Malta is one of the weirdest places I’ve ever driven. It has one of the highest rates of cars per capita of any country in the world, in spite of the fact that it’s just a couple of little islands floating out in the Mediterranian Sea. This completely superfluous orgy of cars doesn’t stop the roads from being a continual insane swirl of not only the tiny cars, but also ATVs, scooters, bikes, pedestrians and cement trucks. The roads did their best to ease you through this chaos by containing no lanes whatsoever.

All of the cars themselves were goofy little things, like we had all broken free of the bumper car rink at the State Fair. This made the chaos seem somewhat lower-stakes, as you were just going to boing off another wind-up car if you turned the wrong way off a roundabout, unless you happened to turn in front of one of the cement trucks.

I’d been met at the airport by a representative of my rental car company, which meant some dude in an unmarked van pulled up and drove me to a house, a literal house in a congested residential neighborhood and let me into their garage, where a makeshift counter had been set up to rent the three cars they had parked in front of the house. Oh God, what have I got myself into now? No wonder the car rental was six dollars.

It was literally six dollars. I’d booked it mostly out of curiosity to see how this could possibly make sense. While I was waiting to pick up my car, a French couple were loudly arguing with the guy behind the counter, and I gradually figured out that the “company” made this work by being veeeeeery picky about the condition you returned your car in, which, given the state of the roads and drivers in Malta, was very unlikely to be the same condition you picked up the car in. The French couple were being charged an arm and a leg for however they’d jacked up their little clown car, and they were protesting Frenchly. Oh boy. This is going to be interesting.

When it was my turn, I chatted up the guy behind the counter and consoled him for the yelling-at he’d just received from the French tourists. He was very excited to meet someone from America, as he badly wanted to go there soon. So 90% of our conversation was about what he should see or do when he got to America. I’m 100% certain this conversation saved me from getting screwed over on this rental car. Before I knew it, I was motoring away in my little Toyota Aygo, trying to thread the needle through insane streets that were the exact width of a Toyota Aygo.

Over time I’ve become an aficionado of small shitty rental cars, and along those lines the Aygo is fine, though it loves to stall out in first gear and corners like a trash can. There are much worse cars out there, and I was driving among most of them on the streets of Malta.

This was going to be my last rental car of this six-month trip, because my driver’s license was expiring in one week. I was also glad the rental car guy had not noticed this. I’d tried to renew my license before I left the US, but with covid closing things down it proved impossible to get a renewed license back in my hands before I left the states. I’d set up a wild menagerie of mail holds and forwards in an attempt to get the DMV to forward a new license to my mom’s house in California so that she could mail it to me in Wales, but the postal service responded by returning all my mail to sender for the entire time I was gone instead. You win this round, US Postal Service. Guess I’m going to be riding some buses.

I needed to get all the way across the island of Malta and the clock was ticking. I was renting an entire apartment from a German couple who needed to check me in and quickly get onto the day’s last ferry back to their house on the island of Gozo. It was going to be tight. I swirled through the chaos and dusty insanity, trying to get a feel for what exactly the hell was going on with Maltese driving as the setting sun did its best to completely blind me and distract me from remembering to DRIVE ON THE LEFT OH MY GOD THE LEFT THE LEFT.

After about 45 minutes of driving and sweating I wheeled into the neighborhood where I’d be staying, as the miniscule narrow streets packed with cars parked on each side wound from side to side in nonsensical spirals. OK! I’m here. Now I just need to find a place to par-There is absolutely nowhere to park in this entire city. Parking was clearly in very high demand and a full contact sport, which was something my German host had warned me about obliquely. I drove around and around the neighborhood, glancing at the clock as precious time ticked away.

On my third or fourth loop I… I found a space! A very, very tiny space. Like maybe too small even for an Aygo, which is barely large enough for one person and a bag of take-out tacos. I slammed to a stop in the middle of the street and threw the car in reverse. It responded by immediately stalling out. Arrg. CH CH CH CH CHHHHHH I started the Aygo back up as cars instantly piled up behind me, angrily trying to wish me into a cornfield.

I pulled the car back, and back, and baaaaack, and CURB. Dammit. Cars roared by wheezily and honked hilarious little honks as I sat diagonally half-way into the street. Arrrg. I pulled out again, careful not to clip the SUV in front of me as I lined up the angle again and carefully inched back. This time the angle was right but there wasn’t enough space in front for me to cut the wheel and get the nose of my car out of the street. Jeez. Maybe this space really is too small. I mean, it’s the smallest space I’ve ever tried to fit a car into, maybe I should have taken a hint from that. But there was literally nowhere else to park in this town and I was beyond late now.

