Paul & Juliet Wilder
GOZO HOLIDAY - JULY 04


On Tuesday 13th July, we took off from Manchester airport for a week long holiday in the sun, to the small island of Gozo, next to Malta.


The airplane lands in Malta, since Gozo is only 9 by 4 miles it doesn't have an airport, however it does have a helipad!! The helicopter ride was a short ten minute flight.


The place we stayed at is called Villagg ta' Sbejha and has 20 self catering apartments around a pool near the village of Gharb run by www.gozovillageholidays.com. Luckily we went at the start of the summer holidays so there were only a few occupied.


We hired a jeep for the week to get us around the little island - yeah we know you could just walk round or catch the old Bedford buses! But most of the roads (even the major ones) are a right state, so its lots of fun!

ALL THINGS GOZITAN


All the villages and towns in Gozo have little streets like this one. This is in the town center in Victoria (Rabat).
The little harbour towns on Gozo are all full of these brightly coloured fishing boats, with the eye to ward off evil spirits. Every road on Gozo has lots of these prickly pear cactus.

Little lizards are everywhere and scuttle away quickly. This one however was too busy eating icecream!
There are loads of little forts all over the island, built by the Knights of St John to defend against their endless foreign invaders. Here's one just visible above Juliet's head...

SIGHT SEEING

Ggantija Temple: Ruins of the Ggantija Temple, built 5,000 years ago, even before the pyramids in Egypt!

Churches: Christianity is really big in Gozo & Malta, over 95% of the population regularly go to church! Every single weekend they have a festival, where they set off loads of fireworks and decorate their churches and streets! Every little village has an oversized church in their attempts to outdo the others! The dome shown below rivals St Peters in Rome and St Pauls in London!


The Coastline: The coatline around Gozo is stunning. Below is an inland sea!


DIVING

One of the main reason we went to Gozo was for the fantastic diving, especially directly from the shore since Juliet gets sea sick.

We chose St. Andrews Divers Cove in Xlendi bay. (www.gozodive.com)


Paul eating lunch at Xlendi bay between dives. We loved this village, it wasn't too busy and it has some lovely little bars on the sea front as well as fantastic views.

Since Gozo is slightly cooler than the Red Sea, Juliet wore a 3mm long wetsuit with a 3mm shortie over the top to keep warm! Makes getting in to it difficult when it's 33 degrees C in the shade! We did four dives, two directly from the shores and two backwards rolling off a small boat!

The third dive we did was our deepest yet at 30 meters where we visited a sunken tug! It was an amazing sight to see a wreck just appearing out of the deep blue (Sadly too deep for our dive camera).


Here we are actually under water! The middle shot is Paul in a cave at Comino island that is only accessable by a deep underwater tunnel. It does however have air to breath inside via cracks in the rock.

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