Bye bye Eagle Eye

LOCATION – GIBRALTAR
CREW – ME, STEVE
WIND – W FORCE 3
SEA STATE – CALM
WEATHER – CLEAR

DAY 23 – Well, the man from the sail makers, he say yes.

The tear in the mainsail can be repaired but we won’t get it back till late on Monday and we have to walk into Spain to get it (traffic is a bitch across the frontier allegedly).

Sadly that means firstly we are delayed by a few days and secondly we will part with Ahmet here in Gibraltar and won’t be able to take him to Malaga to catch his plane. So yesterday we relaxed a little for the day, did some wandering around and window shopping, drank too much, appreciated the incredibly low prices of booze! This morning Ahmet left us to catch the bus to Malaga and his flight home. Bye bye Eagle Eye, you and Big Hat will be remembered fondly.

And I have to make an apology, sorry Gibraltar,  you’re not quite as bad as my previous post (DAY 21 – A LITTLE DIRE STRAITS) makes you out to be.

After an extensive wander around into the old city it does have some nice charms, still very, very “Little Britain” along with most of the characters….

But despite the lack of vegetation and general green stuff I can see its appeal to certain types of people 🙂

I tried to get up to the top of the rock today to see the Monkeys and when I got into town I was on the set of “The Walking Dead”!

A cruise ship had come into port and spat out hordes of undead zombies onto the street, (undead, half dead, same thing really) shuffling around wielding rubber tipped walking sticks and zimmer frames, some even had little electric zombie cars. Blithely weaving around the narrow streets seeking out their food to give them sustenance for the ongoing journey, fridge magnets and tacky caps.

I had to be quick so I deftly planned my route and traversed the shuffling crowds I knew I had the advantage of speed even if they had the advantage of numbers but after throwing a few “I love Gibraltar” tea towels behind me to distract the ones that got too close I was through the throng and I was sure none of them could have made it this far to the other end of town where my escape, the cable car to the top end of the rock awaited.

Alas I was wrong, the sneaky undead had hired lots of minibuses to take them to the cable car, blocking off both ends of town, my only hope now was to blend in and try to act like one until they got recalled onto their transport.

I joined the snaking queue for cable car tickets doing my best to complain about the heat and the waiting and I even developed a dodgy hip to blend in. After 30 minutes of waiting to buy a ticket a woman told us the wait was 2 hours to get a cable car up! I knew her game,  she thought the zombies would be put off and would return to their transport in time to terrorise the next unsuspecting port but she was wrong, immediately I spotted a few more like me who up until now had been pretending to be shambling bored husks and we all ducked under the barriers and ran out in a collective “Fuck that” and left the cable car employees to their grisly fate.

I ducked into a small shaded area on the way back for some respite from the groaning and moaning and was surprised to find a somber but pleasant cemetery,  the Trafalgar cemetery where those who died from their wounds from the Battle of Trafalgar (just up the coast) were brought to rest. (Those who died in battle were buried at sea) a nice remembrance with many graves dating back to just before 1800. I had to leave when a trainee zombie I learnt was named Sharon (from her overly loud and completely inappropriate phone call in this place of somber remembrance) started to round up her little zombie tribe and quickly they took over this tranquil spot, no rest for the wicked, I searched for somewhere else to wait it out.

I was lucky to find a bar on the way home where the undead were slightly less thick on the ground than in other places and settled in to wait for them to disperse/fall apart/die whilst enjoying some Guinness.

Maybe I’ll try again tomorrow if the coast is clear.