Finally, for a little closure, clicking this photograph will take you to a Flickr set of my choices for the best pictures from our trip. Relax, there are only 148.

But if you want to see more, way more, you can sample this collection instead.

[Still on the train to Aswan.]

Wednesday morning Laura and I again tried the room-service breakfast. Her bagels seemed fine, but I knew ordering my "American pancakes with syrup" would be something of a gamble. What I found when I lifted the lid from my tray were French crepes with a tub of honey. This was fine. At least the crepes were browned all the way through.

As an added bonus, every room-service cart (as opposed to the trays) comes decorated with a Gerbera daisy in a white stem vase. We now had three sitting around the room, including the one that came with our dessert of tirimisu and creme brulee on Sunday night: one red, one pink, and one orange. It made the cheerful room even more so.

Laura needed to be at the conference all day, so after doing some work in the morning, I set off on the nearly two-hour bus journey to the south shore of Malta and the ancient temple sites of Ħaġar Qim and Mnajdra. Malta is not that large, but to get most places you must transfer in Valletta and then wend your way slowly through every hamlet and burg along the way. This made for much rapturous gazing out the bus window at narrow streets, yellow-washed walls, startling churches in hidden plazas, and hills divided by low walls of rough fieldstone—when my nose wasn't stuck in my copy of Culture Shock! Egypt, that is, as I crammed for the upcoming phase of our trip.

The temple ruins at Ħaġar Qim and Mnajdra are far more modest that I think I was expecting, for structures that are, in part, as much as five thousand years old. The scale is very human, though many of the standing stones that form the walls are monoliths a good deal taller than a man. The roofs have long since fallen in, leaving open the central corridors with semi-circular apses to either side—something like two capital B's back to back. The apses were used for burial, with older bones pushed aside and sorted by type as a new body was moved in. Both sites overlook dramatic vistas of the rocky southern Maltese shore and the Mediterranean.

The scale of these ruins was too small to generate much awe in me, but as I hiked away I was trailed by a disturbing sense of how close in nature and time we are to those ancient stonemasons, how closely together lie our parchment sheets in the book of the earth's history, and how nearly into illegibility such a recent paragraph has been pressed.

Laura and I that evening, together with Cyndee, investigated and discarded several suggestions from the guidebook before defaulting to a fancy Italian place on another terrace over another bay. The wine and food were lovely, though every few minutes, it seemed, another drape was drawn across another of the dwindling number of open spaces around the terrace. By the time we left, we were enclosed in a plastic cave.

After dinner we set off into the night on Gelato Quest 2. [I have now caught up with transcription of the handwritten journal, though the nearby intermittent wi-fi signal is not sufficient to let me post these entries. I am sitting in the coffee shop of the Sara Hotel in Aswan, with Saturday evening approaching. I just had some coffee and a bit of chicken shawarma to keep me going. It's very hot outside, but nothing like what it would be like in full summer. Strangely, the European Champions League game is being replayed on the television here in the coffee , with Arabic commentary. John Terry just slipped again on his penalty kick.] Laura wanted gelato again, and I wanted fig gelato. We made our way through the crowds spilling out of bars that were showing the European football championship between Manchester United and Chelsea, live from Moscow. Almost half the tourists to Malta, I've read, are British, and most of the rest come from countries that care about such things. We even found a public plaza showing the game on a giant screen, and stopped to watch for a while. It was hard not to get caught up in the excitement.

We had to visit two separate gelaterias to find the fig stuff. Actually, we found a shop that had it first, but we wanted to visit a second, larger shop we knew of to see if they had it too. The second shop did not, but that didn't mean we didn't stop there and gorge ourselves. I showed restraint in having only one scoop at the second shop—pannacotta—then a second scoop of fig at the first shop on the way back to the hotel. It was as good as I had hoped, by which I mean it tasted like figs and felt like gelato. Yum.

Back in our room, Laura and I watched the rest of the football match, biting our nails though we had no stake in the outcome. What a game! It was well after midnight when we got to sleep.

