C. tells me that online reviews warn us: buy the tickets ahead because you will not be allowed to walk around or towards the mouth of the Vesuvius without an only-online-bought ticket, and at the start of the trail phones are regularly out of reach. Buses might get you there, but without a ticket you will not be able to go on. Of course, we get into a -little- argument right there. I can’t believe that ignorants tourists like me are required to be prepared in advance, or to have a satellital phone: there have to be other options. We compromise. We’ll try to get the tickets at Erculano, where -at least some of- the buses to the Vesuvius depart.
In our holiday rythms there is no walking away from bed early, so we manage to reach base camp at mid morning. About twenty meters away from the Erculano train station, a very official-looking office promises bus travels and tickets. 20 euros the bus, access to the trail 15. But it is 11:00 and the next available entry spot is at 15:00. Due to COVID19 less people is allowed to get into the trail, and we got to wait. But four hours in this small town? That is a bit too much even for me in holiday mode. Would there be another bus, another access point?
The answer is almost immediately given. 100 meters further there is a normal bus stop. Meanwhile we puzzle out the time table and the destinations in it, we get hailed from the road “going to the Vesuvius?” Before we manage to say yes or no, a car stops, and an eloquent man displays a whole set of possibilities for us. Back and forth transport, in the car that we are looking at, 25 euros. Want to walk the whole way down on your own? no problem, one way fares are also available. The ticket, we are told, officially costs 12, they sell it for 18. We say that there are no places until 15:00, but we are told that “they have a person to arrange that”. Few minutes later we get an email in our phones with the official electronic ticket to our names, issued by the official agency. When the downloading of the email failed half way, we are told to wait. At the start of the trail we are indeed out of coverage, and the ticket has not downloaded fully. My phone sees no network. So one of the souvenir vendors (who turned out to be “the person they have to arrange tickets”) types on a laptop, shows a QR code on the screen to scan with our phones, and we have wifi, and then tickets.
Naples. Gears inside my brain are turning and making connections. Mafia, corruption, disorder, “we have a man to arrange that”, overprices… And yes, this is what we have just experienced. This is what arrogant northern europeans think about the south. This is what my life in Caracas trained me for. There is always another way. If there is no coverage, or tickets or bus… there will be another coverage, other way to get tickets, other buses. A surcharge. A main system that doesn’t really work, or that seems to be working in order to allow… inside men, and surcharges. An economy that seems to be designed to sustain a parallel, grey, informal economy.
After having lived twenty plus years in The Netherlands, I feel my first reaction “why is that possible here, and why is not possible in NL?”. I mean, if I have to get somewhere in NL that requires a online bought ticket, I really would not expect that somebody outside have access to the process of issuing a valid ticket. That is the point of official tickets, no? And it is not that hard, isn’t it? a safe ticket issuing protocol, in the cloud and accesible to one or two persons max? I myself can set up something like that. Why didn’t the tourist office in charge of the Vesuvius set such thing up?
But this question misses the point.
Given that I have lived in the Netherlands twenty plus years, I have seen corruption enough. About a decade ago the country felt shocked by the revelation that the whole construction sector arranged prices, so that they could surcharge few hundred percent extra. Want to build a house in NL? Be assured you will be paying two or three times as much as it should cost you. We all know, but we all choosed to forget. And don’t get me started about the production and distribution of soft drugs. I mean, drug us is decriminalized in NL. Great. The Netherlands always scores low in percentages of addicted people. But at a cost. Consumption is not penalized, but production is. Yet… If it is consumed here, it has to be distributed here, no? By officially approved shops? Nope. So what about the informal drug economy of The Netherlands? Would it not be bigger than the tourist informal economy of Naples?
So: where is the informal economy bigger? In Amsterdam or in Naples?