Eking
If you’ve been following these posts you will have noticed a few themes. First of all every post is “something-ing” – that helps to develop a theme. Secondly you’ll have read that by last night I’d only got a handful of caches left in Gibraltar to find. Five, I guess, although two of them are not actually in “this” Gibraltar. So three to go. Two of those were round on the East Coast Road. The other requires low tide and wet feet. It’s down at Rosia Bay on the west side. So why the title of this post? Well, clearly I’m eking it out a bit to write a whole extra post about such a quiet day. But let’s go with it.
Incidentally, eking isn’t a word I use very often. I thought it was “eeking”, but on reflection that’s probably the noise that mice make. Or the noise people make when they see a mouse. Something like that.
Back at the Plot
Like there was ever a plot.
I decided I would return to Rosia Bay at something closer to low tide. So that was my first port of call. I tried the bus again by waiting at the “top” stop at Trafalgar Cemetery. While I was waiting I thought I’d check Gibraltar’s online bus tracking service. It doesn’t show where buses are in the town – it shows you where they are on the notional circular route that each bus follows, as you can see in the image here.
This is good if your knowledge of Gibraltar is good enough that you understand, for instance, that the section at the top of the route 9 between Market Place and Market Place is, in fact, a loop around the north west (port and Ocean Village areas). Not at all what I wanted. Buses generally run in both directions, so what I wanted, actually, was an anti-clockwise picking me up at Trafalgar Cemetery and taking me to Bay View Terraces. Normally the buses go a bit closer to Rosia Bay, but due to significant local roadworks at that end of town, the route has been curtailed slightly.
Anyway, at the time, the closest anti-clockwise #9 bus to me was still somewhere up in the port area. I guessed that would take maybe half an hour to get to me and I actually only had about a mile to walk, mainly downhill. So off I walked.
Blimey, that’s a big one
Down at Rosia Bay I took a walk to the correct end (along the narrow concrete shelf) to see what I could see. To be fair, the water was a good metre lower than it had been the previous afternoon. It was low enough now to see that the “ledge” one is required to cross to get to the cache is only about a foot wide, and in several places the rocks had broken away. Water was still right up against the ledge and you couldn’t really tell how deep the water was. It looked shallow at the side I was, but also there were lots of jaged rocks. As I didn’t have suitable footwear for walking through, and “no footwear” looked like a bad choice, I decided to leave it. I could do without breaking a leg.
So a failure there, but on the way back up the hill I popped briefly into the Napier of Magdala Battery to have a quick gawp at the 100 ton gun.
As its name suggests, it’s a very big piece of military equipment. Victorian in age. It was a bit rusty around the joints but otherwise in good nick. There’s a little museum talking about the gun and its part in the history of Gibraltar, which passed an interesting half hour or so. I can’t help thinking that they missed a trick here though. Surely if it’s genuinely 100 tons, they could have called it the “Ton Ton Gun” or something. That would be mildly humourous and fully descriptive at the same time. Never mind.
An Actual Bus
As I walked out (and just before I had any significant hills to climb) I reached the Bay View Terraces bus terminus. You’d expect “terminus” to be something solid, but it’s not. It’s just the proverbial end of the line, where bus drivers sit for 10 mionutes (or don’t) to allow buses to return to the correct timetable. There was a bus waiting there. And yes, the driver was going up to Market Place via the direct route. That’ll do me then guv.
At Market Place I wanted to change to a #8 going round to the East Coast Road. There was one in the station when I arrived but the driver told me he was going out around the port first, and there was another one behind that was going the other way. In actual fact, there wasn’t. So I sat there for maybe 25 minutes and then the same bus returned to the same stand. The same driver grinned a bit when I got on. I could, theoretically, have taken a ride around the port and back, but I was reasonably happy just sitting at the Market Place terminus, to be honest. The bus out as far as you can get on the East Coast took all of 10 minutes.
Not the Nicest Bit
When the bus dropped me off I was about 50m away from one of the two caches around this side – the traditional. It turned out to be one of those “nice idea, not well executed” ones. Why? Because while the view out to see was quite pretty, the area the cache was in was actually a bit of a rubbish dump. I searched for a while and started consulting other people’s photos.
Eventually I saw one photo of someone holding the cache and I positioned myself where the photo taker must have been, and then started my search again. That yielded a find, although I initially discounted it because the cache was actually in a black plastic bag and could well have been rubbish, or doggy doings. Nice!
Dune
The other cache around this side is an earthcache. Another earthcache. Gibraltar has a lot of them. This one was all about the Great Gibraltar Sand Dune. This is a wind-blown feature formed thousands of years ago by the prevailing winds from the east. They dumped sand against the east-facing side of the rock because, I guess, they were too lazy or too weak to carry their sand ovee the top.
As the story goes, the British Military didn’t like how far up the rock the dune extended, so they lowered it a bit. This was partly to make attack from that side more difficult, and also (apparently) to stop soldiers from deserting by just jumping off the top onto the dune.
In the late 1800’s and early 1900s the dune was covered in sheet iron as a way of capturing fresh water (of which Gibraltar has a limited natural supply). That must have looked weird. Anyway, there was a massive engineering project to remove larger rocks and level out the dune face to make a nice planar slop for water to run down. The engineering works on the slope are still visible today, despite it now being mainly covered in vegetation.
All Out of Energy
By this time I was verging on pooped. Not because of today’s activity though. Today had been quite lightweight. No. I was feeling the effects of the previous three days, during which I’d walked the length and breadth of the place. So I got the bus back to Market Place and then went back to the hotel for a snooze.
I decided not take bother trying to find a pub to watch the Forest game on the telly box. With both Villa and Liverpool playing at the same time I figured Forest would be the least likely to be shown. The hotel room has Sky Sports, and sure enough one channel was showing Villa-Sunderland and the other was showing Everton-Liverpool. So I lay on the bed half-watching Villa and listening to the various pings on my phone as Forest went behind against Burnley and then ultimately hammered them 4-1. Three points in the bag, thankyou very much. Forest’s remaining games look quite hard compared to West Ham, so it was essential to get a win. The boys done good.
Restaurant Shenanigans
I really fancied Chinese food for dinner, so I googled again. And again, I was lead to a couple of places that weren’t available. One was shut, despite the schedule on the dorr clearly saying they were supposed to be open. Another, out towards Ocean Village, simply didn’t exist. What did exist though was a place with a Spanish-sounding name (La Piedra), that did mixed-Asian fusion cuisine. Some Chinese, so Indian, a couple of Thai dishes. It was staffed by guys from the world’s most populous cricket-playing nation, and they were watching an IPL game.
I wasn’t in the modd for more walking and this place actually had good reviews on Google, so I stayed. I had a bit of a chat with my waiter about cricket and about my previous business trips to India. That was all good. And the food was actually pretty decent.
When I’d finished I made the shortish walk back to Casemates Square and have one final beer. It was too nice a night to give up, and it was only about 7pm. So why not?
Calling Time
Ultimately though, all good things come to an end, apart from Möbius strips that is. Note that other non-orientable surface are available. I went back to the hotel and created a couple more blog posts from this trip whilst filling the time until Match of the Day came on the telly. Forest were on last, of course.
