Stories from over there

The Mafia

Few years ago, probably 2006 I was driving yet another Contiki Coach around Europe. It was a dodgy bus with a dodgy battery. Buses my friends are like people, it may be the same make as the last one with the same engine made in the same factory but it is distinctly individual and it has feelings! Buses are quite often, a tad neurotic, perhaps it’s the way they are used relentlessly all day and then abandoned at night. They hold a grudge, they save it up until a really opportune moment then they unleash hell.

I had an incredibly annoying Tour Manager on that tour. She was uber girly. I am not. She would flirt with her male drivers in order to get them to do what she wanted. I am a strait female. Her temperament was a lethal cocktail of chirpy, tasteless, immature and bouncy yet depressingly dull due to her constant jolly inane drivel. There is only so much of the Venga boys back catalogue I can listen to before I want to shoot myself. We didn’t get on.

This day was a particularly bad day out of a distressingly awful tour.

It was a tight day for timings, even if everything goes to plan, its still a very tight day. The itinerary went something like: Leave Rome oh say 7am, drive to Pompeii, (aprox 4 hours drive) 2 hours for lunch and tour of ruins. Depart around 1pm, drive down to Brindisi (5 hours including stop) arriving no later than 6pm for check in for night boat to Corfu. Missing the boat is of course not an option because finding a hotel for 52 people in the middle of summer is a problem. Booking them on to a boat for the next day would be impossible. Plus you would have 50 very unimpressed tourists on your hands and you don’t want that. No you don’t

Grand. No problems. Tight but definitely ‘do able’.

So we leave Rome and hit the highway. About an hour on the road we meet a traffic jam, a really big one, a monster. We moved about 10 meters in an hour. The mafia had shut the road, the main road, the really big one that every one heading south drives down. Eventually we came to an exit. We are forced off by dudes in black shiny cars and sharp suits who are parked across the highway. I didn’t know where this side road went. I don’t do GPS. I know my way around, GPS’s are for wimps.

It was funny in a perverse way, we had an American lad on board whose sole reason for booking this trip was to see Pompeii. I feared he may only see a sign from the motorway If indeed we ever found the motorway again, and we would have a lawsuit on our hands. Just as we turned off the exit, the suits reopened the road. We had lost 2 hours. I did a highly illegal 3 point turn in my 12 meter bus in the midst of a mental Italian traffic chaos and we got back on the autostrada. Finally we were moving and we had no time to loose….

It was about then that my tour manager thought it a good point to check the ferry ticket. Most TMs check it the night before, you know, to see what time the boat leaves, this one was trusting it to luck. We were lucky. We didn’t have to be at the ferry port till 7pm, not the typical 6. We had gained an hour, the yank would see Pompeii after all, although it would be at a jog. 1 Hour for Pompeii visit, lunch on the bus, we were still going to make it, it was going to be ok…

I had parked up the coach in the small coach park run by the mafia. We had to park there, operations for Contiki in Italy were arranged by the mafia. Every other country in Europe we could do as we pleased. But here things were a little different. I mentioned I had a dodgy battery. Well it had been fine so far, I had been nursing it along now for about 12 days all along our journey from London through Paris, Lyon, Barcelona, Nice, Venice, Florence and Rome. So long as when you left it sitting, you remembered to switch everything off including (vitally) the Master Switch. The master of all switches that controls the power supply to everything, well as long as you did that, you remembered to switch off the Master Switch, it would start fine….

I return to the coach park after an hour’s lunch in Pompeii to find I’d left the master switch on, what can I say? it had been a stressful morning. So I turn the key and nothing happens just a pitiful pathetic whirl. “Ok” say I, “we are going to have to push start the bus”. There were many doubters on the coach. Can you really push start a bus? I didn’t know either, I’d never done it before. I’d never even push started a car, but I thought that, right now I’d give it a shot. Now Coaches are big and heavy but luckily I just so happened to have my rent a mob crowd to push me. So there I am in the drivers seat, the coach park is about 20 meters square and across the way from me is a large wall. I put my foot on the clutch I put it in gear, the large gang of kids behind me pushed. We rolled, I yanked my foot off the clutch and the beast spluttered into life. I braked suddenly before I hit the wall. We were away. But we had lost yet more time.

We had to make the boat. It should take 5 hours with a wee stop, we needed to be there in 4. I drove like the wind. The roads around Solerno near the Amalfi Coast are windy and narrow. When you pass a lorry there are inches in it. We didn’t stop for a break. Yes there were dissenters but what could I do. The last part of the journey we are in total Mafia territory. There is a stretch of road that leads along the coast after Bari that is patrolled, not by police, but dudes in green trucks. It’s a fast road, like any other Autostrada but coaches are restricted to 80 km. If we were going to get to the ferry port on time I was going to have to do the max of 100 km. It was a risk because if we got stopped we could waste more time bribing some mafia fella, but if we didn’t speed we would be late and miss the ferry. My heart was in my mouth but we were lucky. We swept into the ferry port a little after 7pm. We made it, just.

Beer was going to taste sweet tonight….

The boat wasn’t there, it was late, we waited another 2 hours on the dock.

But that’s life right?