A trip to Gozo must be one of the highlights of any tourist’s visit to the Maltese islands. Gozo Channel now has nice new boats, smarter staff than it ever did, and one would expect the trip there and back to be pleasant and without any bad memories.

But Gozo is not just for foreign tourists. Like many Maltese, I go to Gozo as often as I can. I usually go by car, but for some reason last Tuesday I decided to leave the car at Cirkewwa and be met by friends in Mgarr.

The trip there was pleasant. Gozo was as charming as usual, until we decided to come home around 4.30pm and join the poor human beings, and mostly tourists, who travel back from Gozo via the passenger route as opposed to what I would discover is the far more civilised car route.

So, it was an incredibly hot day. You arrive at Mgarr as a passenger and find yourself squashed in this large, but not large enough, airless tent from which there is no escape. A few fans whirl overhead with many tourists squashed like sardines inside. It felt like hell and we were in this unbearable situation for at least 30 minutes while the boat berthed and the cars drove off.

Just to give you an idea of how hot and airless it was, I tell you that it was much, much cooler outside under the blistering afternoon sun than it was in this tent.

The look on the tourists’ faces (and there were quite a few coachloads) really said it all. However nice their Gozo trip was, it was ruined by this. I couldn’t believe that we treat our tourists and of course the poor Maltese passengers like this. When I asked a member of staff what was behind all this confusion and why on earth were we being squashed like cattle into this sauna of a tent, his answer was simple, “the government doesn’t want tourists to come to Gozo!”

Nonsense, I know, but it was incredibly unpleasant for the tourists and us cooped up in there and no one budged or did anything to help. People were sweating, people were climbing back over the barrier to get some fresh air. There was even the beginning of a panic situation and, when you felt you couldn’t take another moment of this stifling heat, we suddenly found ourselves herded through this narrow passageway with plastic chicken wire along the side, onto the very pleasant Gozo Channel boat.

Even the fact that you go from this wide tent into this narrow passage, almost as if we were sheep about to be sheared or worse, was totally unpleasant and degrading. Having not travelled to Gozo without a car since I was practically a child, I had no idea that the service was this terrible, or so badly thought through when it is very hot. It was so bad that day that the waiting passengers should have been allowed to go outside to breathe at least, until the boat was ready, but they could not.

I resolved there and then to never travel to Gozo again, unless I went by car.

But is this the norm in the summer months? I would love to hear what the guides have to say about this. Why do we treat tourists and Maltese like this? It’s already bad enough that they designed these new boats as if they are only for cars, and as if passengers without cars would not have made use of them.

It is amazing that on these new boats, passengers have to squash in front of and around the cars, and there is no car-less route for passengers to disembark.

So while we talk about airstrips and golf courses, we do need to keep our feet on the ground and realise what a trip in Malta is like for your average tourist in a coach.

Certainly the tourists, who were like me squashed like cattle in this unbearably hot tent, could not have come away thinking tourists are treated with respect in this country. They could not possibly have believed we ever want them to come back. We must get the little things right too, and making a trip to Gozo comfortable for tourists and locals alike is surely as basic as you can get.