Gibraltar, 1994

Me, in front of the Royal Calpe

On March 22, 1994, while I was traveling through Spain with my friend Arthur, we spent a day in Gibraltar, a British colony surrounding the big rock overlooking the straits between Spain and Africa. Just for the heck of it, here's my journal account of that day, with a couple of my photos.

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"A bit of Olde England," we said as we sat in the Royal Calpe on Main Street, eating our fish & chips and drinking a big glass of dark Guinness. Surrounded by wood and red upholstery, leather and beer lamps, we had all we could want from a British pub. (What is a Calpe*, anyway? That name was everywhere in Gibraltar...)

Gibraltar itself was really sort of a tawdry place. At first glance it looked quaint, with its streets jammed wall-to-wall with little shops and eateries. But if you examined the merchandise you realized it was really a bunch of cheap Chinese junk -- little plastic figurines and such. It was like Stuckey's. It was neat to hear all the proper English, as well as a melange of other languages like oddly stilted Spanish (spoken with a British accent, I suppose) and Arabic. But both of us decided we didn't like the town at all.

The upper parts of the rock were quite different. Upper Gibraltar is a nature reserve, since I suppose there's not much more that could be done with it! It's a land of sheer, high, white cliffs and thousands of huge seagulls -- and very tame Barbary apes. They're so used to being fed by tourists they don't do much more than loll around and get fat! We didn't feed them, but we watched everyone else do so.

A Barbary ape

We took a cable car to the top of the rock, where there's an observation platform. It was a hazy day, so we couldn't really get a good view of Africa, but you could just make out the dark outline of hills near Tangier. We climbed around some old ruined buildings up there -- maybe old military installations? Then we descended on a paved road that cut switchbacks along the west side of the rock. We walked, but laughed at all the tourists who were destroying their brakes, or paying an arm and a leg for taxis.

The beauty of the nature was nice to see -- there were tons of wildflowers, yellow daisies and white iris, lavender and lots of others I didn't know. I was glad to be able to crush up some lavender and give it to Arthur to smell.

We also walked around St. Michael's Cave, which was no doubt once very grand. It too seemed a little tacky now, with colored lights and piped-in music -- the "Moonlight Sonata" and "Also Sprach Zarathustra." (That 2001 theme -- isn't that what it's called?) But it was full of neat stalactites and stalagmites, rising like stacks of mushrooms and hanging like folds of draperies. There was a funny plaque in there that said QEII visited in 1954.

Some of my Gibraltar stamps, which I still have

It was an expensive day. I ate lunch plus apple pie, rode the cable car, bought a set of stamps and wrote and mailed Mom and JM a postcard. That alone cost me 3,000 pesetas. God!

But it was fun, and I like being able to say now that I visited Gibraltar. How many people can say that?

*Calpe is an ancient name for the Rock of Gibraltar, one of the Pillars of Hercules.