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British Mensa Travel Special Interest Group |
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Near
Misses by Anne Rothwell All our memories of travel seem wonderful and exciting and even the bad experiences later seem laughable. However, when we look back, we see what a narrow line there is between safety and disaster. Here are a few of our narrow escapes. Two days after breaking my leg, I flew to Hong Kong to visit my sister and we went to the funfair at Ocean Park. There was a 360 degree roller coaster, part of which stuck out over a cliff edge. My able-bodied sister would not go on, but I had a great ride with my leg sticking out. What’s health and safety? Similarly, in Petrozavodsk, we saw a very high and rickety looking big wheel continuously turning. Marven and I paid our 2p or thereabouts and jumped on, managing to dismount safely when we got to the bottom again; worth it for the great view from the top. In Yalta, a lovely seaside town in the Crimea, we found a cable car contraption, consisting of rusty oval bucket shapes containing 2 seats facing each other and painted with adverts for cigarettes. These, too, were on the move fairly quickly, but we managed a ride to the top of the cliff and back. We’ve coped with many risky forms of transport: a Krasair plane in Siberia, which had the ambience of an old charabanc; a Sikorsky helicopter with holes in the floor; a Chinese internal airline in which the oxygen masks were all taped up as they persisted in falling down unnecessarily and some of the seats were in a permanent recline; a Tunisian taxi in which the driver had to stick out his foot and slide it along the ground to stop it as the brakes didn’t work; a crazy Moroccan bus driver who drove at speed when it was getting dark on a winding single-track road; riding an ostrich which bolted; a fast ride on the back of a pushbike (not a 2-seater) in Nepal with a boy who was trying to get me to the bank before it closed; but most frightening of all, being carried in a kind of sedan chair by 2 boys running down a mountain with a sheer drop on one side and rough scree under their feet, in China. And I paid for all this! I could go
on. I haven’t mentioned the places we’d been advised not to
go or the dodgy foods we’ve eaten or being chased by animals. I suppose
you could say we’re foolhardy and irresponsible, but a bit of excitement
and adventure is what gives travel such a buzz. Beating the odds and all
that, and we are still here to tell the tale. First published in VISA issue 62 (Aug 2005) |