[It's Thursday afternoon, and we just boarded our Alitalia flight back to Rome. I'm writing this in a black vinyl-bound journal with a skull-and-crossbones on the cover that I got for my 40th birthday. When I next have the chance, I'll copy this back into my blog.]

Tuesday morning at the Intercontinental, Laura and I opted to have only coffee delivered to the room. My Monday morning order of French toast with cinnamon had been disappointing in the extreme. The four slices were all still soggy with egg batter in the middle. I had eaten around the edges and tried not to gag. The Intercontinental may be a 5-star hotel, but it gets no more than four, maybe three, in my book. The internet connection, via ethernet cable, is not very reliable, and neither is some of the concierges' advice.

I spent the morning working in the room while Laura attended her morning conference sessions. At noon-thirty, I ran into Laura and her colleague Cyndee in the lobby, just as I was heading to the hotel bar in hopes that I could sneak in a pint of Cisk (the local lager, pronounced chisk) before they arrived. They had to run to the rooms and change, so I gulped down a half-pint that looked larger than that. By the time I was done, they were back, and we all took the bus to Valletta.

Valletta on a weekday is far different from Valletta on a Sunday. Very crowded, every shop open, from the tiniest silversmith to McDonald's and Burger King. Our first stop was at a gelateria because our quest for gelato for Laura had ended in disappointment the night before. [Beginning to taxi.] Laura was very happy with her Valletta gelato, but I had already been served my two scoops when I spied the tub of fig gelato. I enjoyed my pistachio and "banofee"—banana toffee—but became fixated thereafter on finding and trying fig gelato elsewhere.

We next visited the Palace of the Grand Masters, where, faced with a choice between paying to tour the state rooms, the armoury, or both, we chose the state rooms. (I knew my vote for the armoury would count for naught against two state-room votes, so I abstained.) [Takeoff. Flying now over blue-green lagoons, and now out over the Mediterranean. The surface looks wrinkled somehow, with still blue veins running through it like cracks in a pudding skin. Currents?] The state rooms were certainly impressive, rich and baroque, together with the long galleries lined with portraits of all the Grand Masters of the Knights of Malta. Most interesting to me, though, was that past a velvet rope, through an archway, and up a short flight of stairs that curved around a wide column, you could read the plate beside the door that led to the office of the president of Malta.

We wandered around Valletta window-shopping for a while longer, then hopped the bus back toward St. Julian's. Laura and Cyndee debarked somewhere between Valletta and Sliema, hoping to find the Zara they had spotted on the way out. (Too soon, it turned out, and that was my fault.) I stayed on board, intending to find food in St. Julian's. Not just any food, either, but fish and chips, which I somehow had a hankering for. (The women weren't hungry. Having stuffed ourselves the night before, I think Laura's exact phrase, gelato aside, was "I never want to eat again.")

In St. Julian's, I walked confidently into a bar I had noted a few times earlier, the Scotsman Pub. Two different signs outside [pen starting to leak! ink disaster!] promised British fish and chips within. I strolled on up to the bar past the only two patrons, took a seat in a spot under a light [pens nearly impossible to use on plane—now Saturday morning on train to Aswan] where I could read in the dimness, and waited for the bartender to arrive to take my order.

"Guinness," I said.

"Aye," he said, having emerged from the back room.

"And a menu, please."

He looked at my oddly, already sliding the glass under the tap. "We've got nae food, mate," he said. He was Scottish and shaved bald.

Confused, I shrugged and said, "Then I guess it'll just be the Guinness."

Hey, it's a meal in itself.

Outside, I verified that fish and chips were indeed advertised, chalked it up to Malta, and continued in search of food.

Most places I saw didn't look very appealing, whether because they served burgers and pizza, or because of the young, rowdy, hip clientele and the improbably of reading in peace. I found what looked to be a fine little Turkish doner stand, but peering around inside I could locate no actual worker.

This is how I ended up, at last, at the Hard Rock Cafe, eating a damn burger and fries and drinking the worst caipirinha in the history of Brazilian commerce. I bought a T-shirt for my son in the gift shop, in part to justify my appalling lapse of taste.