I pulled out again, a scooter swerving around me in puttery rage. Back again, cut the angle, back back back jeez this seems close, I don’t know, I guess I’ve got to SHRRRRRRG I plowed into the rusty Jeep parked behind me. Uh-oh. Huh. I guess I didn’t keep the rental car that I couldn’t afford to damage in any way pristine for very long after all. Well, at least I’d just made the parking space bigger. I cut the wheel and pulled up a couple of inches to the bumper of the SUV in front of me. I turned off the car and heard the people sitting on the patio in front of the bar across the street running a loud verbal commentary on my parking adventure. Thankfully I could tell right away that none of them were the owners of any of the cars involved.

I got out and took a look at the Jeep behind me. You know, I hit this thing going one mile an hour, I can’t even tell there was an impact. I squinted at both bumpers closely and could see no evidence that a crime had been committed. Okay, that will have to do. I grabbed my backpack and headed up the street.

The path to my apartment took me right past the patio of the bar where the commentary on my parking had been going on. Well, this is awkward. I decided to head this off at the pass and walked over to the older guy and waitress who had been mocking my parking skill.

“Ha, well that wasn’t my best parking job ever,” I offered, with breezy self-deprecation, thinking this would defuse the situation and expecting them to joke back some camaraderie-infused version of “We’ve all been there before!”

The waitress smiled, she was picking up what I was putting down, but the guy, who looked like a retired British ex-pat and a neither retired nor ex alcoholic, took this opportunity to launch into an absolutely insane tirade.

“How you ever got your fuckin’ driver’s license is a fuckin’ mystery to me! Christ I’ve never seen anything like that you’re a fuckin’ lost cause you fuckin’-”

Oh wooooow. Okay then. There was no good humor living here. I’m certain that wasn’t even his Jeep, this guy looked like he crawled here. The dude literally seemed possessed by some kind of demon, so rank was the energy pouring out of him as he held court on my apparently life-ruining parking. Jeez, maybe that’s what happens when you drink that much for too many years. After briefly contemplating making a joke about how polite British people are, I realized I wanted no part of this guy at all, so rather than argue with him or defend myself I cut him off instead.

“Oh, okay! Well… I’m sorry you’re so unhappy. Have a good night!”

And I set off up the street.

The German couple who were renting me their place were completely delightful and sweet, and they made it to their ferry on time in the end. About twenty minutes after I arrived, the skies opened up and it rained so hard that the streets below my balcony ran like an angry river.

Eventually the rain had washed all the demons away and I walked a block to the beach for a soft orange and pink sunset that bathed the whole town in a beautiful and eerie glow. Welcome to Malta.

I spent a lot of this trip trying to figure out what the Maltese people were like. Retired Brits and Germans, I knew what they were like. But what are the locals like?

I spent a few days thinking I had figured this out, because I made friends with the people running the little vegan restaurant down the block from my apartment, where I was eating daily. And they they were cool folks. Pretty laid back. They turned out to be Russian.

I pulled off pretty much this entire six-month trip flying by the seat of my pants. The suddenness with which I’d left the US and the unpredictability of the covid world I was traveling through meant I couldn’t meticulously plan out what I was going to be doing when, or even what country I was going to be in day to day. I ended up falling into a groove of just deciding every day where I was going to go and what I was going to do. This ended up being very awesome and was made possible solely by hotels and trains being mostly empty due to covid. The flip side of this was that I was frequently arriving in countries with absolutely no idea what to see or do once I was there.

The only thing I knew about Malta when I arrived was that they’d filmed Popeye here. I’d grown up with this deeply weird 1980 Robin Williams/Robert Altman movie, which has the general reputation of having been a massive flop but actually did pretty well at the box office. I think people just remember it that way because it was so freaking weird and not what anyone thought they wanted or expected at the time. Whether it was good or not was kind of immaterial to the fact that it was always on TV when I was growing up and thus formed the wallpaper of my childhood, with both the weird grungy visuals of Sweethaven and the loping melodies of Harry Nilsson’s offbeat songs finding a place to live in my subconscious childhood brain.

Upon arrival in Malta I discovered that the sets from the movie were still somehow in existence. Abandoned after production, they’d been kept up by the locals as a tourist attraction and instantly became the #1 thing I wanted to see while I was in Malta. My first morning on the island I set off in my tiny car to see what was what.

