Where Too Much Led Me in Malta
A forced pause revealed the limits of constant movement
Twice this year, I booked and cancelled a post-Thanksgiving, pre-holiday trip to the tiny island country of Malta. But each time I pulled it off the travel agenda, this 122-square-mile-island, one of the ten smallest countries in the world, lulled me back with its December Mediterranean sunshine, its old-world architecture and its off-season tempo and affordability. Even the great Ulysses couldn’t resist the island’s magnetic pull. As most historians agree, he was held captive for seven years by Calypso on Malta’s Gozo, believed to be The Odyssey’s Ogygia, one of the many beautiful, enchanting islands in Malta’s archipelago.
I eventually relented and accepted Malta’s third and final call to adventure cloaked as the invitation was in inevitability and mystery. Knowing it would be impossible to dismiss any itinerary that had me moving through Paris and Rome, I intentionally bookended this iteration through these two festive capitals. Each city, home to one of my favorite restaurants in the world: Le Bon Georges in Paris and Roscioli in Rome. At the mere mention of returning to dine again with these formative muses and forces, Taste, my compass, was swiftly brought on board and like that the trip was set unquestionably back in motion.
Two weeks after arriving home from Tokyo, I boarded a flight the opposite direction, across the Atlantic to Europe. Malta would mark my 51st country and my final journey of 2025.
But Malta would not play out as I had imagined or planned. Rather than the Land of Honey becoming the climax or punctuation point in a year of transformative travel, Malta forced a grand pause, an unflinching cease and desist. My plan to spend six days exploring at a slow and steady pace, writing in between bites and sips and walks along the sea, fizzled fabulously before I ever set foot on the island.
At first, I did my best to feign indifference but ultimately this detour wasn’t something I could breathe, shop or think my way out of.
It was food poisoning.
All in all, it kept me confined to my room for three full days and took all but two “real” meals from me in Malta. After day one, I fought the urge to get angry and lash out. I believed it regressive even in a state of weakness and disappointment to wallow in self-pity or privileged despair. If this year had taught me anything, I couldn’t take the easy way out now and frame the time, the money, the sunny cloudless view outside my window as waste. I searched for any kind of clue, a signal, the message.
What kind of call to travel had this really been? I had imagined it? Even more disturbing, if I had, what voice had I just followed to the other side of the Atlantic? If it wasn’t the inner one I’d spent a season of travel clearing the way for and fine-tuning, was I misguided or delusional?
When I finally did venture out, I wandered to the whim of my intuition as I love to do, up and down the hilly old town streets of Valletta. I snapped pictures of boats and the sea flanked just so by Malta’s trademark limestone buildings each adorned with an energizing array of cobalt blue, canary yellow or Kelly green doors and shutters. Grateful for the opportunity to stretch my legs and explore, I walked around the perimeter of Valletta’s peninsula hoping the fresh sea air and sun bestowed the restorative, healing benefits my body was telling me it needed.
The Old Town streets of Valletta, Malta
The views on the southern side were incredible. I gazed out across the stunning Grand Harbour that separated Valletta from The Three Cities on the other side. Cities I would unfortunately never get to see. Today, the harbor was filled with ferries, cruise ships, colorful Luzzi fishing boats, decadent yachts and water taxis. I squinted imagining through sheer will, what the view from this same spot must have looked and felt like centuries ago in Malta’s halcyon days at full splendor and in sadder more ruinous times under attack from the Ottoman and French empires.
With those questions weighing heavy on my mind, I turned onto one of the main arteries cutting into the center of Old Town. I walked up the infamous flight of steps I’d seen featured time and again on Instagram. I scooched between tourists scattered and slouched on dirty stair cushions sipping Aperol Spritzes and other bubbly concoctions. As I pressed on past bars, cafes and bakeries, I realized something very sacred was missing. The more I made my way into the heart of the city, the more I felt an ache and longing for what was so clearly absent.
My compass, Taste.
In the condition I was in, I was very aware that I wasn’t going to be able to rely on the compass that had always and without fail led me to unforgettable flavors, meaningful collisions and the soul of every place I have ever visited. Food poisoning had disarmed me.
