Gibraltar

Gabrielle Hammond

gabsbitesizeblogs@gmail.com

I am here again to give you a little run down of my time in Gibraltar, of which I visited on my recent cruise (see my previous Travel Tuesday for an overview of the MSC cruise).

We knew Gibraltar would be an interesting place to visit and so we were really excited for our penultimate stop of the cruise. In a nutshell it did not disappoint!

We got up bright and early, as we had the aim to climb the Rock and that would take a few hours, and then explore it and then come down. We knew we needed to optimise our time effectively... so an awful 6.30am alarm woke me up after a fun night before! I was tired, little energy, no motivation and was a real struggle to get to that buffet. But, as soon as we arrived at the buffet, we saw the beauty of Gibraltar and the sunrise just added to the picturesque sights we could see while enjoying our full English (apt for a British owned territory).

We made our way into the town of Gibraltar where the start of the climb of the Rock waited upon us. But when we saw it and in the thirty-degree heat we thought... ummm... nope! There was no way we had the endurance to climb it all on our own and then walk back down.

We saw next to us a shuttle bus that got us mostly to the top of the Rock, so we decided to do that which gave our motivation back. We really took in the sights but the narrow roads in a minibus were scary to say the least! Word of advice- don't look down.

We then climbed another 10-ish minutes. It was so steep I honestly think if you had stood still, you could topple backwards. But we made it to the first sight seeing "station"- the caves. It was so beautiful in there, smelt very lovely (I love weird musky smells) and was really interesting to look at.

We made our way to the tip top viewpoint, where we came across the famous Gibraltarian monkeys. Obviously, they are wild animals so we kept our distance, but they were super cute- we even saw some babies. We got some pictures of the sights and the monkeys and was so worth going up there to see.

We then made our way down. Wow! It was hard on the knees. Very steep and lots and lots and lots of steps. My calves still haven't recovered lol. Along the way we saw the WWII siege tunnels (the men went and saw them, me and Floss were too hot and simply couldn't be bothered to walk anymore haha!). They said they were very interesting. Making our way down, we saw more monkeys, eagles (even if that was me pretending to be one) and beautiful sights.

Overall, Gibraltar was beautiful, was a really nice place to visit and would definitely come back even if it was just to see the poor attempts of John Lennon portraits.