When Shirley and I booked our trip with Kensington Tours, we asked for some local cuisine to be included along with culture and history. They certainly listened; today, our last day here, we have devoted to fooding around in Malta.

Our first stop was the Diar il-Bniet restaurant where we picked up Chef Godwin who stayed with us for the day. He took us to his boss’s farm where most of the fresh vegetables and fruits are grown to be used in the restaurant.

A separate structure that is used as a storeage shed appeared to have stairs that led nowhere. When I asked about them, Godwin explained that they were used by farm workers to get on their horses without having to jump up. Which step they used depended on how tall the horse or mule was. Seems like a good idea to me!

Next stop – Tony the beekeeper. Tony started keeping a hive about 15 years ago and then added and added til he now has quite a few. He explained a lot about not only the bee keeping process, but also the science of bees. It turns out that when the queen lays eggs, they are neither male nor female. What the hive needs, whether drones or nurses, the new bees become. New queens are produced when they are treated with “royal jelly” while still in the pupa stage.

We suited up for a closer look at a hive. My suit had a camo print to make it extra hard for the bees to find me. 😉

Time for lunch! We went back to Diar il-Bniet where Godwin layed on a feast of snacks and snails for Shirley and rabbit (!!) for me. (I concentrated on not thinking about fuzzy tails and big floppy ears and the little bunnies that live underneath the Jericho Arts Centre!) It was actually very good. Godwin had made a curry sauce for it and there was lots of cumin. Yum.

We finished our food tour with a visit to the Mar Casar winery. The owner, Mark Casar, produces natural and gluten-free wines: no sulfites and no filters. We tasted his Chardonnay and his Merlot, and his “cannabis wine” which is made from hemp rather than marijuana. He calls it his CBD wine. Shirley and I are so used to standard wines that we really didn’t have a taste for any of them. But Mark was quite funny and we sat with a young couple and had a very nice time.

We had dinner at Scala, a restaurant in Rabat, which is the village immediately outside Mdina. It is located on a rise with several other restaurants. My photos of our dinners were unremarkable, but I do like this photo of the view from our table.

The next morning, Ryan, our driver – this was the third time he’d been in our driver and we felt like he was an old friend – picked us up and told us he had a surprise for us. And what a fun surprise it was.

There was to be a race of adults and children driving these horses. A street will be closed off. It would’ve been fun to watch the race, but we needed to get to the airport.

And that’s it for Malta. We had a wonderful time; six days was enough. The only thing Shirley and I got wrong was that we thought October would be after tourist season and not still in the middle. Nevertheless we loved our visit to Malta.

Addiju Malta. Inħobbok!