This year we’re off to Menorca. Pauline’s booked us into an apartment in a resort called Son Bou and we’re flying out from Gatwick to Mahon at 6 pm today with a charter airline called Excelair. We’re taking Emma and her boyfriend Dan with us this time. As usual we had to be at the airport at least two hours before take-off and we arrived about 3.30 pm, immediately joining one of two queues at the check-in desks. We didn’t finish checking in until an hour and ten minutes later and why did it take us all this time I hear you asking?
Well, it was all down to one immensely fat family of five and a couple of even fatter suitcases. We were roughly three or four people behind them but as it turns out we might as well have been fifty behind them as we stood around watching the minutes tick by while they sorted themselves out. It appeared that their suitcases were too heavy. Not all of them, only a couple but they were told that unless they redistributed the weight amongst the rest of their cases they were going to be in trouble.
The maximum permitted weight per suitcase was 30 kilos and if the case weighed more than this it would have to be checked in separately at a different desk, ah, but only if it was slightly over the weight. If it was so heavy that the fat man couldn’t even lift it off the floor and onto the check-in scales then something wasn’t quite right. So the check-in girl weighed all the cases and pointed to two of them. From where we were standing we couldn’t actually hear the conversation and when the fat man walloped one of the cases onto the ground and started to undo it we still wondered what was going on. I thought he’d been caught smuggling something but if that was true he’d have been escorted away wouldn’t he?
As the fat man unzipped the case the contents spilled out as the pressure of the lid was released and he started to sift through the case. At the same time the fat woman was opening another case and as the fat man passed things to her she was struggling to stuff them into her case. They were beginning to take up more and more floor space around the check-in desk as the fat man chucked things at the fat woman while she chucked things out of her case onto the floor to try and make room for the things the fat man was chucking at her. The fat man reached into his cavernous case time and time again, a pair of step ladders, a hundredweight of potatoes and an anvil were just a few of things I thought I saw coming out of it. The fat woman had meanwhile undone another case to help with the packing of the stuff still being thrown at her and the circle of sweating people, cases and contents got even wider. The fat man would close his case and put it back on the scales, take it off, re-open it, chuck something at the fat lady, put the case back on the scales again only to be told it was still over the limit. This went on and on and on until the right balance had been achieved when the fat man and woman, drenched in sweat, hurled their bags onto the check-in conveyor belt and waddled away shouting and waving their arms at each other.
Finally the people in front of us checked in.
The man standing directly in front of me was given a baggage strip to put around the handle of his hand luggage which he took and looked at intently. He seemed to spend ages trying to figure out what he had to do with it. All you have to do, as you may well know, is to remove a small piece of paper at one end of the strip revealing a sticky patch to be attached to the other end. Trouble was the man removed all the paper, all the way along and ended up with one complete strip of sticky paper and nothing else. It kept getting stuck to his fingers, bag and anything else it came into contact with until finally, in frustration, he stuck it on the side of his bag in one big sticky ball and walked away shaking his head.
The flight was uneventful, although we took off five minutes early and landed twenty minutes early, which for a charter flight is pretty much unheard of. We sat through the usual safety demonstration before take-off, you know the sort of thing, “If we crash, adopt the safety position, bend forward, head between knees (no sir, your own knees), hands clamped above your head, you’ll go quicker that way.”
We got through the baggage hall quickly enough and went straight out to the airport entrance to start looking for a taxi. We’d been told by the people we were renting the apartment from to expect to pay roughly 23 Euros from the airport to San Bou and we had details of the resort and a map to hand so the taxi ride should be straight forward enough. We could see the taxi rank immediately to our left and as we approached a taxi sidled up and the driver got out and opened the boot of the car. We had four large suitcases, two smaller cases of hand luggage and various bags, cameras and handbags between the four of us. Pauline showed the taxi driver the map and asked, “How much?” The taxi driver didn’t appear to understand as he made no effort to reply but just stood there looking at the map with a puzzled expression on his face. Finally he said, “55 Euros.”
This is ridiculous. 55 Euros?
“How much?” Pauline said in surprise.
“55 Euros,” he said shrugging his shoulders.
“But that’s much more than it’s supposed to be,” Pauline said.
He shrugged again and pointed at each of our suitcases in turn.
What’s he trying to say? That the four pieces of luggage are costing us an extra 32 Euros? Doesn’t he expect anyone on holiday to have any luggage? Pauline looked at me and we both shook our heads. I turned away from the taxi driver and said to Pauline, “Let’s just go back inside the airport and check with that information desk that we saw on our way out, maybe they’ll know the going rate.” So we said no thanks to the taxi driver, who looked a bit like Private Walker the spiv in Dad’s Army to tell you the truth, he also looked really annoyed and his eyes were darting about in a very shifty way but not enough to stop him immediately grabbing the bags of another family of four and start loading them and the family into his taxi. This family obviously had money to burn as they didn’t ask in advance what their fare would be, either that or they were blissfully unaware of the fact that they were going to be ripped off when they reached their destination.
I didn’t warn them. People have to make their own way in this world don’t they?
Meanwhile Pauline had nipped back to the airport information desk to find out if this taxi driver really was ripping us off or whether taxi fares had risen 500% in the two months since we’d been told the price. She soon came back shaking her head, “No, it should be 25 Euros, maximum 30 Euros if they add on a bit for items of luggage after 9 pm,” she said. I wasn’t sure what that last bit meant about items of luggage after 9 pm, seemed to have been made up on the spot to me, but even so, 30 Euros was a huge difference to our original fare. What a bastard eh? 55 Euros. Hope he drives straight into a brick wall, after he’s dropped off his passengers of course.
We approached the taxi rank again. I was praying that in the time it had taken for us to sort ourselves out, the bastard rip-off driver hadn’t delivered his passengers and returned already to pick us up again. I nervously eyed up the taxi driver who was getting out to take our bags. Phew, it wasn’t him. This man was nice and friendly and charged us 25 Euros.
We arrived at our destination, San Jaime, a sort of holiday village in the main resort of Son Bou and the taxi driver helped us to find where our apartment might be. We were in Zone ZEH4, number 13. That address gives you some idea of the size of this complex, we were just a number within a zone and it seemed to go on for ever. The place is a 25 years old purpose built holiday location with its own facilities, pools, shops, bars and restaurants. The trouble is that with a captured population of holiday makers the prices are not exactly cheap. We unpacked and wandered out to the pool complex a couple of minutes away where there was a huge bar area with evening entertainment. It was getting late so we sat ourselves down as far away from the stage and the noisy kids as possible and ordered a drink. Tonight’s entertainment was a boy/girl group called ‘5 Steps’ and guess what pop group(s) they were pretending to be. Had a couple of beers and then it was back to the apartment for a reasonably early night to drown out the off-key singing.
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