Lunatic Taxi Driver

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Issy hasn't slept well. She says she was kept awake by the noise of the lift doors. The lift doors are certainly very annoying. They're right outside our room and they've been opening and closing all night every night we've been here, even when there's seemingly no one around to press any of the buttons. We've been trying to get around this by sending the lift back to the ground floor every night just before we go to sleep. This works for a while until someone else on our floor comes back to their room, and it seems that a resident of our floor is always the last guest back to the hotel every night. Issy says that if the next hotel has bad wifi, no bar fridge, and a noisy lift, she'll be divorcing me. I wonder where I'll live.

On the way to the airport we pass a large camping ground behind the beach, packed with caravans and tents all nestled in amongst large gum trees. The whole of Corsica feels a bit like summer on the Mornington Peninsula, and Issy says it feels like a throwback to the 80's. The only real differences between here and the Mornington Peninsula are that everyone speaks French, the weather's more reliable, the food's much better, there's a stunning mountain backdrop, and the water's warmer. Now that I think about it Corsica probably isn't really all that similar to the Mornington Peninsula. We've been noticing that just about all the tourists here seem to be French, and the only people who aren't are from somewhere else in Europe. Corsica seems to have remained undiscovered by the tourist hordes from America and Asia. We wonder why this is, and conclude that it's probably got a lot to do with the absence of any large luxury hotels. I wonder if this is a deliberate ploy to keep Corsica the way it is. If so, it would seem to be a very good ploy.

The lady who checks us in at the airport tells us that we have to pay for our luggage. We respond that the cost of this was included in our fare, but she tells us that we need to show her documentation to prove it. We tell her that we've only got our paper tickets, which we've already given her. She spends a long time on her computer investigating every last detail of our trip. The people in the queue behind us are getting very restless. She eventually comes back to advise us that we don't have to pay for our luggage after all. This doesn't seem to do a lot to improve the humour of the people behind us, or ours either for that matter; we all think that she's just successfully wasted a lot of everyone's time.

Based on our experience coming here we're now very nervous about whether we'll ever see our luggage again. It seemed to like Paris then, and today it will have the option of staying in either Geneva or Athens, rather the continuing on with us to Rhodes.

We land in Geneva, where it's cool and wet. Signs as we get off the plane give us the option to go to either Gate F in the French Sector, or to Gates A, B, C and D in the Swiss Sector. We have no idea what this means. On the basis that the Swiss Sector seems to have four times as many gates as the French Sector we decide to play the odds and go there. We have lunch at a cafe in the airport. We'd read somewhere that Geneva is one of the most expensive cities in the world to live in, and this is very believable if the prices on the menu are anything to go by. Forty Australian dollars for a chicken club sandwich? Really?

We fly on to Athens, and then Rhodes. We hold our collective breaths while we wait for our luggage to appear. We expected Rhodes airport to be very small, and that we'd have it to ourselves at this time of night, but it's crawling with people, and there are at least a hundred buses parked outside waiting to collect arriving passengers. Our taxi driver is a 60 year old Greek woman who tells us that she's proud to be one of only ten female taxi drivers on Rhodes. It's quite a long drive to our hotel, and she drives like a lunatic. I'm sure that very soon there will only be nine female taxi drivers on Rhodes, and there might be few less passengers as well.

We've booked a double room, but for tonight only there are none available, so we're told that we'll be in a suite tonight, and then transferred to a double room tomorrow. There's a bar fridge in the room, the wifi works and there are no lifts nearby, so I ask Issy if I've avoided divorce. Apparently not. She says that teasing her with a suite for one night and then making her downgrade to a double room is also a divorceable offence.

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