7. Spain and Gibraltar

Day 30, May 13th.  Tangier – Tarifa – Gibraltar - Ronda.  19-31C, sunny

Our intention is to cover three countries today – albeit one of them is a glorified car park with a large rock protruding from it.

Nevertheless, this ambition requires an early start, and after a final, rather rushed breakfast in Tangier and an aborted attempt to fill the car with a final load of £1 / litre fuel before we leave, we’re on the 10am ferry, heading back to Tarifa in Spain.

An hour later (albeit losing an hour with the time change) we’re back on European soil, for precisely 36 hours, before we board our next ferry – from Almeria to Oran in Algeria – at midnight tomorrow night. 

We make all haste to Gibraltar, deciding we should be able to manage a whistle-stop tour of the place before heading to our night’s stop-over in Andalusia. 

In many respects, we shouldn’t really have bothered.  Warned off driving in by horror stories of great tailbacks at customs going in and coming out, we park at a large, shade-less car park in La Linea, and walk towards the border, and passport control. 

It’s an unwelcome, rather heavy landing back into a world we haven’t thought about for a while.  We join a motley queue of Spaniards, Gibraltarians and vast, middle-aged Brits, including some of the chain-smoking / mobility scooter variety, who wouldn’t look out of place on the set of Benidorm. 

It’s a longish queue at Spanish passport control (unless you’re Spanish); once we’re stamped out of Spain it’s a less-long queue into UK territory, followed by (in true UK form) a long wait for a bus, to take us to the bottom of the cable car. 

Boarding the bus, Laurie and I sit towards the back and overhear a well-fed young couple from Lancashire arguing behind us. “I keep telling ya this bus doesn’t go to Morrisons! Why d’ya keep saying Morrisons to the driver?!”  Her seemingly down-trodden boyfriend replies “Well ahh don’t know the name of the stop do I?  It’s jus near Morrisons thas all.” 

Tangier, only three hours in the past, feels a long way away.

Along the bus route to the cable car station, Gibraltar appears to have no redeeming features whatsoever.  It’s hugely dense, mostly concrete and has managed to embrace the worst of Spanish suburban architecture with the worst of British public realm planning.  We think of Singapore, and imagine how things could have been done so much differently (and better) here…

Subsequently, we spend an hour and a half, sweltering, in the cable car queue.  We had given zero consideration to the fact that other people might (a) want to enter Gibraltar and (b) go up the rock today… we haven’t seen a queue of people for anything, in ages.  Apparently, there is a cruise ship docked in Gibraltar’s harbour today (one of 200 per year, heaven knows why) – and most of its passengers appear to be ahead of us in the line.

Finally, it’s our turn to ascend. In all fairness, the view from the top is magnificent.  We get a proper look at the concrete wasteland beneath us, the huge ports of Gibraltar and Algeciras, Gibraltar’s excitingly short runway, and the majestic Andalusian mountains rearing out of the sea to the north.  But after all this queueing, we can’t dwell, and head back down in the cable car rather more promptly than we would have liked. 

To make up time, Nina has expertly booked us a taxi at the bottom to take us back to the border, via anywhere we can get a sandwich for late lunch.  We’re all famished, and a little short-tempered.

Our taxi-driver is a cheerful, good-natured UK-born Gibraltarian of 40 years.  He loves the place.  When we ask him why, the answer is simple: “It’s always sunny, and that puts a smile on peoples faces.  And we’re a small community here, only about 30,000 people.  Everyone knows each other.”  He drives us fleetingly past parts of the older town, which – with its narrow, cobbled streets and little squares, adorned with tables and chairs – does look beguiling. 

He explains that Gibraltarians are fiercely independent. In 1967 a referendum on Gibraltar’s sovereignty was held, in which 99.98% of the population voted for the country to remain linked to the UK, with only two people voting against.  A further referendum in 2002 resulted in 98.97% voting the same way; just 187 people voted in favour of shared UK-Spanish sovereignty.  It would appear that – much to the continued annoyance of the Spanish (very evident at the border post) – Gibraltar remains destined to be tied to the UK.

