Day Tripper

As many of you may know, Mr A loves buses.
We’d planned to book the regular tourist HOHO (hop on, hop off) bus, but Mr A found out about this vintage one.

He checked the times and pick up points on their website and also contacted the operator to make sure the driver took card payment as we didn’t have any cash.

We arrived at the pick up point in Sliema in good time and patiently waited ‘opposite M&S’ as instructed. No sign of the bus. We waited for over 30 minutes. Nada.
Mr A contacted the company and was told the pickup was outside M&S and the bus had actually sailed past four minutes ahead of schedule! Grrrrrrr.

We had to catch a local bus to Valletta, to try and pick up the vintage bus from there; as it only came by each stop every 2 hours. Finally, the bus arrived and Mr A was happy to see it was the one in the original Maltese livery colours.
We gleefully climbed aboard, only to be told it was cash only!! Had we been told this, we could have got some money out while we had been waiting. As you can imagine, Mr A was not best pleased, especially when he’d made enquiries beforehand to check.

Luckily for us, there was a lovely Scottish guy on board who said he would pay our fares! Fortunately, the fare was only €4.50 each (as opposed to the €25 each on the regular hoho!) or he perhaps wouldn’t have been so kind.
We would (and have previously) done the same for someone in the same predicament, so it was a much appreciated gesture.

The bus trip itself was great! Fewer stops than the regular bus and lovely to see people taking photos as we drove by.

We drove through St Julian’s; which looked absolutely stunning. So much so, we are going to get the bus back there tomorrow!

We’d already spent time in Sliema and Valletta, whilst waiting for the bus, so our last port of call was Mdina.
The first season of Game of Thrones was filmed in and around Malta and looking at the architecture, it’s easy to see why it was chosen. :-)

DQ x