I recently met an ex-RAF officer who used to be stationed at Dingli. He recalled the happy days and experiences and wondered whether things over there had changed, in a similar way to Sliema and the surrounding towns.
We decided a drive to Dingli to bring back some nice memories for both of us.
I had not been to Dingli and its cliffs for some time and was surprisingly impressed by the improvements, particularly the Panoramic Road along the cliff side.
The aptly named Panoramic Road is an example of what roads should look like, perhaps with some added safety and lighting enhancements. The road is quite scary at twilight, considering the sheer drop if a road accident were to happen.
My friend told me the terrain and scenery remained more or less the way he remembered them, but there were more visitors, more cars and improved facilities.
As we approached a group of cottages, just after the junction leading from Bobbyland Restaurant, the road suddenly and surprisingly funnelled into a winding, very narrow one-car lane.
Cars were manoeuvring to get through from opposite directions. After some horn-blowing exchanges to let traffic from the opposing end know of our presence – a signalling procedure not quite matching the otherwise peaceful surroundings – we got through the winding bottleneck, past the few cottages, cautiously avoiding two families with children walking their way along this narrow, dangerous pathway, which is certainly not fit for cars and pedestrians to wind through.
Past this obstacle, the beautiful scenery broke loose all the way to Gozo: undulating hills, the terraced underlying fields and pristine terrain bordered by the azure sea 250 metres below, and the first signs of sunset offering a background of an indescribable aura of warm, golden reddish hues.
Surely whoever was behind the Panoramic Road could not have missed the best portion of the road to end up in the dangerous and shoddy funnel and the miserably surfaced and precarious road beyond – a death trap for the unwary, particularly at twilight or at night.
The only explanations for this oddity I could come up with was that the government must have run out of budget or that this is the way things ran in Malta! The latter was dismissed since we are making a fair amount of headway in road planning, management and quality standards.
As for the former, I assume EU funds would be available to continue a project which seems to have been started exceptionally well.
The question follows automatically: whatever happened to the rest of the Panoramic Road project?