The Rock

CHAPTER 10

Well, they don’t call it the Rock for nothing! This huge bastion of overturned ocean crust, completely incongruous with the surrounding topography, riddled with secret tunnels and gun ports, impervious to invasion, impossible to not be amazed by. We certainly were. Walking across the border from Spain, which doubles as an airport runway of all things, you are struck by this colossal thumb of limestone defiantly stabbing up into the sky. Traversing the city of Gibraltar, which is charming in its own right, and then ascending the mountain by gondola, you are then struck again, this time literally, by the hordes of Barbary Macaques assailing uninitiated tourists.

We, luckily, were not uninitiated, and had a pleasant afternoon strolling down the narrow lanes that wind down the mountain, taking more from the monkeys (pictures), than they took from us. Having visited Gibraltar in a previous life, I pointed out some points of historical interest to Kacey as we walked back through town- the Governor’s mansion, Trafalgar Cemetery, Engineer Lane, the pub with the £5 fried-egg hamburger, and the infamous all you can eat buffet in the colony’s singular Pizza Hut restaurant, where it’s been told that five famished college students once took a pretty good slice out of the establishment’s quarterly revenue in one fateful night of peperoni and cheese gluttony… those were the days!

Leaving Gibraltar, we drove west a couple dozen miles to Tarifa, turned in our tiny rental car, crashed for the night in a cheap hostel, and boarded the morning ferry to land of the Maghreb.