After four very relaxing, very fish filled days in Malaga, it was time to hit the road again. We caught the last night bus at 6am to the central station and boarded the 7am for La Linea de la Concepcion. The three hour bus ride went quickly as we dozed in our of consciousness to catch brief glimpses of the reminder of the Costa del Sol. The beaches we caught looked prettier than what we had experienced in Malaga, but they seemed to be missing the chiringuitos which are now the love of my life. When we do return to Andulucia, we'll have to split our time up amongst the many beach towns that line the endless kilometers to Gibraltar (yeah, w're using the metric system now, it's kinda weird).
We pull into the bus station, throw our bags in a locker and head for the border. Already we could tell the view was obscurred by clouds (which on a side note, was a great Pink Floyd soundtrack I had on vinyl in college). It was early so there was a chance the clouds would drift off the rock and clear up by the time we made it to the top. We make a quick stop at McDonalds for breakfast as nothing else was open. Well, the were some sandwich shops open that looked anything but enticing and this McDonalds had breakfast sandwiches, so it was a no brainer for us. Our craving craving some semblance of a "real" breakfast had been growing for months and this was as close as we'd get until to Paris, but that's another story.
It's tough learning the hard way that not everything you investigate on the internet is true, current, or both. The first instance this day was that crossing the border could be a bit of a hastle. It's possible the article we read were written by Brits and before the creation of the EU. All we had to do was wave our passports at two guards twenty meters apart. That's right, wave. We didn't have to hand them over or even open them to prove they were ours. We just held them up as we walked passed and that was it. Srsly? Wow.
The stroll through town on the way to the cable car was like taking a stroll through time. What ever ability we gained to time travel in Vienna has been following us. (Why it didn't exist for Dirty Girl on the Ubahn is still frustrating.) Anyway... Everything from the cobblestones, accents and pubs exhumed olde English. Quaint, but not the reason we came here so we soldiered on.
The cable car to the top lies at the edge of the town, halfway down the length of the rock. The ride takes just a few minutes and upon reaching the summit, you're greeted by fucking monkeys. Yeah, monkeys. Like, everywhere. Not the cute zoo kind, but the vicious steal your shit and scare your children kind. Sure they were fun to look it, but there were signs everywhere that basically said don't fuck with them. It was apparent that someone did, and lost, from the first monkey we saw as he was eating an entire roll of cookies. Somewhere on this rock, a small child was scarred for life. We would later stumble upon four baby monkeys playing around. Well, we thought they were playing, turns out they were fighting as an obvious alpha male stepped in to scare two of them away. They ran up the steps we needed to take into the arms of their mother. This made our journey back a little longer than necessary, but it wasn't necessary to have my face ripped off by a monkey either.
So basically, Gibralter boils down to monkeys. We bought the wrong tickets that didn't get us into the caves, and the fog obscured everything else there was to see. Oh well...
Afterwards, we caught the bus to Algeciras and bought our ferry tickets to Tangier. This was the second time the Internet failed us today, as we had been suuuuuuper excited to take the hovercraft over, but sadly they don't run anymore. I mean, who wouldn't be excited to take a freakin hovercraft... To Africa!?
Internet - 2
Team BC - 0
-Bill
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