Visiting Malta

The Swashbuckler books are partly set in Malta (and in the sea around the islands). In May last year, after I'd finished writing all three books, I finally visited Malta to make sure everything was as I imagined, after years of research from the other side of the world.
Here are some of my notes about what happened while I was there:

Day one I know I'm supposed to be doing very serious research but it's gorgeous and you can't help falling in love - the cities glow yellow, and sea and sky are ridiculously blue. The limestone is crumbling now, but it's warm and honey coloured, and even the most impressive ramparts seem somehow welcoming (unless you're a Turkish corsair, of course).
Flew in a circle around the islands and it all seemed terribly familiar, except for the high rise apartments, which don't feature in my unique 1798 picture of the archipelago. Then the first things I saw when I arrived were a house called Lily [the name of the main character in Swashbuckler!] and a restaurant called Il Pirata.
Then I opened the curtains in my hotel room and a schooner sailed past.
Day three Am resting up after a day of scrambling around dusty old forts. Having invented a series of secret tunnels under Vittoriosa for Swashbuckler book 3, today I found some real life ones, and there was some very undignified squeezing through rusty iron gates and crawling along drainage ditches (which I'd also invented).
Day eight A potted history of Malta, so you know what I'm doing here:
Settled first by Sicilians, who built miraculous temples of huge monoliths a thousand years before Stonehenge. From then on, it's a Mediterranean hit parade of all the usual gang - Phoenicians, Ulysses (who spent seven years in a cave on Gozo, probably eating crunchy bread and honey), Romans, Arabs, Normans. Then the Knights of St John, who'd been thrown out of Rhodes by the Ottomans, were handed the islands. They built the great fortress cities and set themselves up as pirate crusaders, that is, they took Muslim slaves and gold as a way of getting back at the Barbary states. In 1798 Bonaparte arrived, then Nelson in his wake (and my imaginary pirates).
I spent all day yesterday back in Mdina, the Old City. Lots of pirate research there, as my books' narrator, Lily, and her crew have a few adventures there and I had to retrace all their steps I had made up. Luckily it all makes sense, and in fact it's a perfect pirate town. The laneways twist and turn, a bend every ninety paces, as that's the usual flight of an arrow, so you can fight a running battle in the streets.
This afternoon I've been out on the water, checking the fortifications from below.
Day ten In the second Swashbuckler book there is a long sequence where the crew goes into the Inland Sea - and today I did. It's a crack in the rock on the smaller island of Gozo, and you zoom through in a fishing boat (you don't row, lucky I checked) and the cliffs are sheer on either side and the water is... actually there's not a word for it... it's not electric blue, and azure doesn't even come close, it's just Impossibly Blue, that's all, and so clear you can see the coral forty feet down. I was in a little fishing boat with a grin from ear to ear (me, not the boat), although Max the fisherman told me I was crazy because you're supposed to do the research before you write the books.
Day thirteen Today was the final research day, the bit I've been looking forward to - the circumnavigation of the islands. I just booked one of those normal cruise boats, filled with sunburned English people, all unsuspecting that they are involved in a great pirate enterprise. They thought they were going snorkelling in the Blue Lagoon. Actually, it wasn't blue today, just a crazy kind of aqua. Because today was the first cold day.
After lunch came the coastline I really need to see, because I've decided on all these pirate landing places and my guide had showed me some cliffs that were about as death-defying as a council drain.
The cliffs! From the sea, they soar. For miles. And the pirate haven I had chosen on the basis of book-learning only looked absolutely perfect to me, and there are grottos deep into the limestone and on every headland a Knights of Malta watchtower still stands, beautiful squat stone things they are too. The wind rose, the sea was heaving and a wonderful dark blue.