Up and off the ship early, it’s another Cathy & Ed day in Gibraltar!  In the fog!  Sigh.  Well, you can’t have everything, and today we will definitely not be having the spectacular views from the top of the Rock.  But the weather is the weather, and honestly, it keeps the temps down a bit, so it isn’t all that bad.

We walk through all the streets we have become familiar with on our many visits here.  Up through the marina, traversing the entire length of the old town over to the Cable Car station.  They supposedly don’t open until 9:30, and we are about 20 minutes early, but when we walk up to the ticket office, the lady is open and sells us our tickets for one-way cable car and admission to all the attractions on the Rock.  It’s expensive, 67.60 GBP for the both of us, but it’s a full day excursion for us – so well worth it.  The ticket lady is sweet – she asks us if we are on the ship and what time we sail.  We tell her all aboard is 4:30 and she approves our purchase of the one-way cable car ticket, nodding her head, telling us we have enough time.  Very sweet.  I’m sure some people try to walk down and don’t realize how long it will actually take – so nice that she checks up on her customers! 

And just like that, we are on the cable car with the workers, lifting off from sea level and soaring up through the foggy air. Up, up, up we go to the middle station where one of the ship’s tours was just getting off the car from up above. Obviously the bus took them up, now they are walking around the middle part of the Rock.  We continue our journey to the top, hitting the restroom and then striking out for the Skywalk and the beautiful (hohoho) views that can be had from there. 

It’s a great walk on paved paths toward the south end of the island.  It’s foggy, but fun, and we are all alone – alone that is until we meet up with another tour group who has stopped before the Skywalk to watch the Macaques.  There are a ton of them here, eating their breakfast, so they are very placid and are completely ignoring us – which is fine by me!  That little Balinese monkey hanging on my backpack was one thing – one of these monsters is quite another!  But they do make for great photo opportunities – particularly the mom’s and the babies, of which there are 3 sets here perched up on the railing.  Now they are just precious.

Making our way past the crowd (human and ape), we get our wristbands scanned (smart way to give access – QR code on paper wristbands.  That way you always have your ticket and it is easy for the security folks to scan you in and out) and walk up and out onto the Skywalk for surprisingly clear views down to Sandy Bay – where there is a huge development we don’t remember from our last tour here.  The views are stupendous though – and the fog rolling in and out makes for even more great pictures.

And a fun fact:  This Skywalk was officially inaugurated in 2018 by none other than Mark Hamill (of Star Wars fame, of course!).  How fun is that?

We are sort of following some directions we found on TripAdvisor for walking down from the top of the cable car, but end up taking our own little tour up the Douglas Path and Lookout to the top of this craggy peak where the Lookout building is still there and you can explore all through the rooms that must have held troops and armaments in the day.  Pretty wild that you can just wander all through these rooms unmonitored.

Back out on the path we head toward the Mediterranean Steps and O’Hara’s Battery, passing another Macaque couple on the way who are just perched on a rock wall, nit picking.  They are amazing creatures to watch!  

Reaching O’Hara’s Battery, the highest point of the Rock, and named after a former Governor of Gibraltar, we wander through the battery, built in 1890.  There are complete machines and mechanisms for the guns and tunnels and everything down here.  Just really mind-boggling that we’re just walking around with only signs telling us not to touch things!  But totally cool to walk underneath the huge gun mounting and all around the top lookout platforms.  Oh, and the dead looking soldier mannequin that is inside with the gun mounting.  Weird.  But, hey, what to do we know – and we aren’t touching him to fix his head!

The fog keeps swirling up top, making for eery – and pretty photos down the coast and around the battery proper. 

From here you can access the Mediterranean Steps, which is said to a challenging trail that leads all thew ay down to Jews’ Gate.  If we had more time – we might attempt that – going down that is! – but since we do have time constraints, we reverse course and head down the paved, non-challenging path toward St. Michael’s Cave, pausing along the way some really neat looking bird with striped wings, and getting glimpses of the coastline down below as the fog moves in and out.

Arriving at St. Michaels Cave unscathed, we sit for a bit in the Cabin café and have a really good – and very reasonably priced – cappuccino before we explore the caves – yes more caves!    These caves are very similar to the Nerja Caves, just more, well, digital I guess is the word!  The history of the cave goes back for over 2000 years, being used for various things such as an 18^th Century stronghold, a hospital, ammunition storage in WWII.  They are really impressive and incredible to think they’ve been used for such a long, long time without being destroyed.

We wander through all the little caverns and areas, just taking in the incredible stalagmites and stalactites.  The only thing that is sort of disturbing is the digital “video” type show – there are all these different color lights projected onto the rocks that fade in and out of each other.  To some degree, it’s cool – but on the other hand, it is sort of annoying and you lose the simple beauty of the natural rock. 

At the end of the caves is a huge auditorium with 500 or 600 seats where we can sit and watch the audio-visual light show.  Beautiful, yes, but sort of distracting too.  Oh well – its probably what sells!

Back out on the trails, we encounter more cute little introspective apes, following the directions to walk down the Rock via the Royal Anglian Way, which is a little less direct than going straight down the road to the Great Siege Tunnels, but a more scenic route. 

We pass by the spot where Queen Elizabeth looked out over Gibraltar on her visit in 1954, with great views down into the now clear harbor.  There’s our sweet Pursuit docked way, way below us! Then head down these little stone stairs and along a path, through scrub and a few trees, that occasionally opens up to fantastic views out over the city and the water to the coast of Spain.

And then there is the creepy, scary suspension bridge!  I’m normally not a scaredy cat, but for some reason, this thing gave me the willies in a serious way!  It’s gorgeous, over a beautiful gorge with fantastic views down to the city – but yikes – it scared the bejeesus out of me!  Ed, on the other hand, who is normally not at all a suspension bridge fan, was fine.  Go figure!

Proceeding on, we walk past the Ape’s den where signs tell us to be wary of the apes as they will act aggressively in this area – apparently this is their home and they don’t want you there.  Fine by us, we aren’t heading that way, we’re continuing on to Devil’s Gap Battery – but we do get some cute shots of non-aggressive apes on the way.

Stopping to watch the cable car come up to the Middle station – along with watching some little baby apes playing/fighting near the path – we push on to the Battery where there is a huge gun and incredible views of the city.

By that point in time it is getting on toward noon and we make the decision to skip the Great Siege tunnels, which we have visited previously, and head back into town on the Devil’s Gap Footpath which leads directly into the Upper Town area and the city center.  On the way down, we get great views of the city, a look at one of the brick shafts used to vent the tunnels underneath us, as well as a great look back up the painted steps – a symbol of Gibraltar’s wishes to remain British after they were painted with the Union Jack during the 1967 Referendum (since repainted and refreshed in 2011).

And then we are back down to the old town, and a British military parade or something going on in Casemate Square.  It is Saturday and the town is bustling with people – we are heading toward Bruno’s our traditional spot for lunch, but had started to consider staying in the center of town. Not!  It is way too peopley out here! So off we go to the marina, to Bruno’s and our own private little club – as we are the only customers there for quite a while!  We have a wonderful lunch of fish and chips (monstrous!!!) and a half roasted chicken (a little hammered, but still really good), plus excellent pours of wine and beer. 

And that concluded a very successful day on the Rock!  It is an easy walk back to the ship, to hang out and watch sail away from our balcony.  Of course it isn’t foggy now!  But that’s ok, because it makes for incredible photos of the Rock as we sail away toward the Canaries.