Seville trip, June 13

[jinian]

Gibraltar! (As you might imagine, there are some scary heights pictured in this installment.)

We slept in and it took forever to get a car rented working from the hotel lobby, so we got a latish start on driving to Gibraltar. Driving in Seville was awful: tiny roads, few signs with street names visible from the road, confusing signage. But we escaped eventually, and the highway was fine.

Fields of sunflowers, grapes, wheat, corn. Flat, slightly rolling land.

Lunch at a country restaurant called Apollo XI, where the bathroom was small but strangely fancy. The appetizer was a vinegared salad of cooked potatoes, onions, green beans, and tuna? bits, which was surprisingly good. I had "chipinos", which turned out to be squid, inky tentacle pieces and fishy-tasting mantle pieces lightly breaded and fried separately.

We saw what the beaches were like: just like the dry countryside, then suddenly sand and brilliantly blue water. Then we saw the speedboat rides to Africa advertised as we passed Tarifa (Google map of southern Andalusia). If only we'd had more time! I wanted to do both of those things.

The rolling hills became larger, rockier hills as we approached Gibraltar, and they were covered with high-tech windmills, which I love. This photo of windmills and a Roman-style arched bridge was taken fairly close to Algeciras, a largish city where we were stuck in traffic for a while.



First view of Gibraltar, driving into the town on the Spanish side, La Línea de la Concepción.



It seemed very much an industrial and military town on the Gibraltar side, though our guidebook said the Spaniards come over for shopping. Not sure where they do this, and the Euro's not that strong vs. the pound. The breakwater in the middle of this photo looked like the boundary between Spain and Gibraltar, and the strip below it is the runway of the Gibraltar airfield, which crosses the only road in or out!



Here's the cable car, viewed from the station at the top. I like the dizzy feeling of this photo.



The side of the Rock was covered with old fortifications:



Prince Ferdinand's Battery.



Squares floated in the ocean some distance from shore; I conjecture based on my extensive Katamari Damacy experience that these are some kind of aquaculture thing.

I already posted about the Barbary apes.

Rock tip, ape, Africa in the background. I like this one.



Looking down from the top of the Rock was a little scary, but it was made much stranger by the seabirds. All of those white dots are birds, and we were far above them. They were all crying, a sort of hoarse mew unlike the sounds sea gulls make here, and their calls blended into one eerie rising and falling keen.



Walking down were some beautiful views. This one has two of the stone pines common on the Rock, plus a couple of the many cargo ships that were idling in the bay, some docks, and the omnipresent African mountains in the background. I really like this picture.



There was a field of acanthus, on such a slope that it can't have been cultivated. Wow. I thought this looked very like a safflower, and I still think it's in the genus Carthamus. Probably not the same species as the cultivated one. (Also appears in userpic for this trip.)



We tried to go to St. Michael's Cave, which has fantastic stalactites, but there was a high fee that included a bunch of other attractions that we weren't going to have time for, so I didn't go in. We had a bit of ice cream, sitting inside the cafe's barred windows that kept the apes from stealing our snacks. Then it was a nice, if steep, walk down to the halfway point of the cable car, whence we rode back down.

The Alameda Botanical Garden was pretty and surprisingly plant-packed for its size. Unfortunately, few of the plants had adequate labeling. I did learn that they called heliotrope "Cherry Pie", I guess for its sweet smell, and there was a hilarious sign proclaiming a particular plant I'd noticed previously as not being rosemary to be "Not Rosemary". I got trapped in the South African garden of pointy plants, which had appealing little stone paths that all ended in five-foot drops, and had to go back. We saw a bougainvillea with no flowers, just eternally proliferating bracts, but I did not take a cutting despite being egged on to do so by Mom.

Photo highlights:
30-foot bird-of-paradise trees:



contrasting with adjacent very manicured and British crest of Gibraltar in a glen:



I took this photo of Africa from the southernmost tip of Gibraltar, Europa Point, as a group of people in spotless white played cricket behind me.