Our friendly driver leaves us at the border.  We try to pay in Euros; he only accepts pounds, so we pay be card.  It was the same in the sandwich shop.  This place is stubbornly determined to be British. 

We queue for another hour to get out.  Hot, tired and annoyed we’ve lost so much time queueing, we rapidly head for the mountains.

En-route to Ronda, we climb 1,100 metres from sea level, in short order.  Shortly into the ascents, I notice a gut-wrenching sight – our engine temperature is rising, quite fast.  In Land Cruisers, the temperature gauge should never move from just below half – any deviation equals some problem or other.  It’s just a question of how big a problem. 

I immediately ease off, and the temperature recovers.  But on the innumerable, delightfully pretty hairpin bends and sweeping curves that lead us up to Ronda, the same pattern repeats itself, on every steep hill.  The engine is not fully over-heating, but we have zero time to fix this in Spain and it’s less than perfect to be entering somewhere as hot and large as Algeria with an issue like this.

Finally, we arrive in Ronda.  It’s perhaps the prettiest of all the Andalusian towns, with narrow cobbled streets, beautifully fragranced and shaded squares, and the eye-wateringly high, vertiginous Ponte Nuovo, which spans the Guadalevin River, 120 metres below.  Remarkably, nothing in the drive up to the town itself suggests that such a deep, sheer gorge could run through the middle of the town – the surprise of it is almost as entrancing as the gravity-defying aesthetics of its 18th century stone arches.

We park in the town hall car park and find our apartment for the night, giddily rejoicing at its spotlessness and its pristine, fully functioning sanitaryware.  We feast our eyes on the sights of the town, refresh ourselves with well-earned beers, lemonades and excellent local food, and enjoy collapsing into our cleanest bedding in weeks.

Day 31, May 14th.  Ronda - Almeria, Spain.  24-31C, sunny

Ronda merits another full morning of relaxed wandering and endless attempts to capture ever more captivating images of its bridges – in fact it deserves much more than that – but that’s all we have time for. 

We load up at midday, and head, gingerly, for Almeria – giving ourselves plenty of contingency time.  Given Ronda is about 800 metres above sea level, today’s drive is more down than up, and – apart from on a few long uphill stretches – the temperature gauge behaves itself.  But we’re still aware there’s a problem. 

We e-mail Atman, our amazing ‘fixer’ in Algeria, to ask if he can find us a garage in Oran.  As ever, he replies courteously and promptly – we know we’ll be in safe hands when we arrive in Algeria.

Mild temperature-gauge anxiety aside, it’s an uneventful drive to Almeria.  Beyond Malaga, we drive past a solid 50 miles of polytunnels and greenhouses which cover every flat square inch of land between the mountains and the sea.  This is where all our (and everybody else’s, by the looks of it) winter tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and salads come from.

We reach Almeria at 5pm, four hours before we need to check in for our ferry, and three hours before anywhere opens for supper.  We use our time exploring the city’s ancient, vast Alcazar (Moorish fort) and its beautifully terraced gardens, which is currently being refurbished at huge expense, and some of the city’s less windswept streets.  It is very, very windy – not hugely encouraging viz a viz our hopes of a calm crossing.

We buy ourselves enough beer to see us comfortably through Algeria (we don’t want any more of our Moroccan hassles) and stock up with Euros, then after a brief bit of tapas, head to the ferry port for 9pm. 

It is total bedlam.

It feels like we’ve landed in Algeria already.  Having been directed though numerous “Ferry this way” signs, we’re suddenly debouched into a vast car park with about fifty different lanes, all full of ancient Algerian vans, so heavily laden that their tyres are almost touching their wheel arches.  There are French and Spanish number plates amongst the throng, but all in the same condition, with the same loads.  Most back doors are held together with rope or old washing line; cargo nets on rooves struggle to contain bulging and seemingly random arrays of new and second-hand goods.  Many bonnets are up, with drivers casually tinkering with their engines.

