Holiday Fall 2007 Gibraltar

For a day trip, we took a bus ride to Gibraltar. I had thought that we would have to take a boat or something to get out to the rock but you actually just drive the whole way. We had to go through 2 border crossing as the 5 Square KM Gibraltar is actually aUK colony. After crossing the border you drive across the airport to get to the main part of the peninsula. When I say driving across the airport I mean literally driving across the one runway they have. They need to stop traffic on the road to land planes. The official currency is the British Pound however they do take Euros as well. It is best to have whatever the currency of the area is since you never know what the daily conversion rate is going to be and you can never be quite sure you aren't getting snookered :)
We had signed up for Full Tour Excursion so we transfered to a smaller tour bus to go up the rock and see the monkeys that are prevalent on the upper portion, as well as the other stops and sights. We got a brief tour of the town, the abandoned British Naval and Army bases, and then went down to the Southernmost point where you could easily see Africa across the channel. The amount of Shipping traffic through this area was incredible. There is also a lighthouse on this point and a couple hundred yards off the coast was a half sunken freighter being salvaged.
We then started up the rock itself stopping about halfway up to visit St. Michael's Cave... a natural cave that has been turned into a concert hall at one end. When we arrived there we were greeted by the monkeys who were totally unafraid of people and were jumping from car to car and very curious about everything going on. We did not touch any of them, although some groups were privy to having them jump on their shoulders for pictures. Our guide warned us that they do, on occasion, bite if provoked and that we should make sure to hold onto anything we took off the bus because they would quickly grab any thing they could get their hands on and disappear into the brush with it. After we came out of the cave we drove to a nice lookout spot to see more of the monkeys, as well as a beautiful view down onto the town and the harbor.
We continued back down and the tour ended by the shopping district where we now had two hours to kill before heading back. We got lunch did some window shopping, found a great English toy store which stocked Educational Workbooks, and then poked around for a bit more before heading back to the resort. It was a very interesting trip and truly an amazing place to visit. Next time, we will definitely rent a car and be able to tour Gibraltar on our own. It was a lot of fun but we lost 3 hours on each end with the bus stopping at all the resorts for pick ups and drop offs and we would love to take the Cable Car to the very top!(More Pictures)