Liddle fact: Gibraltar is a British Overseas Territory located on the southern end of the Iberian Peninsula at the entrance of the Mediterranean. It has an area of 6.8 square kilometres (2.6 sq mi).
We had received an email from Cheryl about their trip to Gibraltar. It went like this....
"We went to Gibraltar. Monkeys, great air strip interesting and using pound as currency"
We could not make heads or tails of the email?
We had also all heard of Gibraltar before but weren't sure why? Our curiosity got the better of us and we decided to check it out and see what all the fuss was about!
We tried putting Gibraltar into Mio, but she couldn't pick it up? With our past experiences with Mio we started to get frustrated with her, yet again! Ok, so this time it wasn't Mio's fault, the misunderstanding was that Gibraltar is not in her Spanish maps as it turns out Gibraltar is not in Spain! Who would have known that? Apparently not Hilary, Kim or Kate.
We passed through customs with ease, the men were very chatty... We were told by one officer that they were excited as they didn't get many women through. We drove through, that's right, through, the middle of the air strip..... First penny dropped (pardon the pun) on Cheryl's email.
From there on in it was revelation after revelation.... As we wondered through the Main Street of Gibraltar we saw English pubs with names such as The Horseshoe and The Royal Oak, the street names were classically English and prices were in pounds, there was even a Royal Mail post box and bobbies walking around! We were back in London, although it was a tad warmer and a lot less busy. We were still baffled by the monkeys as there had been no sightings, we started to think that everyone was having a laugh and joking about this monkey business.
We did a few laps of the country, in total it took 15 minutes to go around it. At times Lilly Pad had to suck her sides in to fit through the tiny streets but thankfully she made it unscathed. We raced around the island to catch the sunset, which wasn't an issue and once again witnessed another radiant sunset.
We decided to camp on the island as we wanted to climb to the top of the Rock in morning, we suspected if we were going to see any monkeys at all that we would need to go there. We found the perfect camping spot in a car park which was very quiet overlooking the beach, thankfully there were other campers already there.
The next morning we set off on our walk up the mountain. Woo hoo.... we finally sighted our first monkey, we all got overly excited and were thankful that it was in fact true:) It was a steep steady climb in the heat but we still decided to take the path called the Mediterranean Steps and once again it was the least populated due to the level of difficulty. It was certainly the better path to take as it was spectacular!
Finally after the gruelling stairs we had reached the top and oh what a view. We were right there were monkeys a plenty! They were everywhere, there were even some very adorable baby monkeys. They were very friendly, jumping onto the roofs of the passing vans and cuddling up to the drivers who obviously coaxed them with bananas :) once we had soaked up the view we quickly descended the mountain via the road, in fact we ran down in only 25 mins when it had taken us 1 1/2 hours to climb.
Having felt as though we'd explored every inch of Gibraltar it was time to leave the tiny place, so we joined the long customs queue....
