Tuna
Saturday 17 May 2014
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cs4BNcJewjM
Geezer Land Ahoy. We decided to do a quick trip out of Spain-land today and head for Geezer-land, aka Gibraltar. It was only an hour down the road.
We parked on Spain-land side as we’d read that to try to drive over the border would be time consuming and unnecessary. Found a parking site right near the border and wandered across. You just had to flash you passport at the nice English lady, who nodded, and you didn’t have to stop walking.
The Rock can’t be missed it is huge and kinda sticks out. To get to it from the border you walk across the runway, that’s cool. Following all the nice blue tourist signs you end up in the main square which is full of day tripping tourist (like us J). Having not yet had coffee (it was 11am!) we stopped at one of the first places and had one. We should have asked for the price as we got monumentally screwed, and we should have walked a bit further on. Oh well.
As gentle stroll along the cobbled streets we walked past every sort of British shop you could want, all the big name brands too. We came to a square where there were military people dressed in their good white uniforms and coppers working the beat. They roped off the area for something, still not sure why but there was a bagpipe band. We left and kept walking.
We eventually came to the cable car; this took us up, quickly. Once at the top we had fantastic views over the harbour and town and a view across to Africa. We eventually found the hidden door way to get out of the viewing platform area and on to the road. We wandered along for a while and came to a lookout where it was full of people and monkeys. People where holding the monkeys, urgh, what happens if they bite you? There was also one lady that was posing beside a monkey, and then it pissed on her. She was a bit upset but everyone else laughed.
Then onto St Michael’s Cave. It is a huge cave full of stalagmites and stalactites. But …. they also had a coloured light display over the cave walls set to trashy Europop music. I don’t understand why, but they did it and it looked rather cheesy.
We then had a walk to the other end of the rock to the tunnels. In the Great Siege Tunnels you get to wander inside the rock along the tunnels they dug out during the 1770s. It was fantastic to walk inside the tunnels and to see where they placed the cannons and also to look out at what they would have been shooting at.
From here it was a stroll down the rock into town. We passed the exhibition of Gibraltar, A City Under Siege. It looked at what life would have been like for the people living there at the time of The Great Siege. It isn’t a big display and there is an interesting range of cheesy wax pieces, with hilarious sound effects of people groaning and screaming.
Just before exiting the park, we came across more tunnels. These were dug in WWII and could house and move large vehicles (fire engines, trucks), a section was dug out for a hospital, housing, everything, there was a tour leaving in 25 minutes, but it was 3:00pm and we hadn’t had lunch.
An amazing place to see!
Lunch time @ 3pm. We’d notice decent number of English pubs. We found a small one in a side street and had Cod and Chips with a pint of London Pride.
It was time to head for the car and home. Crossing back into Spain-land was very quick, they didn’t want to see your passport, they weren’t even there. The car queue was really long. It had just started to rain as we got in the car.
We did quite a lot of walking today, so our footsies are a bit sore.