Later that evening, I met Laura and Cyndee and we set out for beverages and light food. We sat in the far corner of the terrace at a place called Paparazzi, overlooking one of St. Julian's several small bays. I had a gin smash. When I ordered a silver cloud after that, the waitress commented that I must be out to try everything on the cocktail list. My mixed salad plate was loaded with capers, Maltese sausage, ġbejniet, oven-dried tomatoes, paté, olives, and more. I shared my bounty in exchange for pizza slices—good individual pizzas—from Laura and Cyndee.

We went to the tenth-floor hotel bar at the Intercontinental for one last nightcap (I was trying to tank up, I think, for nine days in the dry desert), where on the spectacular open-air plaza that even higher balconies look down on from three sides, the Welsh bartender and I had a laugh at our mutual inability to comprehend the other's pronunciation of "Laphraoig." He told us that the Maltese and Italians often ask him to speak English. Laura had a Johnny Walker Black, Cyndee a half-pint of Cisk, and we all jumped when the fireworks went off, out of sight, just the other side of the hotel tower, with a sound like artillery. It sounded like a war.

That scared us. What scared the cockroach making its way toward us across the plaza was two waiter dropping a table they were putting away for the night. That spurred the cockroach to flight. The scurrying kind of flight, that is, not the flying kind.

The bar closed at midnight. And that was Tuesday.

Not a huge sightseeing day yesterday. I spent some of the morning writing in the hotel room, working on a new story titled "Our Dependence on Foreign Keys." In the afternoon I wandered around St. Julian's, collecting such supplies as bottled water (a must, they say) and a universal-to-UK adapter that would accept my laptop plug and thence plug into my converter (found it at a photography shop after being directed there by a gruff but helpful ironmonger). I also collected the indelible memory, after turning into a dead-end car park down by the shore behind the Westin, of a couple having sex in a rocky declivity by the water. There were other people on the beach, less than a stone's throw from them, and I watched only long enough to be sure I was seeing what I thought I was seeing. Okay, maybe two seconds longer than that.

Together with her colleague from work, Laura and I hopped a bus that evening to Sliema, where the concierge had promised us we would find a wonderful little inexpensive traditional restaurant on a side street. "No sea views, but good food." Laura specifically asked if it was open on Mondays, because many restaurants are not. "Yes, yes, open all the time." You can guess where this is going, but what you might not guess is that when we tracked down the tiny shuttered restaurant and perused the posted menu of what might have been consumed on a Tuesday through Saturday, we discovered we had been spared a cavalcade of pizza, pasta, and burgers.

Guidebook to the rescue! One of the top restaurants in the area, The Kitchen, was a mediumish walk away on the Triq il-Torri, and on a Monday evening it was possible to secure a table without a reservation. The service was painfully young, surly, and slow, but the food was outstanding. Beef ragout in rolled pancakes with sour cream, pumpkin tortelloni, open pie of seabass fillets, stuffed pork fillets over baked beans.... We shared everything, stuffed ourselves, and topped it off with a nice local blended wine.

At the bus stop after dinner, around 10:30 pm, we saw our bus approaching, the 62. It quickly became apparent that the bus was not going to stop. We shouted and waved, and the bus stopped for us half a block later. The driver did not seem pleased to let us on. Was it an express bus that wasn't supposed to stop there? Was the driver just hoping to end his last run of the night a bit sooner? I don't know. But the gelateria where we'd hoped to score some dessert was closed when we arrived, and St. Julian's was crowded with pretty young people doing their best to get even more drunk, so we cut short our quest for gelato-not-Ben-and-Jerry's and called it a night.

A nine-hour flight east, a four-hour layover in Rome, and a one-hour flight due south brought us early yesterday afternoon to the tiny Mediterranean island nation of Malta. The weather here is a vast improvement over Chicago's. It's sunny, with a bit of haze in the evenings, and just the cool side of warm. North across the water lies Sicily. To the south is Libya. To the west is Tunisia. This island, in fact, lies farther south than Tunis.