The movie-constructed village of Sweethaven sits in glamorous Anchor Bay on the Northwest coast of the island, the bay so named because that’s where people would dump anchors they no longer wanted to deal with. It took 165 people seven months to build the village set in the summer of 1979, using timbers imported from the Netherlands and eight tons of nails. Wait, that can’t be right, that’s a lot of nails. Maybe they were bad carpenters. Either way, building the set and doing a lot of drugs took up so much of the movie’s budget that they ran completely out of money before they had shot any of the film’s ending.

Unable to get any more funding and facing mass defections from a crew that he could no longer pay to stick around, Altman improvised the movie’s ending out of drug-addled suggestions from the few crew members who hadn’t fled the island yet, which is why the ending of the movie seems like something you’d improvise in a day after you ran out of money. The octopus that kidnaps Olive Oyl was supposed to be animatronic, but they couldn’t afford to pay that guy so Shelly Duvall is basically just thrashing around in the water and moving the octopus tentacles herself. Popeye dances on water at the end because Altman didn’t have an actual ending and Robin Williams was so high he blurted out “What if he walks on water like Jesus?” and Altman was so high he thought that was a good idea.

Today the set has been cleaned up and repainted, with most of the cocaine scrubbed off of everything. This robs Sweethaven of some of its original, dismal and dilapidated ramshackle charm, but it’s an understandable move. For one, the buildings surely would have rotted away to nothing by now if left as entirely unpainted and already decaying as they appeared in the movie. And for two, it’s probably tough to get people to come out and pay to see a tourist attraction that looks like hammered shit.

The drive to Popeye Village took me down dusty and narrow back country roads that gave me a good view of Malta's sparsely-vegetated landscape. At one point I met a huge bus coming at me head-on along a road that wasn't really wide enough for the bus alone and certainly wasn't fit for the both of us to drive on together. I had to drive a quarter of a mile in reverse until I found a spot where I could pull off and let the bus go by. The driver gave me a very friendly wave though as he kicked up a dust storm rumbling by.

The first thing I realized upon arriving at Popeye Village was that I was the only person there who had ever seen the movie. I don’t mean that as a funny exaggeration, this was 100% true. There were plenty of people there on the day that I went, but it was immediately clear this had just become a fun place for the locals to hang out, because there’s honestly not that much to do in Malta. A large section of the village had been set aside for sunbathing, and locals frolicked in the bay, made calm by a breakwater built during filming.

This didn’t detract from the experience at all for me, it was just funny when I showed up for the 2pm guided tour of the village, and the guide (a young woman dressed as Olive Oyl) got super-excited that someone was there who had seen the movie and would have any idea what she was talking about, as we went door to door and she detailed movie scenes that had taken place here or there. My favorite was the spot across from the Oyl’s house, where there was still a couch-shaped hole in the neighboring building from when Bluto threw a couch through the Oyl’s window after being stood-up by Olive. Apparently they’d really launched a couch across the way to get that shot, and the evidence of its impact was still there.

The Oyl’s house had been genuinely destroyed during the filming of that scene, so what we were standing in front of was a reconstruction done to the same specs after the site became a tourist attraction.

As fun as the tour was, the most magic for me just came from wandering around Sweethaven by myself. It was very surreal to have this imaginary place that had occupied space in my childhood mind suddenly come to life as a real location I could walk around, cartoonish crooked angles and all.

One of my favorite sights was another cast member dressed as Bluto, who was playing minigolf with some little kids in an area of the park that looked like it became Santa’s Village during the offseason. Later, the cast put on a skit to get the gathered Maltese psyched to go swimming in the bay.

The details of the place were wonderful to see, like how hilariously wretched the Anchorage House was, which by appearances looked like it was only being kept on the land at all by a cable that connected it to a large boulder across the street. Jeez. What a cartoon solution. That’s perfect.

You could go inside most of the buildings, some had kept their movie interiors while others were converted into little museums detailing the filming of the movie.

Others were dedicated to the character of Popeye himself and his journey from comic strip character to home stereo kingpin.

The Oyls’ house was the most elaborate, with many rooms you could explore. I walked down one dark hallway and peered through the glass inset in a locked door. I then yelled my second involuntary “JESUS FUCK!” of the trip as a ghostly mannequin of Olive Oyl scared the living bejeezus out of me.

Walking through that same house, a band of little kids came around a corner and screamed loudly in abject terror when they saw me, yelling “AAAAH! A GUY!” before running away hilariously.

