Mankind
nowadays attributing a price on everything, this public area could no longer
stay unexploited and run over by locals and tourists for free. Therefore at its
entrance you now find a display announcing an entrance fee of 0,50 euro per
person and the cozido comes to 3 euros. As the cozido is not brought by
helicopter, it will cost you at least 3,50 euros if you are two to carry your
pot ( the driver is free, thank you). At a first wooden shack you thus pay your
dime of 0,50 euro, only to read on the ticket that at a stone house, The
Reception, 50 meters onward you should stop to have your ticket exchanged
against an official receipt. I pity the poor employee selling the tickets.
Indeed it must be of utmost frustration to sell tickets which become worthless
50 meters onward. If the aim was to create a phony job, the success is
complete. So once you got your ticket (under the watchfull eye of a policeman
who was present each time we drove up) , the pickpocketing continues: together
with the entrance ticket, you are handed over a parking ticket to be paid for
when you leave (at a rate of 20 cents per 15 minutes). The parking fee was of
course not announced on the official entrance board so that it is most
doubtfull if legally you have to pay. But police will calm you if your temper
hots up....You might of course try to park prior to reaching the entrance, but
by miracle since a few weeks this has become forbidden.....
If you
come with a cozido you MUST stop at the Reception. Because there they
confiscate your pot, put it on an electrical golfcart (we are an ecological
town, aren't we?) and hurry it to the earthholes. Hurry they do indeed and when
seeing them drive around recklessly on various occasions I came to the
conclusion that they were training for the SATA Rallye Azores. But I do doubt
if their cart held until that event. Anyway they seemed to train hard to be
able to compete with Ricardo Moura....
Exit the
times when you could take close-up pictures of your pot being laid into the
earth. The fact that you dare to trespass the compound awakens 4 otherwise
bored employees to life to tell you that you are not allowed to enter. Do not
think to rebel ! In case you forgot : there is a policeman at the entrance!
Don't
try to be smart and cheat on the entrance fee by walking around the lake and
approaching from the other side: Bad luck : the zealous employees have an eye
on you. So you might prefer to just walk back the way you came.
I ask
myself if this robbing of a public area against money is meant to be a profit
center or a cash drain. If the aim was to create jobs at all costs it is a
success. I have nevertheless doubts about the quality of these jobs when seeing
how the workers hung around, not overzealous to say the least. Around 20 people
seem to be employed up there and to me it is evident that if after one year
this experience is evaluated there will be but one solution: to raise the
entrance fee to have the accounts balanced.
If at
first glance the idea seemed brilliant to those behind this project (creation
of jobs, additional revenue for the town, additional safety), the negative
points take the upper hand: abandonment of free access to a public area ( how
much does it cost to picnic for a family of four from Povoação parking their
car for 4 hours...) , creation of mean jobs with no perspective, too many
employees (why put someone at the entrance selling tickets if the tickets
should be exchanged 50 meters on; the Soviet Union collapsed in part due to
these " working"methods), police present (were they afraid of riots;
why not make more traffic controls instead ?), milking of locals and tourists
(double fee : entrance and parking), utmost dishonesty (parking fee not
announced at the entrance; once you are in you are trapped unless you prefer to
run away from the thieves which is precisely what we did)...
Why not
call this a social project and explain to the locals and tourists that this
project was meant to (re)employ people who were previously on the dole; levy an
entrance fee per car and bus at a reasonable price, regardless of the number of
passengers or parking time....and the pill might be easier to swallow ! And why
not grant free access (be it on week-ends only...) to all inhabitants of
Povoaçao county; their share of the total entrance fee is surely so low that it
would not make any difference.
Maybe I
am just an oldfashioned, stingy, grumpy (foreign) citizen and I do not
understand anything about progress, about the economy or the Azorean way of
doing " business"......
Guy Anen
Povoação
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