Not Unplugged: Malta
An early intimation of this newsletter begins with the quest for a story and ends with a Resident Knight on his phone
I got my first taste of traveling without making any preparations in 2010. A couple of years earlier, I had started writing for the travel magazine Afar, which ran a regular feature called Spin the Globe, in which they literally did just that. Turning an old globe kept in the office for just this purpose, the magazine would send a writer to wherever it was that the editor’s finger happened to land (with re-dos allowed for conflict zones and the middle of the ocean).
I was beyond thrilled when they asked me to do one. In the days prior to my trip I fantasized constantly about where I might land, and I have a clear memory of visiting my parents a few days before my departure, and running through the possibilities as we sat in the car one evening waiting for our takeout order. Tibet, we reckoned, was out because of visa requirements, and Iraq was obviously too dangerous. But that still left so many enticing options. Vietnam? Namibia? Some far-flung village in Uzbekistan accessible only by ancient goatherd path?
Instead, I got Malta.
Which, as I learned once I arrived, has some spellbindingly beautiful towns and cities, a fascinating history, and is surrounded on all sides by the glittering Mediterranean. In someone else’s hands this could easily be an uplifting story about turning disappointment into appreciation.
Just not in mine. Because never in my life have I disliked a place as much as I disliked Malta. There were several reasons for this, including:
Bad food
A deep conservatism that meant divorce was still illegal at the time of my visit in 2010, and wives had only been released from their husbands’ legal tutelage 17 years earlier.
The kind of urban planning that razed whatever natural landscape existed outside of the medieval towns in order to build hideous blocks of holiday apartments and tacky nightclubs for Brits on package tours.
A national costume that, as far as I could tell, consisted primarily of a tank top stretched tightly over a rounded belly. In the male versions, this would be complemented by tufts of black hair sprouting exuberantly from its borders, as if seeking to merge with their brethren gathered in thick mustaches higher up.
A willful insistence on letting people continue to climb on their most precious natural landmark, the stunning rock arch known as the Azure Window, for years after geologists began warning that it was in danger of collapse. It collapsed in 2017.
But the biggest reason I disliked Malta was a kind of determined insularity that manifested often as plain old racism. At the time, Europe was in the middle of the migrant crisis and Malta, because of its geographical position between the two continents, had became the forced landing point for thousands of people attempting to reach Europe from Africa. Once there, they were held in detention centers, often indefinitely, which meant that although migration was everywhere in the headlines in Valletta, I did not actually see any Africans (though I did hear quite a few appalling remarks about them). Until, that is, that I met Kasib Sali. This is what I wrote about him in my original draft for Spin the Globe:
From his home in Mali, Sila had crossed the better part of north Africa to reach Libya. There he turned over his life savings in exchange for passage on a boat that would take him, he was told, to Italy. Instead, the boat was commandeered by the Maltese police. “Very difficult,” is all he would say about the detention center where he was confined for a year. (Later, I read an interview with another migrant in the local paper who compared the conditions there to Guantánamo.) Sila wanted to reach the real Europe too—he had his sights set on Germany—but a mental health issue had landed him in a local hospital, with little chance of obtaining the visa he needed to move on. With an apologetic shrug, he explained the problem. “I hear voices.”
Who wouldn’t? Malta is so saturated with history that it’s impossible to walk the streets without hearing the centuries’ echo. I count five different historical re-enactments staged or screened nightly for tourists—and that’s not including the World War Two ones. A dim recollection of the cannon and harquebuses with which the knights defended themselves finds its echo in the Maltese predilection for fireworks; every night, Valletta’s silence explodes as teenagers throw cherry bombs in the street. And each year, several fireworks manufacturers die in factory explosions (by August of 2010, four men had already been killed in four separate accidents). The Maltese speak of these events with an air of tragic inevitability.
So is it the dream of Europe that Malta represents, or its nightmare? One evening, I sit at an outdoor café with a group of middle-aged women, their magenta hair glinting as the sun sets over the harbor, and it doesn’t take long before the conversation turns to how migrants are bringing in drugs and taking away jobs. Meanwhile, the migrants themselves describe a Maltese resistance to outsiders that would not be unfamiliar in, well, the Crusades.
Some of that got toned down in the published version (though all credit to beloved editor Derk Richardson for keeping much of the spirit). But the core of the story remained.
Because that was the real challenge of Spin the Globe. Landing in a new place where you might not know anyone and hadn’t had time to do any research was tricky, of course, and could lead to the occasional misadventure. But the thing that really made me anxious about the assignment, and that kept me nervous well after I had arrived, found a place to stay in Valletta, and had my first mediocre version of lampuki pie, was the need to find a story. Because as any good travel writer can tell you, it’s not enough to just go to a place and describe what you see; something has to happen.
In the end, something did happen in Malta, and it happened in a way I never could have predicted. That hasn’t stopped me from worrying every time I land in a new place with no idea of what I’m going to write about. But as I grapple with the question again and again through this newsletter, I’ve started to think that maybe–just maybe–there are always stories out there to find, if only we can stay open to them.
Your (once again) excellent writing brings up a conundrum that, as a travel writer, I often struggled with: How (and when) to say, to quote you, “ Because never in my life have I disliked a place as much as I disliked Malta.” We’ve all been to places that we just would never recommend to friends but editors don’t want you saying this. Their reasoning (valid) is “our readers don’t want to read about places you don’t like.” I get it. But at the same time, it would be nice to have some honesty in the writing: These people are racists; the architecture is boring; the food sucks. Sometimes I’ve tried to do that by writing between the lines, but even this was often stripped out of my stories. Yet not every place we visit is the loveliest, most amazing destination in the world. And from my perspective, it would be good if travel writers were at least as honest as restaurant critics (or, okay, as honest as they used to be). If a city sucks, it sucks.
Fascinating post Lisa. I really enjoyed reading your 'Spin the Globe' piece