| Holiday To Adventure | home |
Sadly, as we discovered half the way to the hotel, the taxi was to be a lot more than seven pounds - more like fifteen - which is a lot of money to pay for a car journey. The taxi driver owned a Volvo 700 series car - big thing - safe as houses. However, I did not feel in the least bit safe as the driver performed the manoeuvres, characteristic of his countrymen. As we flowed in an out of lanes and stopped just in time, time after time, I realised that part of the bill for our journey must be danger money.
It turns out that the journey starts by costing you a cover charge for being in the car, plus various supplements - whatever they can think of to fleece you with - in this case a supplement for having luggage. My opinion is that if people are going to get shirty and charge extra for you having luggage, which, let's be honest, doesn't add to the effort of the journey for them, then they should not bother touting for tourists at a railway station.
Anyway, after paying the thieving taxi scum-driver his ransom money, we entered the hotel… in all fairness he took 200 lire less than the meter had on it because I didn't have any more change (okay, so that's six pence, but every little helps).
The hotel was very nice - in its reception area it had a little stage with piano, where later on in the evening some live music would be played. It had marble floors and nice couches to sit on. It even had some clever machine which would allow you to hook into the internet and send faxes, which I was rather keen to play with, but never got round to.
We got our room key in return for our passports and went up to the room. It was smallish, but had everything one might need, including a fair sized bath ready to offer us whichever sort of soaking we might desire. At reception we'd found out that the shuttle bus did not literally shuttle between town and the hotel - going back and forth all day. But was, instead, a scheduled service at times which the hotel considered might be useful. The guide book that we'd bought on Florence warned that taxis, as well as already being expensive, were even more expensive when called by phone, since they start charging from the moment they set off. The hotel did not have a taxi rank!
The shuttle bus was not going to town between the time we'd arrived at the hotel and the time we had to meet Amber, John, Debbie and Steve and so we did the only thing that any rational couple would do in the situation. We argued. We debated. We agonised. We decided that I would go down to reception to see if any other methods of travel were available.
I found someone at reception who thought they could speak English and asked them about transport, they told me about the shuttle bus and taxis, but could not grasp why I might want any more information than that. This woman called over another person and I asked the same question of him - he was a tall, tanned man and very Italian looking, I'd heard him speaking in Italian on the phone and I could not believe I'd get anywhere unless I spoke slowly and deliberately in simple sentence structures. He replied to me in fluent English - American accent and I felt more stupid than I had done when I'd handed over the ransom to the taxi driver. He confirmed that it was taxi or nothing.
I returned to our room where we argued some more, discussed moving hotel - inconvenient and ultimately more costly - we discussed standing up the people we'd intended to meet and we also considered going out there by taxi and getting the return shuttle bus a couple of hours later - probably losing out on the chance of actually spending any time with our new-found chums. Eventually, we resigned ourselves to the cost of a taxi and had one ordered. We got dressed, went to reception, found out which company and car number for the taxi and went outside to await our fate...
Written: May 1998
Posted: 12 March 2002
Ashley Frieze