Malta belongs to the EU, so passport control was ridiculously easy. In fact, since our visas were stamped in Rome, we didn't have to fuss with customs at all. A harrowing ten-minute cab ride, wilder than any Manhattan trip, brought us to our hotel, but we were distracted from imminent death by the gorgeous vistas of sand-colored buildings crowding every hillside in sight, occasionally topped by spectacular towers and domes. It's probably fortunate that we didn't learn until we reached our hotel room that Malta's rate of traffic accidents is the highest in the EU.

Our hotel is in St. Julian's, a metropolitan resort sort of city on the north shore. We're next door to a multiplex movie theater and across from a bowling alley. Our hotel has a private beach. But slumming on the sand was not our goal yesterday. Once we were settled and changed, we hopped a bus back east a few miles to Malta's capital, the medieval city of Valletta.

Valletta was built in the 16th century by the Knights of St. John, the Catholic military order that ruled the island from 1530 to 1798, and was named for Grand Master Jean Parisot de la Valette. It was, I have read, one of the first European cities built from scratch on a grid plan. It occupies a long narrow promontory pointing northeast between Marsamxett Harbour on the northwest and Grand Harbour on the southeast, with a street plan very reminiscent of Manhattan's (on a rather smaller scale).

The streets are narrow and straight, with only residents permitted to drive them, and lined mostly with uniformly erected buildings three or so stories high, in varying shades of sand-colored stone. Some of the streets are quite steep, with steps built in. Many corners have a large statue of a saint, a knight, or the Virgin set into an alcove a story above street level. The views from either side of the island are spectacular, especially across Grand Harbour to the Three Cities, built on three promontories jutting northwest into the harbor. Fort St. Angelo, pivotal for the Knights during the brutal siege by the Ottomans in 1565 and then by the British Navy during World War II, makes for a particularly impressive sight on the middle promontory.

Most places in Valletta were closed, it being Sunday, but we did peek into St. John's Co-Cathedral, which is as ornate on the inside as it is plain on the outside. The floor is paved with the intricate marble tombstones of over 400 knights. We also peered into the lush central courtyards of the Palace of the Grand Masters. I'm going to try to get back there today, though since Laura is here for a conference yesterday was really her only day for sightseeing.

We drank cappuccinos at an outdoor cafe across from the cathedral, then set off to locate a couple of restaurants where, though closed Sundays, we may have dinner this week. Resigned to having our Sunday dinner in St. Julian's, we tried to find our way back to the bus stop, but were stymied by the fact that we had ended up on a higher level street and couldn't find our way down to the passage across the deep dry southern moat that is the main entrance to the city. This was fortunate, because in our wanderings we ran across the Hotel Castille, with a rooftop restaurant serving traditional Maltese fare that would be open at seven. With half an hour to kill, we did more wandering, ending up at the Anglo-Maltese League Bar & Restaurant for a drink with the locals.

For dinner we sat at a corner of the Castille Hotel roof terrace overlooking Grand Harbour. For an appetizer we had baked gbejniet, which are cheeselets made either from sheep or goat milk. Laura ate spaghetti frutti di mare topped with a giant prawn, while I had lapin à la maltaise—rabbit stewed with tomatoes, capers, and other little yummy stuff.

It's fascinating to look at signs in Malta. The two official languages are Maltese and English, and Maltese is the only Semitic language written with the Latin alphabet. This makes for very exotic-looking words, all cluttered with x's and q's, and h's with extra bars, and dotted c's and g's and z's, and initial m's followed by other consonants. You get placenames like Zurrieq and Xlendi and Mqabba and Ġgantija and Dwejra and Tarxien and Siġġiewi and Għar Lapsi and Ta' Ċenċ and Żebbuġ and Naxxar and Marsaxlokk and Xagħra and Mdina. We went hunting for one Valletta restaurant in a street called Triq Nofs In-Nħar! I don't know about you, but I get excited about exotic words like this, and learning the phonetic rules for pronouncing them. (The q's, for instance, are silent!)

I have a nifty international current adapter for my laptop, but it's useless to me right now because I forgot to pack a grounding adapter for my three-pronged power supply. D'oh! I'll have to set off in search of one after I get my ass out of this hotel room. It's already nearly one in the afternoon, and there's exploring to do! Not to mention I must conserve batteries!