Gozo with a 14-month-old

[babyadventuring]

Hi everyone,

We’re off to Gozo with our daughter next week and wondered if anyone has got any tips. We’ll be staying in Marsalforn and looking for stuff to do around there that my brother can take the baby girl to while my partner and I go diving. She’s not quite walking, but we’ll have the pushchair and sling.

Tips about best shops for food and baby supplies would be handy too. And restaurant recs - basically anything you’ve got.

Thanks,
Jo

I love Marsalforn and have dived from there a couple of times. There are several restaurants on the front that do amazing pizza.

There's only a couple of small supermarkets in the village, they're OK but expensive and limited selection.

If you have a car it might be worth going to the Lidl, which I think is in Victoria, but we never get a car there as we just dive, walk around and then maybe get the bus to Victoria or somewhere else like Ramla bay while we are there. There's some ancient ruins called something like gigantica, but not sure how pushchair friendly it is.

The Lidl is pretty good and has a nice play area right by it. I don't know marsalforn well as we usually go to xlendi and dive from there. We've taken DS a couple of times - the Maltese are very family friendly and all the restaurants were more than happy to sort out food for toddlers. If you're hiring a car make sure you take your car seat!

Definitely head to the Three Hills Garden. It's a network of play equipment for very young children. Take a look at the pictures www.visitgozo.com/where-to-go-in-gozo/parks-and-gardens/three-hills-garden/

Thanks all, those are excellent tips and I’m pleased that there’s stuff to do with the baby girl. We booked it purely because of the diving so anything that entertains her is a bonus. She’s currently into putting things in boxes, so I knew we’d be safe just taking her stacking cups if need be.

What are your favourite dive sites? I leant to dive at Xlendi 10 years ago and this is the first time I’ve been back since. I seem to remember that the Blue Hole is a biggie, but I haven’t done any more research than that.

Thanks,
Jo

Well you'll want to do the Blue Hole again, to see how the area has changed now that the Azure Window fell down. Also the Inland Sea of course while you are there.

Your dive guides will advise you - the sea conditions will vary around the island, so they will pick where the sea is safest.

You must try and do the Cathedral (underwater cave that surfaces and has light coming through holes in the rocks - breathtaking). Raz il Hobz is an underwater rock that gets a lot of sea life congregating around it.

There's also a few shallow bays where the sea life is interesting - we saw rays in one, that are good for a second dive of the day.

What else depends on your depth qualification - a lot of the wrecks are quite deep - we can only go to 30 metres and a few are around 40 - we dived over one (kalamera?) and could see it but it was a few metres below, and those with the depth qualification went inside and swam up the stairs.

Comino (the little island between Malta and Gozo) is always worth the extra cost, but I don't know if you'll want to be out all day and also don't know if they still go in the winter. There's a few sites there but the classic combo for a day trip is the wreck at 20 metres and the Santa Maria caves.

We wanted to do the Xlendi tunnel, but our guides didn't seem keen - they said it wasn't all that and the sea wasn't clean over there, but we did loads of other great dives so not an issue.

We’re deep divers and love wrecks so will definitely attempt that if the weather, etc allows. I think we might have been due to dive the Cathedral 10 years ago but didn’t do it for some reason. Looking forward to doing it now!

Ooh we went to Gozo when DD was 6 months old (she had her first solids on the ferry from Malta because we missed the earlier sailing & found we couldn’t get ready mixed formula so she had to have a yogurt to keep her going until we got back to our villa).
Lovely island, we did quite a lot of walking when we were there, the bus only ran once per hour & we were a way from the bus stop but the local shop delivered our shopping for us which was great .