Bay View Reviews

We arrived at Malta, to find it was raining and only just warm. This was made worse as it was 29ºC at home (UK) but that was the one and only lukewarm day of the week. The rest of the time it was really hot, this was in early September. We stayed at the Bay View Hotel in Sliema. This was a nice hotel, situated on a busy road, however traffic noise was low and the view (If you got one over looking the harbour was great, but there were some really awful rooms which looked straight into the opposing rooms. Sliema was busy and quite nice; however the whole appearance would be better if the litter in the street was cleaned up, lots of dog-ends, etc, and the roads and pavements are diabolical. However a short walk around towards St Julian's saw a much cleaner part of town, really beautiful at night, lots of places to eat out along the street.

There are very few beaches in Malta but the lack of these did not matter at all. The whole coast line is accessible for swimming, with lots of ladders fixed to the rocks and loads of shallow flat rocks to wade out. The sea in early September was beautiful. There was lots of fish to be seen and if you intend to spend any time in the sea, do yourself a favour and buy a diving mask and snorkel, it unlocked a whole new world to my wife and I and we spent many happy hours exploring underwater. One word of warning though, buy yourself a pair of jelly shoes, or take some old trainers, as we went barefoot at first and later both found these little shivers in our feet, they were really tiny and painful to walk on and really hard to get out.

The bus service is brilliant and more important than all IT WORKS. It's usually around 20 cents to get to the adjacent towns and the buses come along every 15 minutes or so.