“Odyssey is an industry-first initiative that seamlessly integrates immersive storytelling and informative scene-setting shows with a historical, story-driven flying theatre ride. Get ready to step into a world where history comes alive”
Our plan was to walk north along the coast to the nearby village of St Julian’s and depending upon the weather maybe even further, if things turned out badly then we could always get a bus back to Sliema.
For the time being at any rate the weather this morning was fabulous.
I don’t know this for sure of course but I imagine that the east coast of Malta used to be a string of villages with green space between them but rapid commercial and tourist development has morphed them into one long homogeneous strip of continuous concrete, high rise and tarmac.
I admit that I have a tendency to lament the passing of time, to be gloomy about the passing of the past. The loss of heritage. On this walk I found myself weighed down by nostalgia and despondency in equal measures. Maybe I should try harder to welcome the change, embrace the present and look forward to the future. I should use full beam going forward rather than looking in the rear view mirror. I need to add a dash of hope to my cocktail. The historian in me makes this difficult.
St Julian’s in the 1960s…
… and almost all of this gone, swept away in a frenzy of hasty development and here in the east much of the previous charm of Malta has been hollowed out and now there is high rise where once there were traditional homes, Starbucks where there were corner bars, McDonalds where there were tavernas. Malta has the fastest growing economy in Europe and it shows and there is a swift, maybe reckless transition from the old to the new and the development demonstrates impatient haste.
This what St Julian’s looks like now from the roof terrace of the tallest building (for now at least) in Malta…
So today we were visiting a new visitor attraction called ‘The Odyssey’. There are a number of these audio-visual shows in Malta and this is the newest. Last year we went to something similar in the Bastion fort in Valletta which raced through history and concentrated on the WW2 siege of Malta. It was very good.
So, we booked on line and got a late morning slot. I really don’t like that booking online business and being tied down to a time slot, it takes all of the spontaneity out of visiting and travelling always having to have one eye on the time. It strips out the casual and and the impromptu and replaces it with timetables and an alarm. And you no longer get proper tickets just an email confirmation and a QR code.
I know, I know…
Anyway, it was rather good, a few light shows, some films and some animations and then we were strapped into our seats for our flight over Malta.
I wasn’t exactly sure why it was called ”Odyssey” but it turned out to have a connection with Homer’s epic poem ‘The Odyssey“. Now after the hero Odysseus had fooled the Trojans with his wooden horse prank and the war was over he set off home for the island of Ithaca, a couple of hundred miles away at most near the island of Kefalonia. but he managed to find himself over seven hundred miles away in Malta. That was either one hell of a storm or navigational aids weren’t especially reliable two thousand years ago.
So, what is the Malta connection you might well ask? Well, it took Odysseus ten years to make the journey home but seven of them he spent in Calypso’s Cave on nearby island of Gozo, lured there and kept prisoner there by the nymph Calypso.
A nymph (or nymphomaniac) is by the way is (according to Wiki) a woman with an excessively strong, uncontrollable sexual desire also known as hypersexuality or sex addiction.
I wonder why he stayed for seven years?
It was a good experience, well worth the entrance fee even though the final ten minutes was obviously sponsored by the Malta Tourist Board but it finished with an express lift ride to the thirty-fourth floor and a panoramic view of the entire island.
Nothing left to do now except walk back to Sliema, stopping now and again to sit in the December sunshine, lament a little and reminisce a lot as we told each other about travels past.
Later we choose a different restaurant quite close to where we were staying, it was good and we agreed that we might return tomorrow. We are like that, if we find somewhere we like we will go back, no point taking unnecessary gastro risks.
Have Bag, Will Travel 