Four Months In Spain with Tim 'n Laura: Lost in Gibraltar!!!

Lost in Gibraltar!!

This post doesn’t have too many pictures, compared to the last two. Since we were in both Gibralter and Tarifa fairly shortly, (Tarifa one night and Gibraltar just one comical evening), I have combined them both into one post. Then the next one will cover Asilah, a small town in Morocco (Africa) where we went for two nights and three days.

This is a picture of Tarifa, taken from the boat when we were leaving. Most pictures in town didn't come out too well.

We were supposed to stay for three nights in Tarifa, a small dirty beach town on Spain’s southern tip, right between the Costa de la Luz and Costa del Sol. Of course when I say “dirty”, that is not in the guidebooks, and it is one of the principal reasons we reduced our stay from three nights to one.

Our intention for this stop had been to relax on the beach a couple of days, and then take a day trip to Tangiers, Morocco. It turns out, though, that Tarifa is a great place for kite-surfing. Kite-surfing is a sport that requires lots of wind, and when you think about it, lots of wind isn’t always conducive to a great beach experience. Having visited another great kite-surfing location before in the Dominican Republic (where it was so windy sand blew into our camera and broke it), we decided to check out our other options. That combined with no air conditioning convinced us to move on.

The first thing we did was to leave town for the night to see Gibraltar. For those who are geographically and politically challenged, as we are, Gibraltar is a large rock on a small chunk of land located on the coast of Spain. The interesting part is that somehow England tricked them out of it in the late 1800’s, and it is now a part of the English commonwealth. The good news for us was that when we crossed over we got our passports stamped! =^)

The Rock, at night. This shot was taken at the end of our "hike."

Gibraltar didn’t work too well for us. We arrived late, just hoping to fit it in before the day ended. We walked across to avoid the long customs lane, and hopped on the first #9 bus that came by (this was recommended by our travel book). We took the bus to the end of the line (as recommended) and hopped off, only to see the bus turn off its lights as it shut down for the day. It was at about that moment that we realized we were now stranded on the far side of Gibraltar with no way to get back!

As the bus driver began to pull away, Laura walked up calmly and asked him the best way to walk to get out of there. He gave us a funny look and pointed back the way we came, which to Laura and I seemed a very long ways to go. He then pulled away and we were left standing in the dark, at 9:15 in the middle of nowhere on a deserted street. So we started walking. =^(

A moment later the bus driver came back by and told us to get in, that he would drive us a bit of the way back because he felt bad for us. We must have made a pretty pitiful site out walking in the dark like that, so he took us about a mile down the road and dropped us at a run-down casino where a couple hundred old people were playing bingo.

At that point we started walking, and proceeded to make our way out of town. It only took about an hour to get back out, and it was nice to take a sort of walking tour of Gibraltar, but it wasn’t our first choice for modes of transportation.