Malta – Travel Destination for The Solo Travelers

Malta is small strange island country in the Mediterranean sea. The country with around 440 000 inhabitants has the size of just 316 square kilometers. To give you some perspective, it’s around three times bigger than Jersey in the United States, or 1745 times smaller than biggest country in Europe, France. Or if you compared its size with United States, then Malta is 31 119 times smaller.The size While the country is small, it’s actually huge. Having been there numerous times, I can say that while its longest distance in theory is just the length of three world’s longest runways, the country feels way bigger than it actually is. I have probably spent around 2 years in Malta all together and I have only seen a small part of it. The thing is that in Malta 10 kilometers often feels like 50, or even 100 due to the number of cars and how the roads have been built.The prices Price-wise Malta is quite cheap and pretty expensive at the same time. I’d say that beer prices are cheap, ranging from EUR 1.50 to 2.50 in general, although obviously if you wanted to, you could get the same beer for 5 EUR as well. And as the craft beers are becoming more and more popular, you can pay for them anywhere from 4 to … 15 euros, I guess. Food prices might be the same as everywhere else in Europe, or maybe slightly higher. Just based on my observations. Compared to other prices, there are two things that seem expensive for me. Firstly rentals – you can expect to pay 600-1200 for a one-bedroom apartment, or 250 to 600 for a room. So that’s not cheap at all compared to the general living expenses. For the best deals, it’s probably a great idea to consult professionals, like the people at https://letting.remax-malta.com/.Also taxis are not the cheapest ones, with the cheaper end being Taxify with roughly 4 EUR start fee and 1 EUR/kilometer, plus…I think it was 10 EUR/hour.Nature Although on different websites they say that the island nation has a surprising amount of endemic plant and animal species, and most likely it is true, from where I stand it is slightly different. Malta has nothing green. Whenever I go there, I feel like I’m leaving the nature behind. Of course, there are some trees and even a ‘forest’ which is a forest only by Maltese standards. And I’ve even seen grass in a few places. But nature…that’s definitely not the first thing I’m thinking of when someone says Malta. Don’t get be wrong, I love the place, but it has its anomalies.

Business Malta is known for it gambling regulations – meaning they offer good taxes for foreign gambling companies to go there and register their business in Malta. If I’m not mistaken 100s of different online gambling businesses have moved, although maybe just in part, to Malta because of this reason. Of course, that’s also one of the reasons why the rental prices have been going up by double digits every year for a while now. Slots, poker, betting – those companies are doing well there. For me being from Estonia, it’s weird to see the lottery kiosks in Malta where you can go to see the lottery draw today if you wanted. I used to think it’s a thing of the past, but in reality they still do exist on a number of countries.Bars These are my places. I love bars. No, I’m not an alcoholic, although I do like to go out every evening to have a beer or two. Malta has loads of great and not so great bars, you can read some reviews of bars in Malta here.Weird stuff And of course, Malta has lots of weird stuff. You could actually write a book about them as there’s too much of that. I won’t even mention the weird English signs which seem to have been written with the help of Google translate. Although, firstly, I just did mention it, and secondly, it’s weird as English is the second official language in Malta. A friend of mine at some point said that he visited the mobility shop – you know, the shop where you can get wheelchair ramps and stuff. But to get into the shop, there are three high stairs. No wheelchair ramp.