sand if the sea had been even mildly rough. Beaching the kayak, we walked upslope towards Dragut’s Rock, a pyramidical boulder embedded in the clay halfway up the slope, where we ate a whole loaf of bread with cheese and onions and tomatoes. The small bay with its turquoise water and half-submerged boulders was set before us like some outdoor abstract art installation, the warm-amber of the rocks contrasting nicely with the greenish-blue hue of the sea. We could just make out the trickle of the spring that was supposedly discovered by corsairs plying the central Mediterranean. They landed here often, stocking up on fresh water and looting the fields up-slope for vegetables. One day, the legend goes, the master pirate Dragut Rias spotted a vineyard and sent one of his slaves to fetch him some grapes. The slave was ambushed by a farmer, and in his flight he managed to tear a few branches of vine. Dragut was so angered by this sacrilege (the Prophet Mohammed, it is said, forbade the destruction of vines) that he tied the slave to this rock and burned him alive.
Dragut was indeed an ambitious corsair – in a devastating raid in 1551, this Ottoman General captained a flotilla that dragged the entire able Gozitan population, 5,000 out of 5,500, into slavery – but the story has obviously been embellished. These stories, high on Catholic propaganda, were fanned by zealous Catholic priests among a people much given to superstition and lore and fantasy.
Later, I was thinking about the Gozitans’ penchant for fantasy when we stumbled on a fisherman in his luzzu, the baroque wooden boat of indigenous design. His name was Paul and he was eager to talk after a whole day spent at sea alone. Like most Gozitans, in his teens he had emigrated, spending four years in Australia and ten years in Canada doing menial jobs. He returned to Gozo for a holiday in 1974, and ended up staying, taking over his father’s fishing outfit.
“Fishing is in my blood,” he said, scratching his stubble and playing with the folds of skin on his lined face. “I remember my grandfather fishing.”
Paul had been unspooling trammel nets, putting out a three-kilometre wall of nets in which fish – squid, barracuda, scorpion fish, angel fish, mackerel, bogue, red mullet, painted comber, little tunny, and so on – got caught by their gills at night. “I work every day. When it is stormy, I mend nets or build new ones, and I scrape just enough for my family. That is the life of a fisherman. Our problem is that there are too many fishermen these days. When I started, I used to catch three crates of fish from three pieces of nets. Now I need seventeen pieces of nets to fill three crates.”
I studied the luzzu, painted with bands of green, orange, red and beige, a baroque design flowering on its side, and the Eyes of Osiris carved on its hull. These eyes were symbolic, supposedly leading fishermen to areas where fish are abundant.
“You want to buy it?” Paul’s eyes were permanently squinted. “I’ll sell it to you. I have another one. This one is as old as me: 60 years, and it was my father who bought it.”
“I know someone who might be interested,” I said.
He clucked his tongue. “There is a problem. Old age has turned my heart soft. A buyer turned up the other week and I couldn’t bring myself to sell her. I am kind of attached to her. I’ll sell it to you when I retire.”
I asked him whether he did anything to protect himself from curses and bad luck.
“Of course. You don’t take me for a fool, do you? I always keep an olive branch near the engine. And—” he tilted his face towards the sky – “I have faith in Him. The man who strives honestly is rewarded. Sometimes I don’t catch fish for some days, and I keep my faith, and then God gives me a large catch to make it up for me.”
I was finding the northern coast more interesting. It has more nooks and crannies, and the landscape is more varied and colourful. We were passing green slopes covered with grasses and tamarisks and prickly pears and beards of bamboo, the land folding into a series of bluffs and valleys crowned by amber inland cliffs. Each corner revealed a new vista. The sandy beaches looked like splashes of orange paint, and the parts of the coast outside bays were pearled by boulders that had cracked off the cliffs and tumbled to the water’s edge. All day the swell nudged us along in a shallow and azure and clear sea.
At San Blas, where we landed for the night, we got a close look at the orange-red sand that is unique to the Maltese Islands. A small crescent sandy beach, San Blas is backed by a valley of citrus orchards, and at the base of the inland cliff that crested the slope we could make out the layer of sandy bedrock: the redness is nothing more than iron which is leached inertly in the alkaline Maltese soils. The sand is formed by un-reactive aggregates of iron.