I couldn’t do what I usually did, what I love to do. Pop into a place that called out to me for a glass of wine and a small plate. I couldn’t even entertain the idea of trying my luck at a late lunch anywhere. It was all forbidden fruit. All I could do was catalog places of interest in the hopes I would come back the next day with an appetite and a stronger stomach. I felt the searing, empty pangs of regret and the crippling fear of missing out pass over me as I reluctantly declined the invitations of Trattoria de Pippo, Risette and Angela’s Valletta.
Not only was I walking past taste, my senses told me that much, but I was walking away from the connections I crave and celebrate when I travel. My time in Malta would be defined by avoiding those tempting thresholds I knew better than to cross.
Did it really take the complete dismantling of my most important travel tool, Taste, for me to see what moving without it felt like? Was this gut-wrenching exercise in introspection why I had come to Malta? Without Taste, I was lost, frustrated and grieving. In its absence I was also grateful, indebted and especially aware of how much it influenced not just how I moved, but how I metabolized creativity, connectivity and joy in the world.
It suddenly seemed very important for me to be in Malta two weeks after I first experienced the Japanese expression, mottainai in Tokyo and began drafting The Gift of Travel my next blog. Once more, I had to admit I was right where I was supposed to be as I was supposed to be there. I had been called to move without Taste, my compass, leading the way for a different kind of reappraisal and reset.
A neon sign at MLA baggage claim: Malta Airport
The next day, after an unforgiving, sleepless night I accepted the only shot I had at enjoying my remaining time here was to take a forced time-out. I stayed in, ate bland uninspiring foods again and poured my freshly primed heart into The Gift of Travel. It was never lost on me as I reflected on my five travel intentions that this wide-open dedicated day of writing was itself a very curious gift.
There was value in the self-reflection but more than that, the more I wrote, the more I realized how jumbled and bunched up things had become inside of me. Since returning to travel in August, I had taken in so much in such a short span of time. Not only had I overcome doubt and committed to this reinvented version of myself, I was writing in real time about it. As liberating and enlightening as that could be, I hadn’t taken into consideration how much attention and energy it took to expose and dissect the truths behind this transformation.
While I had found flow and alignment in Slovenia, Seoul and Kyoto and found meaning in moments I used to overlook in Tokyo, I was desperate and hungry for the time and space to internalize and process what these discoveries meant. Across mind, body, gut and soul, I was unmistakably overstimulated, not burnt out or exhausted just full.
And so here I was, called to Malta to slow down. I was invited to appoint stillness, not movement, to digest and diffuse the overwhelm that so much rapid change and growth had inspired. Taste, my compass, wasn’t defunct or defective. Taste, as always, was pointing the way. It had receded so it could redirect me to the place I was always meant to fertilize this next phase of expansion and renewal. In place.
I had planned to travel to New Zealand for three weeks, just three weeks after I got back from Malta. It was my fifth and final trip of a six-month season and as much as I had started to feel it, I wasn’t brave enough to act on it - at least not until this physiological breakdown.
I finally understood. I was done moving for a while. I needed to take solace instead in the quiet predictability of healthy living, solitude and measured rest. I was craving routine, familiarity and most of all room to write and learn. I felt a growing, intense urge to settle behind closed doors and create.
A day of self-prescribed recuperation had done its job. I eventually made it to Gozo and best of all I finally came to sit in front of plates heaped with inspiration, stories and flavor at AYU, aptly described by the owners as the traveler’s kitchen. It was started by three brothers who built a concept around the tastes that had inspired and moved them on their travels around the world. I knew the moment I could eat again this is where I’d come.
I tried kibbeh, lamb stuffed bulgur balls, Korean chicken bao buns and for my main course, one of AYU’s signature dishes Sri Lankan Black Pork Curry. Every last bite was utterly and unbelievably amazing. My depleted, deprived taste buds came to life as the flavors, textures and colors I’d been so voraciously hungry for since arriving in Malta collided in front of me.
With New Zealand now somewhere off in a more distant future, my shoulders softened as I took in what remained on the dishes around me. I thought about the stretch of time I had just opened up, all that generous and glorious unencumbered space to write and create. There would finally be time to digest and savor all that life had plated in front of me.
I finished the last of the Black Pork.
I left AYU that evening like I was going home from Malta, full. Blissfully and genuinely full.
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