The island of Malta - Day Zero

My trip started half a day early.
       France has a motto:  Liberté - Egalité - Fraternité.  Right now the cabs and hotels are not feeling the Fraternité part.  Or the other two either.  Uber has cut deeply into the cab drivers’ profits and Air B&B into the hotels’.  The problem?  Neither of these interlopers has to pay all the fees, licenses, workers’ benefits, insurance, taxes, etc. that their establishment colleagues pay.  Which tips the playing field at least 50% out of level, and in favor of those interlopers.
       My obstacle - an apt choice of words - wasn’t going be to get to Malta, but merely to get to the airport!

   

        So I decided to take the RER B commuter train to Roissy-
Charles-de-Gaulle Airport the night before my flight.  Smack dab at its end is the Ibis Hotel, which has been there since Roissy opened its then-sole Terminal 1.  Now there’s also a Terminal 3 for charters and a Terminal 2, with its buildings A through G strung out like beads on a necklace.  And a free shuttle that runs between all three of the terminals every couple of minutes.

It’s a good thing I made that decision because the morning news, which I view from the spartan but clean comfort of the Ibis, shows footage of cabs totally blocking access to the airport.
       And yet here I am, sitting at a table overlooking the tarmac, sipping my tea and eating my pain au chocolat.  No foul, no harm, no stress.
       (A tip if you travel in Europe and you need an inexpensive light meal:  look for EXKI.  This chain shuns GMO, uses only organic foods, their pain au chocolat was deliciously crumb-ful and their tea (in those fabric bags) full-bodied.  Even their trays are “made of organic waste and paper, to reduce our ecological footprint”.  So... the food is good and you help save the planet.)

But why Malta, you wonder?  Yes, lots of people have asked me that.  Most people don’t know where it even is.  So let’s clear that up first.
       Malta is a tiny island south of Italy and east of Tunisia, only 112 miles from Sicily, which is a bit more than the distance between Cuba and Key West.  It covers 122 square miles and has a population of well under half a million.  For comparison’s sake, that’s a little less surface area than Detroit and about two-thirds of Detroit’s population.  Once upon a time, geologically speaking, it was part of a land bridge between Africa and Europe across what’s now the Mediterranean Sea.  I’ve always wondered how Lucy and her descendants got from the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania to Europe because it’s a long detour if you go via the Middle East.  The existence of this land bridge would explain a lot.  And the island does have remnants of a Neanderthal civilization, as well as Stonehenge-worthy ruins.
       If you look into the history of Malta, there’s something for everyone.  You would find the Phoenicians, who traded throughout the entire Mediterranean Basin long before the Romans became a “world” power.  And when they did, Malta was there too, a pawn in the back-and-forth fighting of the Punic Wars, a name known to any Latin student.  For those interested in Christianity, there was St. Paul in chains, on his way to prison in Rome, washed up on Malta’s shores during a shipwreck.
       Skip a few generations and you’ll find Spain’s Ferdinand and Isabella, who sent Columbus to “find” America.  They took over Malta and bequeathed it to their grandson, Carlos V, king of Spain and ruler of the Holy Roman Empire.
       Then there were the pirates.  Lots and lots of pirates.  From the Barbary Coast.  Including the famous Barbarossa.  And other scalawags, such as the charlatan Cagliostro, who fled France over his part in the Affair of the Diamond Necklace involving Marie-Antoinette.  And finally, one of the greatest scalawags of them all:  Napoleon Bonaparte, who looted the island of anything worth looting... then lost it all when his ships were sunk by Britain’s Lord Nelson off the coast of Egypt.  Lord Nelson who was Vice-Admiral in Malta.
      The island became “the Nurse of the Mediterranean” during World War I, offering 25,000 beds to the wounded of “the Great War”.  And it held out during World War II, only a few miles  off Mussolini’s Italy yet never defeated, in spite of a total German blockade and more bombing than the London Blitz at its height.

       If you’re interested in literature, Malta can offer works written by Coleridge and Lord Byron and Thackeray and Sir Walter Scott during their visits to the island.
       If you’re interested in movies, there’s John Huston’s “The Maltese Falcon’.  You know, Humphrey Bogart as detective Sam Spade, searching for a vanished jewel-encrusted statue that the Knights Templar sent to Carlos V but was intercepted by the Barbary Pirates.  (See how it all fits together?)  The Maltese falcon actually did exist.  In 1530, when that same Emperor Carlos V handed over Malta to the Knights of St. John (not the Knights Templar), there was one condition.  Each year they were to send him one falcon in tribute.  The Maltese falcon.

     Yet most of all, for me, Malta is those knights:  the Knights of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem.  Their original name - the Knights Hospitallers - says it all:  a community of monks founded to nurse Christians who fell ill while on pilgrimage in the Holy Land. Centuries ahead of their time, they boiled instruments before surgery.  But the Crusades meant they had to protect themselves as well, so they were also fierce warriors who fought Suleiman the Magnificent, the greatest warrior the Ottoman Empire ever had.  Knights, armor, banners flying... all those books I read in my childhood.
       So you see.  Something for everyone.  And down through the ages.