What I Wish I’d Known Before Our Gozo Quad Bike Tour

My partner booked the quad bike tour back in February and told me about it afterwards, and I spent a fair bit of the spring hoping it would rain that week, which in Malta in June was never going to happen although I didn’t know that at the time, since the biggest thing I’d ever steered with handlebars was a borrowed bike round a car park when I was about twelve. We’d looked at doing Gozo on the local buses first and gave up once we worked out that almost every route goes back through Victoria, so a day where someone else planned the route and I only had to follow the person in front started to sound less frightening than it had in February. The weather in June was fine. We went.

Some of this I would have liked someone to tell me beforehand and some of it is just things I noticed and still think about.

You need to be 21 to drive and you need your real driving licence with you on the day, the card itself, and they won’t take a photo of it on your phone or a photocopy or a provisional one either. A man on our tour had left his in the safe back at the hotel in St Paul’s Bay and rode behind his wife all day, he told us about the safe at least three times, once at the harbour and twice at the picnic, and his wife just carried on eating. I don’t think it was funny for him.

Closed shoes are compulsory for drivers too. I’d packed trainers more or less by accident, whereas about half the people in the minibus that collected us were in sliders, and two of them had to go back up to their rooms to change, which is how a pickup meant for quarter past eight turned into something closer to half past.

The minibus takes you up to Marfa on the northern tip of Malta and a boat takes you over to Mġarr, where the quads are waiting in a line near the harbour and a guide goes through the safety talk. I listened to that briefing more carefully than I have listened to anything since my driving test. Someone asked how big the engines were and the guide said 570cc and I nodded like that meant something to me, all I really know now is that they go up hills quicker than you expect if you’re holding the throttle as tight as I was for the first half hour, and that they drive on the left over there like we do at home. For us that was normal, but the Dutch couple behind us took the first roundabout very slowly and then laughed about it for a long time afterwards.

You get a helmet and a disposable hair net to wear under it. Nobody warns you about the hair net and it looks exactly as good as you’d imagine in the group photo.

The convoy was slower than I’d been dreading. The guide rides at the front and you keep the quad ahead of you in sight, and on the long farm tracks between villages I forgot to be scared for twenty minutes at a stretch, until a lorry came the other way on a road barely wider than the lorry was and I remembered again.

After the picnic we swapped and I went on the back, which I’d assumed would be the easy half of the day and it wasn’t really, you’re holding two handles behind you and you don’t see the bumps until you’re already in them, so the next morning the tops of my legs hurt and I blamed the hotel bed for a while before it occurred to me it was probably the quad. If you’re both over 21 and both have your licences with you, you’re allowed to take turns during the day, and I’d do it if only so each of you finds out what the other one was complaining about.

The tracks down towards the coast are dry for most of the year and whoever is in front throws the dust straight back at you. I had sunglasses, which were fine, and one of my partner’s scarves that I pulled up over my nose and mouth for the worst stretches. I didn’t put any sunscreen on my hands though and they’re on the handlebars in the sun more or less all day, the backs of them went red and stayed that way for most of the week.

Somebody’s phone slid off the seat of their quad near Dwejra when we stopped and went into a bush at the side of the track, they found it again fine, but after that I moved mine into the pocket of my shorts that has a zip.

Where we went, in the order I remember it anyway, started with the cliffs at Ta’ Ċenċ, and I say in the order I remember because by the middle of the day I’d stopped keeping track and was only following the quad in front. The guide wanted everyone further back from the edge than we’d have stood on our own. Somewhere after that we went along above Xlendi and then stopped in Fontana at the old washhouses, stone arches over a spring that he said went up in the 1500s, and water was running through the troughs while we were there though nobody was washing anything, he said some of the older women in the village still bring clothes down sometimes and I’d have liked to have seen that.

At Dwejra I stood for a while where the Azure Window was before the storm took it in 2017, I’d seen photos of it for years and now there’s just sea there with Fungus Rock off to one side, and the Inland Sea is round the corner where small boats go out through a gap in the cliff. We didn’t have time for the boat. My partner says we’ll do it next time.

We went past Ta’ Pinu without stopping, the big basilica out in the fields near Għarb, and then stopped up above Wied il-Għasri, a narrow cut in the north coast with a small pebble beach right down at the bottom and a lot of steps if you want to get to it, which we didn’t.

The salt pans at Xwejni just along from Marsalforn I liked more than anything else that day and I’m still not completely sure why, it’s squares of seawater cut into flat rock and there are far more of them than it looks in pictures. One family, the Cinis, have been working them since the 1860s and they collect the salt from about May to the end of August depending on the weather, so there was some of it piled up white along the edges when we were there. Their shop is across the road in the rock, behind a blue door, and I bought two bags for a few euro each. There are signs asking people to stay off the pans because walking on them ruins the salt.

The quads have third-party insurance but there’s an excess if you damage one and it’s your fault, it was €450 on ours, which I read about on the booking page once we were home and would probably have been better off reading before. Nobody in our group so much as scraped a wing mirror, and the man without his licence pointed out that he at least had nothing to worry about.

The day finishes with a boat back to Malta around Comino, past the sea caves, with a swim stop in the summer months. I was confused about the Blue Lagoon pass beforehand and so was everyone else in our group. Since 2025 you’ve needed a free timed pass, booked online at blcomino.com, but only if you step ashore onto the managed area by the lagoon. If you stay on the boat or swim off it you don’t need one. We swam off the boat and the water really is that colour, it doesn’t look real even when you’re floating in it.

We got back to Marfa at about half five and the minibus was waiting to drop everyone at their hotels, and I was still finding dust in my ears the next day. My partner wants to go again in October, maybe on an afternoon start this time because of the heat.