Anna and I encountered one of those Google Maps-induced navigational hiccups that ended with us stranded by the side of a busy road with no sidewalks on either side, still a mile from Mdina’s gates.
In the photo above, you’re seeing the bus stop. Looks okay, right? But about thirty paces further down the road, that low wall closes in, leaving less than a foot between the trunks of the trees and the edge of the pavement. The pine limbs get lower, too, so half the time you’re ducking and the other half the time you’re bushwhacking. Walking on the other side of the wall isn’t a great option; it’s a significant drop down to somebody’s overgrown vineyard.
So we bushwhack along the edge of the road for about ten minutes, waiting until there are no cars coming and then dashing as far as we can get before pressing into the low-haning pine limbs to let a new wave of cars pass. It’s pretty hairy.
Finally, we’re passing a garage where a bald old Maltese mechanic is working on his car. He sees us and waves us over. In fractured English with much miming, he tries to explain to us that we should climb up onto the low wall between the trees and field on his side of the road. I’m a little skeptical—the wall is unmortared stone topped by a row of cinderblocks that seesaw under your palm if you press their edges. But we decide that falling off a wall is preferable to being reduced to tourist jelly by a passing semi.
The man tries to give Anna a boost onto the wall. She plants her shoe on one of the low stones and tries to scrabble up, but the stone gives way, taking the cinderblock and a good chunk of the wall with it. She skins her knee.
Undeterred, the man rights the cinderblock and mimes that Anna should use it as a stepping stone to get onto the top of the wall. This she does. I follow without mishap.
Once we’re up there, it’s pretty obvious that this was a cleverer idea than it looked. The cinderblocks are stable as long as you step right in the middle of them, and the wall runs all the way from us to Mdina.
I turn around to thank the man for the suggestion, but he’s vanished. I’m half-convinced he was a mirage, or possibly a jinni.
We walk all the way to Mdina along the top of the wall.