It's impossible to work out which of this melange of lanes are supposed to be for the Oran ferry.  There are four, huge ferries in the port, and beyond the address of the port itself, our confirmation e-mail tells us nothing.  There are no other Europeans, no other tourists, and no officials anywhere.  I take our booking confirmation to the main port office, and am directed to a Trans-Mediterranean booking desk, where I apparently need to reconfirm our booking and check in. 

All passports and car documents are required, which leads to a return trip to the car – weaving around the throngs of Algerians who are mostly sitting cross-legged on the tarmac, eating, smoking and praying.  But at least we now have some vague confirmation that as long as we’re in lanes 6, 7, 8 or 9, we should end up in Oran.

Tickets secured; I return to the car again.  There is little action now; the Algerians around us are still eating, chatting and smoking (prayer time seems to be over), and there are no signs that we might board any time soon.  There are a dozen lanes of other vehicles, parked haphazardly, to our left – which look like they need to board another ship before we can get going. 

We settle into some home schooling, but the boys are tired.  At 10.30pm they try to huddle down for some sleep in the back.  They get the drill about these sorts of things being out of our hands, but both still can’t resist asking when we’ll start to board.  We have simply no idea. 

11pm passes.  There is a stampede in the lanes to our left, it appears another ship is boarding.  At 11.30pm, our lanes suddenly open, initiating a completely unregulated, fume-filled bunfight of four lanes of vans and trucks trying to squeeze through one small barrier, all at the same time.  Several of them break down in the process, provoking much horn hooting and frantic bump starting.  One particularly knackered old van looks like it’ll need to be pushed on to the boat.

But, somehow, the queue seems to move quite quickly.  We had feared that all these vehicles would need to be searched at customs before boarding – which would take literally weeks – but thankfully, customs just select the odd one on the way through, randomly.  We see one Algerian driver, gingerly opening the back of his elderly Transit, desperately trying to stop washing machines, toasters, kettles and food processers from spilling out all over the inspecting customs officer.

Past customs, we’re recognised as the boat’s solitary tourists and waved on board, ahead of the vans.  It’s a very large, industrial old ferry.  Taking a note of our deck number (picture of an avocado, presumably to save language / literacy issues), we make our way upstairs, find some surprisingly polite and helpful crew, and are shown to our cabin, right at the front of the boat.

Per our previous overnight ferry, it’s a very small, metal box of a cabin.  No window, but it does have a loo and a shower.  Albeit the loo is in the shower.  We waste no time in pulling our bunks down, getting teeth brushed, and into bed.  Our aim is to be asleep before we leave port.

We’re all nearly drifting off when we set sail.  The first five minutes as we edge out of port is calm, but then, without warning, we are heaved into the first of three hours’ worth of what feel like colossal waves. 

It is very, very rough.  The plastic trim that encases our window-less tin can of a cabin creaks and groans as we lurch up and down with the swell outside.  We have no idea how large the waves are, but every now and then the boat hits the water with such force that the entire steel hull shudders and vibrates with an industrial ferocity.  The anchor chain – which sounds like it’s just outside our cabin – clangs against the side of the hull, adding to the din. 

We’d left our little bathroom door open to provide a crack of light for the boys, but it soon bangs shut.  Good thing too – the only thing that keeps us all from horrendous sea-sickness is the near-total darkness of our cabin.  We tell the boys, clinging to their top bunks, to keep their eyes shut, to avoid becoming sea-sick. 

As the lurching becomes heavier, Nina and I end up with a boy each in our respective, tiny beds.  So much for paying extra for a four-berth cabin.  We stay that way for the rest of the night, huddled up like sardines, only this time in what feels like a vast, pitch-black, metal washing machine. 

Sometime past 3am, the sea mercifully calms.  Ralph and I drift off to sleep, albeit not easily, and wake after 9am, as we’re approaching Oran.  Nina, cuddling a rather hot Laurie and disturbed by my apparent snoring, barely registers a wink. This has been the most testing, scary part of our journey to date.  The boys were immensely brave – nothing has really phased them yet.