Two completely independent events contributed last week to put the country’s newest venture under a not particularly positive spotlight.

The newest venture is Malta as a venue for passenger cruise liners with the renovation and inauguration in the coming weeks of the Cruise Liner Terminal in Grand Harbour.

The events of the past week have focused attention, although for a very different reason, on Monaco, which is what the people behind the cruise liner terminal and the cruise liner business would like Malta to become: spotlessly clean, upmarket, chic, beautiful and a pleasant location for people on a cruise to spend a few hours by.

And in the past days the Malta Cruise Network, a lobby group formed by stakeholders in the cruise liner hosting business, organised a tour around the island for journalists to allow them to see Malta from the eyes of visitors here on a stopover.

Unfortunately, very few journalists availed themselves of this opportunity and only one paper, The Times, reported it. Our sister paper sent two French journalists who are doing a work experience in our office, but they came back so shocked at what they saw, they felt that as visitors and guests they could not bring themselves to write it.

It does make for sorry reading: for all the expenses incurred renovating Pinto Stores and the huge business to attract cruise liners here, we just cannot get it right!

For the main issue is and remains one of sheer simple organisation. One has to remember these are people who are here for a few hours, so no time can and should be wasted in useless queuing. Yet queuing is precisely what it is all about: the buses down at Pinto Wharf queue and queue again, so too when the passengers (remember more than one ship may be in port at the same time) are taken to Mdina, where again they have to queue to get out of the bus. And, of course, Valletta: the buses cannot enter, so the tourists queue off the bus at St James Ditch (watch out, the ground’s slippery!) and traipse all the way down Republic Street following the guide’s umbrella or hanky held aloft. Queue once again at St John’s Co-Cathedral, once again at the Palace, and then, queue again to board the bus, which whisks them down to the ship, just a stone’s throw away.

If you encounter groups of cruise liner passengers looking bored, hot and flustered, you can now understand why. You can also understand why the cruise liner passengers do not turn up again as repeat visitors. One hot and frustrating day is more than enough.

Having said this, and more later on, the basic problems are still there and no one, no government, no authority of the three or four involved with the sector, seems to have done anything sustainable about it.

Consider:

• Those passengers who choose to forego the €75 per person for a morning tour, run the gauntlet of taxi drivers and cab drivers milling outside the terminal railing. The official price list is quite steep: Lm10 for a one-hour taxi tour of Valletta and Floriana; Lm28 for a four-hour tour of San Anton, Mosta, Ta’ Qali, Mdina, Rabat and Dingli; Lm4 for a single trip up to Valletta. The real truth is that tourists are fleeced here. Can you imagine, with all our boasting on what Malta can offer, that our contact with the tourists is an illiterate cab driver with no knowledge whatsoever of anything! Or an equally avid taxi driver!

• The road is now closed, but just let anybody try negotiating the first kilometre from the Cruise Liner Terminal in the direction of Marsa and Mdina: you first pass through the narrow construction site where MMA is building its huge new office block. Then, past Sea Malta and the further reaches of Marsa, you come upon the most derelict of roundabouts near HSBC and Go Mobile, up the narrow road by the tyre shop and the marble slab shop: nice introduction to Malta, don’t you think?

• As was pointed out to the journalists, visitors can see far more from the coaches than we do, far more than people can see from the road: over the rubble walls the tourists can see the discarded fridges, the rubble and the junk in the roads they pass through. As they can also see the roads, which are never cleaned and wild flowers, weeds and grass in overabundance.

• When Valletta was the Capital City for Culture, to its eternal shame, it spent months with Republic Street all dug up (same as Mdina is now, to our shame again, with no plan or rhyme, no sense of progression of works). Seven years down the line, what was contracted to be done in Valletta’s case has not been kept up: the roads are not washed, the gaps between the slabs are lethal for women in high heels, and a sordid sheen of oil, dirt and neglect has crept in again. Take St John’s for instance: they have allowed café tables to spread out everywhere and tourists have to tread on a very narrow and uneven path over the roots of a tree to enter the church.

• The final impression is simple: Malta is tacky, not good value for money, a frustrating place with no sense of organisation at all, where everyone does what he likes and with no protection for the tourist except when herded into the coaches by the guides. About which many things can be said, but at least they try and provide a good service. One thing must be said: they should allow their charges time to wander around and sit and have a coffee instead of rushing them off their feet.

The main tour is Valletta and Mdina. There are no water buses to take people to Cottonera. Do any tours visit Hagar Qim and Mnajdra, or the Hypogeum, or Ghar Dalam?

And on a last note: many tours take people to the Upper Barrakka, now beautifully restored. But has anyone in authority ever visited the rest rooms there and were greeted by the attendant handing out slips of toilet paper?

We spend thousands to upgrade our gardens but then neglect the basic necessities that people use.

No wonder Monaco is Monaco and Malta will always be Malta.