Hello and welcome to the Independent Daily Travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. It's Tuesday the 15th of April.

Beautiful time of year to be in the Southern Mediterranean. And I'm delighted that the voice you've just heard was that of my colleague, Natalie Wilson, because it's Travel Desk Tuesday.

And better still, Natalie has just been, I believe, for the first time to the island of Malta.

I have indeed.

So talk me through it.

Where did you go?

What did you do?

What did you think?

So I started off, did two nights in Medina, the Silent City, the former capital, I believe.

Yes, and just to put people in the picture, in the olden days, when Malta was being invaded every second Thursday,

they would obviously put the capital in the centre of the island to give a bit more protection.

And now it's, well, just describe it for me highly atmospheric last time I was there.

Highly atmospheric feels exactly like a movie set.

And I think many Game of Thrones, Gladiator has actually filmed there and yeah, just a very beautiful place.

I was very lucky I was staying in the Zara Palace, which is more museum than hotel. It's

unbelievably beautiful and you can see basically the whole country. I was surprised how small

mortar is from the balcony and yeah it was unbelievable. What happened next? Did you for example

go and see the capital, Valletta or go to any beaches? We were very lucky with the weather for

so I was there mid-March around 21 degrees, a bit windy as Malta is, but not too bad. So we did two nights

of Medina and then two nights in Valletta. Didn't make it to any beaches. I would have loved to go

to Gozo, so maybe next time. That's the little island which is off Malta. I'm going to say one

tenth of the size, don't write in. And and even more a kind of throw back to an earlier

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