Gibraltar, land of the barbary ape

Today I saw monkeys. But before I get to that, there’s something that I just must share with you. The strangest thing is happening to my skin. It’s turning colour, but not bright red. I have noticeable pigmentation. Friends, for perhaps the first time in my life, I’m tanning – go figure, the weather in the Mediterranean is sunny enough that this occurs. A tan, people. My arms, and my face... it’s quite shocking.

Okay so today was Gibraltar. We went into this not knowing what to think about the port, but generally excited about the monkeys. As it turns out, mum stayed on board again because she didn’t have a lot of interest in the monkeys. Chelsea and I went ashore. We scoffed at the shuttles and taxis thinking no problem, we could walk across this little rock. So where the map made Cadiz look bigger than it was, the map made Gibraltar look smaller than it was. We walked all the way down the pier (which was quite a ways) and then literally halfway across the rock to get to the tram to take us up the rock. It took us a bit more than an hour I think, and we didn’t stop to look in any shops or anything.

We got up to the tram and waited 45 minutes for our 6 minute tram ride up the rock. We got to the top and got to hang out with monkeys. Now I realize they are wild animals (the only wild primates in Europe actually) but I didn’t think they would be THAT wild – okay let me re-phrase that... I didn’t think we would be allowed to get that close to them. I sort of envisioned a viewing area, where we could look maybe down on the monkeys, or at them from across a fence or a glass pane or something. Nope. The monkeys own that rock man. If you go up there, you’re in their territory, and it doesn’t bother them at all to run around, past, and into you. The guy who works with the monkeys gives you this lecture about how from the monkey’s point of view they are not a tourist attraction and are wild animals and are interested in people only inasmuch as they think they might be able to get a snack off of us. They will bite and they will grab at any plastic bag or other thing they might suspect is food. The fine for feeding the monkeys (intentionally or not) is 500 pounds.

Chelsea and I hung out with the monkeys for a little more than an hour. They were so cool. It was really interactive. We could go all around this converted fortress tourist centre thing, and there really were monkeys running all around us. There was this one baby monkey only 3 months old – he was adorable! He did all the cute monkey things like hanging upside down and swinging off bars. There were other young ones, and a bunch of older ones including the alpha male, Gregory. The Barbary apes are tailless monkeys and wild to the rock of Gibraltar. The saying is that Britain will retain Gibraltar so long as there are monkeys there. For a while it looked like they might die out during WW2, and Winston Churchill, not wanting morale to go down at such a critical time, had reinforcement monkeys brought in from north Africa.

I’m sure no one is terribly interested in reading more about these monkeys. I will post pictures of them eventually, just no tonight most likely. Stay tuned. Dinner tonight, for those interested, was a chilled tea and watermelon soup, followed by spaghetti carbonera, and New York Sirloin steak with apple cider sorbet for dessert. Chelsea has tandoori tiger prawns for dinner, and if I liked sea food I’m sure those would have been superb.

Till later!