Day 10 - Oct 27, 2017 Last updated: 11/26/17 1:00pm PT
Today we went to the top of The Rock. We took the cable car to the top and walked down. Gibraltar has been an important defensive location for centuries. There are tunnels throughout The Rock that existed since at least the 18th century and were expanded during WWII. We toured the tunnels and natural caves on our way hiking down. We also saw a lot of Barbary macaques, the famous Gibraltar apes.
From the top of The Rock.
We went into the natural caves, which they made into a concert hall.
Here is the runway you have to walk across to get into Gibraltar. The first picture is looking north into Spain. The second picture is of the ‘runway zamboni’. They drove this zamboni around where the runway crosses the street, I’m assuming to clean it, right before a plane came in for a landing.
At the south end of Gibraltar is Europa Point. From this point you can look out over the Mediterranean and see Africa.
Crossing the Strait of Gibraltar into Tangier, Morocco was originally on our list of things to do. When we plan a trip, we make a list of almost everything that could possibly be done. From there, we devise a path to travel. Then we slowly whittle down the list by dropping things that are either too far or repeats of similar things we’ve already seen. Tangier was the last thing we dropped from our list. It seemed like we would only be going there to check some imaginary checkbox that says we set foot on Africa. Since we wouldn’t be going deep into Morocco, and we’d only be in the tourist area of Tangier, we wouldn’t be getting any kind of real cultural experience. Going to Morocco would have added at least 2 more days onto our trip, which was already going to be over 3 weeks long. And since there are almost 200 countries on planet Earth, and there is no way we’re ever going to get to more than 10% of them, the checkbox idea is not a good reason to go. Had The Rock of Gibraltar been on the African side, then yeah, we might have gone.
It was hazy, but you could see Africa.
Gibraltar is kind of odd. It’s a tourist kind of town and there are a lot of shops for tourists, but they almost all close at 6pm. We had to make sure we got our gelato fix early today so we didn’t miss it, like yesterday.