As you’ve seen, the beaches around Sliema are a little inhospitable. And by inhospitable, I mean I’m pretty sure tourists aren’t the top of the food chain. But we’d hauled our bathing suits all the way across Europe, so we decided that gosh darn it, we’re going swimming even if it kills us. (Which it might.)
I’d heard the phrase “the blue lagoon” connected to the phrase “beach,” so we took the bus all the way across Malta to the Comino ferry to check it out.
The ferry itself is an experience worth having. It soars over tall waves, the entire deck is the splash zone, and it passes some beautiful cliffs and sea caves:
Then it moors here:
(And that is not a photo from a tourist brochure. It’s a photo from my phone.)
The water is Mediterranean turquoise:
The lagoon is the stretch of sea between the island of Comino (foreground, above) and the tiny rock of Cominotto (background). The sand is white, the ocean is clear, and the depth is never more than about eight feet. We only saw one jellyfish. The Comino shore is packed with deck chairs, but if you swim out to Cominotto, which we did, you can sunbathe on the tiny strip of beach and explore the sea caves and grottos with only a handful of tourists and some green leopard-spotted lizards for company. (Regrettably, you cannot do so with your camera, unless your camera is waterproof enough to swim over with you.) There’s even a tunnel that bores straight through Cominotto to open water. It’s cool and shady and the water is about waist-deep. I didn’t make that particular swim, mostly because I had this theory that the eels probably liked the shade as much as I did. But I stood at the entrance and could see daylight at the other end.
The only problem with Malta in May is that the water is really, surprisingly, shockingly cold. Anna lasted a lot longer than Fiona and I. We swam out to Cominotto, hauled ourselves out of the water with our teeth chattering, sunbathed for hours, finally stopped shivering, and then looked back across the water to the ferry dock and thought, crap.