One of the buildings had been converted into a little cinema, where they played a 20 minute behind the scenes making-of featurette about the movie, which was fun to see when you’re actually sitting in the place being depicted on screen. I had the theater to myself and the girl manning the door made popcorn just for me, which was fun.

At the bar next door I got to try Malta’s national soft drink, Kinnie, which was absolutely disgusting.

Other areas had been dedicated to finding things Maltese people who’ve never heard of this movie might enjoy doing.

This was a really magical day that I enjoyed thoroughly, and when I got back to my apartment that night, of course I had to watch Popeye. Which guaranteed that I would have Olive’s song He Needs Me stuck in my head for the entirety of the rest of my travels.

I followed that up the next night by watching The Maltese Falcon, which turns out to have nothing whatsoever to do with Malta.

Okay, that was fun. But what do normal people do when they go to Malta? I made a list.

Valletta is Malta’s ancient capital city and where they filmed the streets of King’s Landing and The Red Keep in Game of Thrones. So this seemed worth a peek. Most of the advice I could find online was basically “You will never find parking in Valletta aaaah YOU ARE SO SCREWRED,” etc, so I was careful to park outside the city, after following a road that seemed to indiscriminately switch back and forth between city street and full-fledged freeway, and which at one point did a complete U-turn all on its own. Malta, I don’t think roads are what you think they are.

The highlight of Valletta for me was the War Museum. This isn’t normally something I’d be super interested in, but it turns out that due to the island’s strategic location, the history of war in Malta is the history of Malta.

Malta has basically been a timeshare for nearly every culture on Earth at one time or another in its history. The original settlers came from Siscily around 6000 BC. They disappeared mysteriously around 2500 BC and were replaced in turn by the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Greeks, Arabs, Normans, French and finally the British in the 1800s, before Malta gained independence in 1964. So it’s kind of an odd place in that it has a very long history, but that history’s kind of all over the place, and the only constant seems to be that a lot of people died to make way for the next wave of invaders from wherever was powerful at the time. Maybe that’s why the Maltese people are so hard to nail down. They’re everybody.

The era that the war museum spent the most time covering was kicked off in 1530, when the Holy Roman Emperor gifted Malta to the Order of St John, a medieval military religious order based in Crusades-era Jerusalem who became known as the Knights of Malta. The Knights ruled the island for over 250 years, making their fortune raiding Ottoman shipping vessels that passed through the shipping channels near Malta. In exchange, they paid the Emperor an annual tribute of one Maltese falcon. And I mean a real goddamned bird, not the cursed and jewel-encrusted statue of Hollywood imaginings that was a pain in Humphrey Bogart’s grumpy ass.

I found it funny that the noble and religious “good guys” in this story were essentially pirates, but the Ottomans were pretty rough customers themselves. In 1551 they raided the island of Gozo and sold all 5,000 of its inhabitants into slavery in North Africa. I was shocked to learn the extent of the slave trade in this era, as the Ottomans raided not only Africa but Europe, the Balkans and the Caucasus, with something like 2.5 million slaves of all races and religions being moved through Istanbul alone in those years, in a practice that lasted into the early 1900s.

A large section of the museum was focused on the Great Siege of Malta. The Ottomans had tried and failed to take Malta from the Knights in 1551, then returned even stronger in 1565, waging a four-month siege on the very fort that now hosted this museum. Five hundred knights managed to defeat the Ottomans in what became one of the most famous events of that century. The reign of the Knights would last until the late 1700s, when they were ultimately defeated by Napoleon.

The museum also dedicated a lot of space to World War II, when due to its strategic position in the middle of the Mediterranean and its proximity to Italy, Malta was shelled relentlessly by the Axis forces. The local population held out against long odds, and this ultimately got the ball rolling toward their independence.

OK cool. What else do people see here. A big church?

OK then. Oh, there’s a natural rock arch formation called The Azure Window that was the shooting location for Daenerys and Khal Drogo’s romantic wedding on Game of Thrones? Sure, why not.

Oh, the arch fell into the sea after they filmed that? Okay.

I was walking around looking for a restaurant that night, having to contend with the fact that restaurants were just randomly closed due to covid and nobody had updated their websites or Facebook pages to let anyone know they weren’t open any more. This involved a lot of walking to a lot of closed restaurants and not a lot of eating. I was walking down one dark street when I passed a guy who yelled “FUCK OFF!” at me for no apparent reason. I paused for a second and decided this was a situation it was better to avoid completely. He yelled “FUCK YOU!” at my back as I walked away. The energy around this was very strange, it felt like this guy was channelling something dark that was beyond himself. Jeez, maybe there are demons possessing people in Malta. At least there’s ice cream.

