I’m back in the UK! Last night I found a last-minute couchsurfing host in the Spanish border town of La Linea. He was so kind to drop me at the border today. So now I can go hitchhiking Gibraltar and explore the monkey rock. The guy who took this photo is a born and raised Gibraltarian. He organizes some of the concerts for the national week here. Many people in the streets dressed in the national colors in anticipation of this week. It culminates on the 10th of September when it’s their national day.

The border crossing to Gibraltar wasn’t as tough as people had said. Nevertheless, I had prepared for the worst; the Guardia Civil runs the Spanish side. They can be a real pain in the ass sometimes, as I’ve experienced a couple of weeks ago. I just walked through and the customs dude just said “Welkom” ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) in Dutch after glaring at the emblem of my passport. This was a little creepy, to be honest. Uncalled for.

Now it’s time to hike up that Rock, see the monkeys, and try to hitchhike in this small territory. Tomorrow I might go to the southernmost point of Europe in Tarifa, exciting!

Edited to Add:

This was the last post I published on my three-year-old Samsung tablet (R.I.P.). That tablet had been annoyingly slow for quite some time, but I still appreciated it. It helped me start this blog. I had written nearly all posts previous to this one on this tiny tablet. So… what happened?

On the descend down the Rock of Gibraltar, over the Mediterranean Steps, I had to look at the map. Then I saw the screen had cracked. Out of nowhere! A few hours later, I had hiked down the Rock and hitchhiked out of the territory. Once across the border, I had to hitchhike back to my Ukrainian host in La Linea. But my tablet’s battery was low and I needed to charge. The charger didn’t work, though, and I couldn’t access my map to find my host’s house again. Was I lost? Yes, lost as hell.

People offered me help and I tried charging it in a pub at the beach. But nothing helped. I tried logging into my CS and Facebook accounts on someone else’s laptop, but that didn’t work.

Then just before nightfall, I hitchhiked blindly with the help of a woman towards the area where I believed he lived. We were losing light, but I managed to find the neighborhood based on the style of houses. Then the tablet spontaneously charged a little bit via the charger in the car. That was enough to open my map app and see where I had to go to sleep. It was two streets over!

That was the last time this tablet did its job. The next day I hitchhiked blindly (i.e. without a map) towards Tarifa with the help of my couchsurfing host. There I stayed with the Digital Nomads of Tarifa who empathized with my dying tech. Two of them helped me turn my blog from a Tumblr blog into the WordPress site it is today. Karma restored!