We were up bright eyed and busy tailed this morning as we were doing temple trekking on our own once again, trying to visit the temples at Skorba and Ta Hagrat which we failed with so spectacularly with the other day.
It meant that I dragged Sarah out on the road by 8am, meaning we were up and about by 7am. This is definitely not a natural time to get up at when you are on holiday*. We planned our route to perfection and the buses were nice and reliable too, so we managed to get to Mgarr (the town where the temples are) by 9am. We decided to head to Skorba temple first and then bumble along the road to Ta Hagrat.
Skorba temple is a complete contrast to the temples we saw yesterday as instead of a newly built visitor centre, there is just a tiny shed in one corner of the temple grounds with a guard sitting in it and the toilet facilities consisted of a rather nasty looking portaloo. It was reassuring though that the guard had his obligatory pet companion sitting in the shade keeping him company, so there were some similarities. I wonder if the pets come with the job much like we have company car schemes, maybe they have company pets. The senior execs getting a better range of pets, i.e. directors get to choose from an apex predator like a lion or tiger, whereas the minions only get a choice of cats and dogs.....
I digress. The guard came out and asked us if we had any tickets. We assumed you could buy them at the door, but apparently not, you had to get them from the council offices at the other end of town. I got the impression from the guard that he didn't get many visitors to his temple at all, and so us turning up at 9am sharp threw him out of his daily routine somewhat. He asked us if we had a car to go and get some tickets but we told him we just walked up here. He decided to just let us in without a ticket, which was very kind of him, and I have to say I am glad that we didn't pay, as there really wasn't that much to see here at all, it was a temple once, but there were very few things of note at the site, most of the more precious things being taken to the museum in Valletta.
There was too much to photo here, this site being the most ruined we have seen on our travels, but here are some token snaps for you to get a feel for the temple, and for completeness.
This is the main apse in Skorba temple, it is a lot smaller than Hagar Qim and Mnajdra and is shaped in a trefoil structure, like a shamrock. It appears the site was used and reused for hundreds of years, dating from 3,600BC all the way through to 2,500BC. However, the outer wall of the site dates from as far back as 5,000BC, making this site ancient (or for the more cynical readers - the radiocarbon dating process cocked up).
We decided to leave and head to the next temple, but as i was leaving I offered the guard a couple of Euros to buy himself a beer as a thank you for letting us in to the site. He refused, and the look on his face was one of horror, making me wonder if there is a strict code in Maltese law on bribes. In Egypt the money would have been deposited in the guards bank and earning interest, but the time it took this man to say "no".
The official behind the desk was a young woman, who was clearly earmarked for high office in the world of officialdom as she was doing everything by the book, even down to scanning my five Euro notes to check to see if they were authentic. She couldn't get one to scan and then told me she couldn't accept it, and I was somewhat afeared that she might have pressed a silent alarm under her desk notifying Interpol of a major counterfeiting operation in the town. Luckily I had another fiver, and after some attempts at pushing it through the machine, it was accepted and she got us our tickets.
We wandered our way around the corner to the temple to be met by an equally amazed guard who took our tickets, went away with them and came back five minutes later with them again. As i said earlier, it genuinely felt like they have never had anyone visiting this temples before and so when someone does, they do not know what to do at all. This guard reinforced my view.
The temple itself was also quite small, but was much more of an impressive structure than at Skorba. As with several of these temples, it was only discovered when farmers kept noticing pottery being ploughed up when they ran over it. It makes you wonder how many more as yet undiscovered temples are out there.
This is the central apse of the temple leading to the portaloo at the back. It just shows what skill neolithic man possessed to design a temple with the forethought that 5,000 years or so later modern man would erect his own modern temple to improving the fertility of the soil! We were lucky indeed, as we had arrived at this temple just in time to watch the emptying the toilet into a van (which seemed to be leaking) ceremony. To paraphrase the words of Kilgore from Apocalypse Now, "I love the smell of a portaloo being emptied in the morning"......
This is a shot across the temple to give a sense of scale. While this temple was in better condition that Skorba, it was still a smallish temple site, not really worthy of the five euros entrance fee really, but I always like to support the heritage of these places, so don't really mind stumping up a few quid for it. In visiting both of the temples, we saw no other person interested in them whatsoever (which is sad), so most of my photos are relatively people free (which I love).
* unless of course you are European, in which case you are up at the crack of dawn to put your towel down on your preferred sun lounger before heading to breakfast. I always used to assume this was just a generalisation and was more associated with the Germans but in fact it is almost all nations, apart from the Brits, who are still in bed nursing off their jägerbomb hangovers.
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