The other draw of Malta is that they have some seriously old shit. Like, the oldest man-made structures on Earth old shit.

I’d taken the ferry out to Gozo, the other main island that makes up Malta, and stood on the deck taking in the fresh air and the blue sea all around us. Gozo gradually came into focus.

I was headed to Ġgantija, a megalithic temple complex dating back to 3600 BC, at which time people had already been on these islands for over 2,000 years. During those early days they’d gradually wiped out the indiginous dwarf elephants, dwarf hippos, and dwarf- no, kidding! GIANT SWANS! Bet you didn’t see that one coming. The swans were actually bigger than the elephants, which is a dream I had once.

The small museum at Ġgantija described the neolithic people who had lived here so long ago. I was fascinated to see their digital re-creation of one of those people from their skull, it’s always interesting when you realize someone from 5,500 years ago basically looked like that barista you always talk to at Starbucks.

The Sicani people worshipped a strikingly rotund fertility goddess, and many of their carvings survive to this day.

There is some debate over whether the most ancient of these temples is the oldest man-made structure in the world, or if that distinction belongs to Göbekli Tepe in Turkey. The consensus seems to be tipping toward Turkey at the moment, but no one really knows. I personally think the pyramids in Egypt are much older than we currently think they are, but that’s neither here nor there. This is some old shit.

The temples were rediscovered in the 1800s, which was the golden era of people finding priceless ancient artifacts and dancing a jig on them and then blowing them up with dynamite just for shits.

Outside the museum, a pathway takes you past the scrubby desert plants to the temple structure. It’s hard to photograph without it just looking like a pile of rocks, but if I look this good a few thousand years from now I’ll be happy.

A boardwalk takes you through the main entrance of the temple.

Smooth, round holes in the rock slabs were thought to be used to hang doors to keep pesky kids and psychotic 1800s explorers out of these sacred temples.

These measures were only partially successful though as many knobs carved their fancy names into the rock.

It’s surreal both to see graffiti from the 1800s as well as to see such finely chiseled graffiti, strange for an act we think of today as occurring with a sharpie when the field trip chaperone isn’t looking. It also struck me as funny as a crime you’re uniquely unlikely to get away with, since you’re carving your name into a goddamned 6,000 year old rock. I wonder who defaced this ancient monument?

You know what? I think it just might have been this Chapelle fellow! You got the feeling that people back then didn’t even think this was wrong, they were just oblivious to the concept of things like this having value that should be preserved for future generations.

Inside the structure there were altars where animal sacrifices took place.

You can’t really see it from ground level, but the cloverleaf design of the temple created circular rooms branching off the main passageway on both sides.

Since I had the temple to myself on a covid-era weekday, I took the opportunity to stand for a long while and meditate on this space. Why was I drawn to come to Malta, did it have something to do with being here? As I cleared my mind and stood in silence for several minutes, I started to see the patterns of holes and pock marks on the surface of the rocks that made up the temple start to shift until I was seeing faces in the rocks. And I rapidly became aware of the energy of the people who had used this temple so long ago. I could see some of their faces, and then felt a presence behind me. As I began to look back I felt an energy move by my side and saw a woman walk past me into the round temple room and disappear. Huh.

I walked into the temple’s other entrance on the opposite side, looking at the large scaffolding that had been erected to shore up a crumbling temple wall. Hmmm. Seems like a somewhat inelegant solution, but better than nothing I suppose.

No, this side doesn’t feel like anything. I walked back to the first entrance and found a spot halfway along the walkway where I’d felt the energy of those ancient people the most strongly. I stood there and felt the energy move through me, which felt both grounding and refreshing at the same time. I stood for a long while, just being silent and feeling the energy move, and gradually a concept formed in my awareness. A picture became clearer, that the ancient people had channeled and harnessed beneficial Earth energies here that the modern people of Malta would benefit from integrating, that this would help with their evolution. But the energies weren’t accessible to people now, even the ones who visited this temple, they were cut off. It was like the two worlds were existing side by side without intermixing, they were out of sync. And standing there, I was weaving together this ancient neolithic energy and the modern island, as if creating a doorway between the two. After several minutes it felt like this was done and I was off again.

After that experience it felt clear that this was the kind of thing I was in Malta to do, so I sought out some of the other ancient temples on the islands. On the main island of Malta, the ancient temples of Ħaġar Qim and Mnajdra sit near to each other on the southern coast. Each is covered by a massive high-tech umbrella to prevent further erosion.

