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THE GOZO TIMES - The Times of Malta - 9th May 2005
Welcome to Birbuba
One recent weekend, I decided to play at being a tourist. Having put a fiver’s worth of petrol in the tank, I grabbed my camera and set off on a three hours tour around the island. It was something I hadn’t done for at least 15 years, but what many visitors do as soon as they have taken delivery of their hire car.
Having worked in the tourist industry for so long, my eyes have been conditioned to see all that’s awful and ugly, everything that’s bound to yield complaints… So it came as a great surprise to me that I was still able to find so many beautiful spots in Gozo! And new ones too, as practically all local councils evidently put much effort into embellishing squares and many streets of their villages.
So, here we should have happy visitors taking in the island’s beauty, cooing over all those pretty sights. Alas, sometimes one only has to turn around to make discoveries that stand in stark contrast to the idyllic scenery of just one moment earlier.
Birbuba Street on the outskirts of Gharb stretches just under half a kilometre and leads to the Chapel of San Dimitri, a popular area for nature walks. It is seamed by residential dwellings and farmhouses that are rented out to tourists. Each of these houses is a little gem in its own right. The disastrous state of the street itself, however, immediately invokes pictures of Kosovo, Kabul or the Gaza Strip – pictures that had long since been committed to long-term memory and which our visitors had no intention of recalling during their most precious weeks of the year!
Mary is furious: she just lost a fortnight’s booking for her farmhouse because the tour operator’s representative did not want to risk a complaint by the clients. Cancelled bookings don’t simply mean a lost opportunity for some extra income. Before your hous
e is ready to be rented out, a little fortune has to be spent. First of all, the property and its inventory have to satisfy the standards set by the Malta Tourism Authority (MTA), and thereafter comes the time to part with hard cash: license certificate, license fee, pool license, insurances… all payable in advance and on a yearly basis, when realistically the season lasts only about six months.
One wonders what thoughts pass through the minds of the MTA officers while stumbling over the rubble of Birbuba Street, on their way to certifying a property. But of course the state of the surroundings is just about the only item that is not covered by the regulations, meaning they are none of the MTA’s business and can be safely ignored. Why doesn’t the MTA give accommodation owners a break for a change, and instead sit down on government level and have a good look at what needs to be done from their side?
To be fair, it is evident that the long-lasting works in Birbuba are finally nearing their completion. According to information from the local council, about a week after publication of this article, the street should receive its first coat of tarmac. There still seems to be hope for house owners like Mary that not all is lost yet this year, but the sigh of relief will not be breathed until it actually happens!
