Day 15: Algeciras y Gibraltar

Today we planned to go to Gibraltar.  I honestly didn't know much about it other than that there were monkeys and it was a really big rock.  We first had to take a public bus to La Linea from where we could walk into Gibraltar.  The 30 minute bus ride was nice because we got to see the local area.  Still not much there which makes me think what do people do here?  There are a lot of apartment buildings but it's can't be that they are all shop owner or having something to with tourism. Then I remembered this is a port area so many of them must work there, either loading or unloading or anything else related to port work. We had to go through past port control to get into Gibraltar.  It was neat being able to walk into a country.  Once we got into Gibraltar we stopped to check out a map of where to go first and try to decided what we would do.  There we met a man who offered us a tour of pretty much everything for a good price.  Seeing all the great distances between the different points of interest, I knew that we would not be able to get to them all on foot.  So we signed up for the tour which worked out nice because it was the three of us and a family of 4 and that was it. He was great he drove us around in a 8 passenger van and gave us some fun facts about the country.  Our first stop was a look out point at the Pillars of Hercules.  It was a clear day so we could seed all the way across to Africa.  Next he led us farther up to caves where there were stalactites and stalagmites.  This was really cool to see because I had never been in a cave like this, also this cave had an area for concerts which I thought was really cool and would be a fun place to see a play or listen to a concert of some sort.  Out side of the caves there were monkeys just wandering around and trying to get you to feed them.  Wile Kaija and I were taking pictures of this one monkey he decided to crawl up the fence and then he jumped onto her shoulders.  He just hung out on her should as if it was something he did every day.  He also did the standard monkey move of picking through her hair.  After capturing a few good pictures we coaxed him to get off. Our next stop was on top of the rock were there were even more monkeys.  Here our guide coaxed a monkey into getting onto our shoulders for nice a nice photo opportunity.  After hanging out with the monkeys for a bit we were ready for our next stop which were the army caves.  In these caves is where the military. Was stationed and from where they shot their canons.  This was also pretty neat to see how it was organized and how well it had preserved itself. From there we returned back to the town to the main pedestrian street and the tour was over.  I thought it was a great tour, the guide was funny and interesting and gave us enough time to see everything.  We continued to explore the city on our own.  We found some lunch and then just warned along the pedestrian street to find our touristy souvenirs.  As we were getting tired the city too was closing down for the mid day siesta.  So at this point we decided to head back to outside of the port to our hostel to relax. In the evening we went out to wander around just to see a little more about Algeciras.  We found some place to eat dinner, found some breakfast and eventually made our way once again back to the hostel to play cards and drink some wine.  A cute small town.  But for all the people who do go there to get to Morocco or Gibraltar they don't seem to do well with tourists.  Aside from our hostel owner, he was quite nice.  Tomorrow we return to Madrid for our final days in Spain.