Amy's April Adventure in Africa, part 2

Day 3--arriving in Tangier (Tanger in Francais). Tanger is a bustling tourist attraction for foreign visitors. For centuries, Tanger has been a trading post. The picturesque scenery has influenced many artists and writers in which the 'ville nouvelle' was created. The bars and cafés in this part of town in the 1950s were filled with writers, smugglers and international spies. Such influenced writers were Tennessee Williams, Paul Bowles and William Burroughs.

 We took a teal colored taxi (the  taxis are of different colors in each city) to our hotel at Atlas Rif and Spa. 

Our hotel overlooked the bay and the Strait of Gibraltar. We used my National Geographic guide book to explore the city and the medina. 

Even with the guidebook, google maps and the occasional billboard of a visitor map, we still got lost. We ended up walking way past the Kasbah and into the inner city of Tanger.

Despite it being frustrating for me because of my failure to understand the map, it was an adventure walking around the city. 

Luckily with our little Arabic and French we were able to make it to the top of the Kasbah and overlook the strait of Gibraltar.

Tanger has an 'old city' and a 'ville nouvelle'. We walked along Avenue Mohammed VI that was parallel to the beach and admire the view. 

There were many beach side restaurants that offered dancing, cocktails and Futball watching. We were lured into Palm Beach Club in order to get out of the rain. We ordered a Casablnaca beer and a coke and received this gratuitous meal: 

Day 4-Ferry from Tanger to Tarifa

We booked tickets online for the FRS ferry from Tanger to Tarifa. We originally had booked tickets from Tanger MED to Algeciras (where we were staying), but changed when we heard that the other was was quicker and had a free transit bus from Tarifa to Algeciras. The ferry was one of the biggest I've been on and it was only a 35 minute boat ride. The strait was a little choppy. 

Once in Algeciras, we dropped off our bags at our hotel on the edge of town, Hotel Mirador, and took the local bus to Gibraltar. 

(The view out our hotel window)

Gibraltar is it's own British city in which we had to go through customs before entering. After passing through customs, we walked across the private Tarmac for Gibraltar. This was definitely a first for me!

The town was densely packed with apartments and buildings, but it was very quaint. Cobblestone walkways, Fish and chips pubs, red telephone booths and black wrought-iron gates that adorned the city provided evidence that we were in British territory. We walked around and admired the English language since we both have been away from home for quite awhile.

We were dying to get on top of the rock, so we took the cable car to the top. It was 11£ and totally worth it. Luckily they took credit card, because we didn't have pounds on us to spare. ;)

Once we got up there, we were astonished by the sheer height of the rock and the beautiful 360 degree scenery!

From one angle we could see the Spanish town of La Linea, another angle showed the bay with Algeciras on the other side, behind us was the strait and the mountainous land of North Africa and then the endless Meditteranean Sea.

Before coming up the rock, we were instructed to not touch or feed the monkey and to keep our bags close at hand because the monkey were notorious for snatching bags. I was shocked to find a dozen or so monkeys playing around and intrigued by us human tourists. 

After a nice walk around the 'top of the rock' we meandered on down through and city and stopped at a pub to enjoy a British staple: fish and chips.

We rode back into Algeciras and enjoyed some wine and tapas in the city center. We went to Lizzaran, which I've been to in Casablanaca, however this one had rotating tapas in that the server came around with a variety of small tapas (appetizers) and you choose which ones you like. This was a great way for us to try new things: Patas Bravas, Brie & marmalade, spinach & ricotta crepes and a variety of fried seafood. Unfortunately, we didn't find any sort of nightlife in the city, but other than that it was a nice, calm town.