***
The next morning we woke up to the soothing soughs of the waves breaking on the shore, and set off on foot to explore Mistra Rocks at the eastern flank of the bay. Bernard called this spot the ‘Rock Garden’, and I could see what he meant: in the heaps of boulders ranged up the slope, some as large as churches, hardy and herbaceous plants and trees (Mediterranean heath, carobs, olives, palms, thyme, honeysuckles, vines, capers, St John’s wort, tree spurges, bay laurels, etc) had taken root in pockets of soil gathered in cracks. The tangled mass of the boulders suggested that they were tossed here by some sort of geological upheaval and I suddenly realised that I had been here once before when I was a child. I had come with my dad to pick capers and I had almost fallen down a deep crack. For years afterward, that fall had been recreated in disturbing dreams, and now, discovering the location of my nightmares answered a long-standing puzzle. Now I knew that the place indeed existed, and it was as I had experienced it in my dreams: a forbidden place, the boulders jagged and sharp, and the absence of sound eerie.
That walk proved to be the highlight of the day. When we paddled out of the bay into open water, the breeze was imperceptible. Mistra Rocks looked more monumental and enigmatic from the water, as though the adobe of the gods, but beyond this stretch, the land morphed into a monotonous scrubby slope. The boredom of the landscape, the strong sun, the predictable and easy paddling, and the accumulation of four days of paddling – all these things left me feeling numbed and tired. During a long lunch-break I fell asleep.
We reached Santa Marija Bay in Comino in mid-afternoon, and as we pulled our kayak onto the sandy beach, we were greeted by a police officer. After a moment of apprehension, it became clear that the police officer was interested in us because he craved human contact. Policing Comino, an island inhabited by four aging farmers and a hotel open in summers’ only, was a lonesome job. He worked two forty-eight-hour shifts a week, spending much of his time walking, fishing, cooking, and watching TV. Only summers, when Comino was invaded by day-trippers, called for some mundane policing such as breaking up scuffles and booking seacraft that anchored too close to shore in beaches. We pitched the tent in the bay and took up his invitation to cook at the police station. He had lived in New York for twelve years before he returned to Gozo. He said, “As you can see, Comino is quite different from New York. Both teach you different things about life, but I prefer Comino because there is no people. The fewer people there are, the less trouble there is. There is another thing: it is so natural to daydream here that you don’t feel you’re wasting your time.”
He spoke at length about the tiny island. “People have the wrong idea about this place. They think this rock is barren, but if you look up you will notice bees flying overhead – they cross over from Gozo to graze the plants of the garigue. Try this: stand on a spot and see how many different plants you could count in a quick gaze round. You will spot at least fifteen. If you come in June, the whole place reeks with wild thyme and their flowers turn the island purple.”
***
In the morning we found police officer fishing in his dinghy at the mouth of the bay. After a brief chat, we pressed on, and round the bend along the cliff of the northern shore we found the deep cave at the waterline the police officer had spoken about, once a hideout for pirates waiting to ambush boats crossing to mainland Malta. We ventured into the cave, where the reflection of light on the water’s surface threw a web of light dancing on the ceiling and where the rise and ebb of water tossed us playfully. Then we continued along the cliff with its veins of brown soil, passing dark, submerged boulders at the cliff’s base. The wind, which had changed to a south-easterly direction, was picking up, and clouds were ganging overhead, and rounding the east coast, we were suddenly yanked by three feet surface waves. For an hour we battled these waves, which drenched us, and then, just as suddenly, we rounded the next corner to find ourselves in a calm sea at Taht Il-Mazz, a gulf enclosed by a 100-meter-high cliff where the slight surface ripple was just perceptible, like the scales of a creature quivering in the wind. We paddled slowly around the several half-submerged rocky isles that stood still in the water like sentries, their surfaces deeply braided by erosion, and beyond these rocks we came to a small beach. We had circumnavigated the island’s 9km circumference in three hours, and it wasn’t lunchtime yet, so we landed and reclined lazily on the sand until, fearing that the strengthening wind would whip up into an imminent windstorm, we decided to make the 2km crossing to Mgarr Harbor, completing the loop.
Mgarr Harbour was bustling with people and for a moment I wondered what the occasion was. Then I remembered it was Sunday afternoon, and that many Gozitans take their Sunday outing at the harbour. They go for a stroll on the pier, eat pastizzi (pea-stuffed puff pastry pockets) and ice-creams, read the Sunday newspaper, listen to the radio, chat with friends about common preoccupations, but mostly they watch the mainland ferries coming and going. The harbour is Gozo’s only link to the outside world, and since the world has always come to Gozo, the natives come here faithfully and expectantly, waiting to see who might turn up. On that Sunday it was two men in a strange seacraft that attracted a curious gathering of spectators.
(C) Victor Paul Borg 
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