A selection of images from a three week trip to Malta in March 2013, the first holiday of the year, revisiting where I grew up, in fact.
Some of my formative teenage years were spent here, back in the late 1950s, early 1960s. It was here that I first became interested in photography;
my first proper camera was a folding Zeiss Ikonta, if I remember correctly, taking 6cmx6cm 120 B&W roll film, which I processed myself in a Paterson tank,
making contact prints with a yellow plastic Paterson contact printer. Now it's Photoshop CC and an Epsom A3 printer. How times have changed!

It was most interesting to see how the island had changed, too. Back then, Malta used to be known as the island of hell's bells, goats and smells.
There are still a lot of bells - there are about 360 churches, slightly more than 1 per square km. It's becoming a lot smarter now, though,
as a result of large quantities of EU funds which seem to be pouring in (judging by the number of billboards advertizing these projects).

This was a somewhat unusual holiday for us, in that we made extensive use of public transportation. (Normally, I prefer to drive.) A weekly bus ticket cost
just €12 for unlimited travel, a real bargain, although the service could be less than reliable, occasionally very infrequent, and sometimes extremely overcrowded.
But often great fun, though sadly no longer in the bright colourful vehicles of the 1950s and 1960s any more! The map in the first image shows the tracks recorded
by my hand-held GPS device as we traveled around the island, including a day trip to the sister island Gozo.

I have tried to include snippets of information with some of the images, highlighting some of the islands' amazing history, from the time of the earliest
settlements (predating the Egyptian dynasties), occupation by the Phoenicians, the Roman times (and St Paul's shipwreck on the island), the Dark Ages,
when the island was invaded/ruled in turn by Arabs, Normans, Swabians and the French before coming under the rule of the Knights of the Order of St John
in the Middle Ages, the Saracen siege, French rule again under Napoleon and then formally becoming a British Crown Colony in 1814, the impacts of two
World Wars, and finally achieving independence in 1964, becoming a republic in 1974 and joining the EU in 2004.
(Hard to put 5000 years of history into a single sentence!)

This was the first real outing for my new camera (Nikon D800), so I was on something of a learning curve here.

The images have mostly been geotagged using a hand-held GPS - click on the "view map" button below each image to see exactly where the image was taken.