In many ways these temples were much better-preserved than Ġgantija, but the energy felt much less strong to me here, probably because being out on Gozo, the Ġgantija temple is less-visited. After slowly walking through each of the temples and tuning into the stones and the ground, I found the best spot on the central walkway and cleared my mind, tuning into the energy of the island and the ancient people like I had done on Gozo.

This went on for several minutes, and the neat thing about this experience was that as soon as I started, a beautiful green butterfly fluttered over and landed on the rope railing a few inches from my left hand and it stayed there for the full twenty minutes of my meditation, only leaving when I broke that connection to the island energies.

A dirt trail takes you up the coast from Mnajdra to the grave of General Sir Walter Norris Congreve, the British governor of Malta in the 1920s, which is backed by a view of Filfla Island, the southernmost point in Malta. Filfla was thought to have been sacred to the neolithic people, and somewhat less sacred to the British Royal Air Force and Navy, who used it for target practice.

I had time to visit one more site and made my way across the island to the Tarxien Temples. I had this spot to myself, like the others. The underground nature of this site gives a better perspective on the shape of the temple structures themselves.

I’d timed my visit and departure well enough that I had just enough time to visit the Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum, an ancient subterranean necropolis built beneath the present-day town of Paola. It was just a short walk from Tarxien and I had mannequins to keep me company in the empty streets.

Photography is not allowed in the Hypogeum, so I will do my best to dazzle you with my technicolor words. The Hypogeum was created by the same ancient culture that built the above-ground temples, and in many ways it’s the best thing you can see as it gives you a much clearer idea of what those temples looked like before the elements had their way with them. It was hidden away underground for thousands of years until workers who were digging a cistern for a housing development in 1902 accidentally burst into the underground chambers. They didn’t want to deal with this at all and tried to cover up their discovery, but before long pesky archaeologists came knocking asking about the city they’d discovered underneath the city.

If you’re one of the lucky few to get a ticket for the day, you can go down into the chambers with a local tour guide, who makes sure you don’t Chapelle your name into the wall or fall into one of the burial pits in the dimly lit tunnels. This was a fascinating place since you start out in a standard-seeming museum building, then you go down some stairs like you’re going into their basement and holy shit, there’s a caveman city down here! Three levels have been carved deeper and deeper into the limestone. The first combines natural caves with man-made extensions creating several rooms and burial chambers.

Proceeding down further, the second level is where the action is at. Two large circular chambers are covered in red ochre and designs. One of the rooms branching off from these is a narrow chute with a low ceiling I had to duck to fit inside. This room is a resonance chamber for chanting, if you ooooooom or mmmmbop in here it resonates and echoes epically through the entire cavern structure, an all-consuming sound that is completely bone-chilling and awesome. The walls have red ochre swirls and dots still faintly visible, which is pretty amazing considering their age.

The star of the show however, is the room known only as the Holy of Holies. Facing the Winter Solstice through what was then an opening to the surface world, this room features an elaborately carved temple facade that gives a glimpse of what the temples on the surface once looked like. It looks like it was constructed out of slabs of stone like the other temples, but it was actually carved out of the solid rock, like an inverted underground negative of the surface world. Beautiful lights had been set up to illuminate this special part of the Upside Down just for us.

The third level down is what you didn’t want to accidentally fall down into you big clod, a deep chasm where the ancients were buried and where they have room for one more.

This was a completely fascinating world to explore and I marveled at the idea of what wonders could be beneath our feet that we don’t even know about. Travel has brought me to a lot of special improbable places, and this one will definitely stick in my memory as I felt not only transported in space but in time as well. The surface temples felt a bit like afterthoughts, out of place shadows from the past sort of sprinkled across the modern day island. But down here it was still the deep past, we were in the ancient world and now we were the shadows out of time, the echoes, the afterthoughts.

Once I was burped back up into the surface world, it was time to return my car and fly off to Portugal, hopscotching over Spain where covid was inconveniently off the hook. Puttering and gear shifting furiously through tiny narrow streets I finally found a gas station and on my third try made the difficult turn straight off the highway and into the alleyway that led to the house where I needed to return my car. When I dropped it off the guys seemed a little disappointed that I hadn’t effed up their car. I was surprised too, but it was the happy kind of surprise for me. I was briefly worried that they were going to gin up some kind of bird-fart damage or “we somehow know you hit a Jeep” penalty to stick me with, but the guy remembered me as the American he liked and I was out of there in two minutes flat, no hassle.

Best six dollars I ever spent. Thank you Malta.