It started after the first stop of our vacation, the stop after our visit to Trastevere in Rome.
We got into a taxi and before long we coming up towards Monaco. We were at the top of the hill on the way to our hotel in town. But we were driving backwards.
Read more‘He could have turned the car around while we were in Italy, even though the streets there were narrow,’ I complained.
Our driver was resting his arm on the passenger side seat and craning his neck to look through the rear window, as he barreled the taxi down the hill, in reverse. We held on to the backs of the seats in front of us.
Sometimes the street curved from left to right down the mountain but mostly it was straight down but the driver did not let off the gas anyway. Instead he gunned it down those curves. Until we reached some steps.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘We’ll continue over those steps so it will be a bit bumpy.’
I started to ask questions but Liam and Siobhan interrupted.
‘Leave him alone Dad!’ Then I shut up, and the car juddered against the steps until we reached a small tunnel at the bottom of the hill.
It was at a tunnel that two cyclists next to us appeared. They cycled side by side through the tunnel and were so close to each other, and so close to our car, that I could see the whites of their knuckles on the handlebars as we passed them.
‘Why don’t they cycle one behind the other?’ I asked. ‘Or at least, can’t we slow down?’
But our driver continued to crane his neck backwards to see the road in front of him and we carried on out of the tunnel until we reached a flat beachside section of road.
I thought that would be the end of the crazy driver—left behind in Monaco— but it turned out that on the next stop of our vacation the new driver would also drive in reverse and he would just be the same—driving as if he was hell bent on oblivion.
Photo by Kevin Casper via PublicDomainPictures.net.