Early in the morning, at 7 in the morning, I started my trip to Gibraltar. I went with my neighbour who is also an Au-Pair. We took the bus close to our house. After a 2 and a half hours drive, we arrived at the border betweeen Spain and Gibraltar. The bus stopped on a parkinglot in Spain and we walked over to Gibraltar.
At the border, there was a passport control.
And then we were already in Gibraltar. To get to the actual island, you have to walk over the airport landing pists. There are barriers which close in case there is a plane landing or departing. Then the cars and pedestrians have to wait till the plane has passed. This occured to us when we were on our way back.
It is very impressive how cars, bikes and pedestrians can walk just on a regular airstrip.
You can see the typical rock mountain of Gibraltar already from a certain distance.
This is the memorial of Gibraltar. It is right after the airstrip, so on the first part when you are really on british ground.
There were a ton of other people walking into Gibraltar with us.
The main street was very crowded with people.
A lot of Spanish people come over to Gibraltar to buy Tobacco and alcohol because the taxes are different than in Spain. There are also a lot of jewleries because it is also lower in tax.
The people there speak English with a british accent. I was quite surprised about that. The ones I talked to, also speak Spanish. The Englishmen there are quite wealthy through tourism and they employ Spanish people. You can pay in pounds in every shop and the prices are lower in british pounds than when you pay in euros.
This is the city hall.
This is the trafalgar cimetary. There are gravestones from the earlier wars of invadions there. It is a very old cimetary. There were a lot of people in the center of the town where the shops are, but almost nobody walked till the cimetary or the botanic garden. So it was much calmer on these places.
The botanical garden which is rich on plants, flowers and also all sorts of insects living there like butterflies i.e..
From there we walked up the hill to get to the national parc where the monkeys live. The cabelcar was almost 20 euro, which was too much for our budget. A lot of people go up the mountain by taxi. While we were walking, we got pretty hot and sadly there were no more shops up the hill.
We did another path than most people. It looked more intresting and actually it makes a circle all around the mountain top. So we had an amazing view on the sea and at some point we could even see Africa. The problem was only that we weren't prepared for that at all. We did not have had lunch, no food was left and no water. So it was quite difficult do keep on walking in the burning sun.
But we kept walking and at the end we finally reached the top.
There the monkeys were already waiting. They were gazing in the sun and being fed by tourists. One stole a pack of cashewnuts from a visitor. But they were all very calm otherwise, being used to tourists all year long.
Then we started to head back to the town center. We had already been walking for a few hours. We took another path down. At the beginning this one looked nice and clear. But as we advanced more and more, the path got narrower and the herbs and trees were growing into the path. After more than one hour of walking, we finally got to the center again. Just in time to buy an icecream and go back to the bus.
