Welcome To The Rock !
Posted On Monday, June 1, 2009 at at 12:11 AM by Alvin
過大海 ! Gibraltar had always held a special impression and fascination in my mind - the land where a Legendary Rock marked the end of the old lands and the beginning of new ones; or perhaps it was just the sheer excitement to imagine that once upon a time, this was the location of a gigantic waterfall (just like our present day Niagara or Victoria Falls) where trillion and trillion tonnes of Atlantic Ocean waters poured in to the dried-up Mediterranean sea bed ! Of course on this very day, The Rock would be our day trip from Algeciras !
We left Tetuoan yesterday morning for Ceuta via a delayed bus, a further connecting bus, a shared taxi to the Frontera, passport controls of both countries and a loss of 2 hours as a result of time difference (Ceuta is officially part of a Spanish province in Morocco).Further travelling by a 45-minutes fast boat across the strait to the port city of Algeciras and we finally lost every hint, sound and smell of all things Moroccan - welcome back to Europe proper ! Algeciras was deserted on this Sunday afternoon and we went out looking for anything that resembled a eatery (mouth wide opened, lungs gasping for air, tongue rolled out and muttering something like giv' us a beer...) ! Having been fed on a splendid diet of Spanish tapas and a few Cana of fine beers the previous night, we were ready to tackle The Rock ! We caught a bus to La Linea and walked across an air strip after passing passport controls and The Rock was right there to greet us. We had a good o' fish and chips for lunch followed by a pot or two of English black tea (most civilised, o' boy...) in this tiny English enclave and it felt good to be in an English village town again; something like a sunny Winchester maybe. We saw The Rock from the front, from the Spanish side, from the back at Europa Point (from where we also caught a distant view of The Moroccan Rif mountains) as well as from the top of The Rock - yes, whew, done it all and we arrived back to Algeciras with tired limbs and fully satisfied after this day out !
