on accidents while traveling

It sounds like the tour boat in Ohrid was an overloaded boat taking people to the Sveti Naum monastery near the Albanian border (I’ve driven past the monastery but did not enter it). Capacity 42 passengers, but an estimated 72 were on board. The boat split in half, sinking in only 6 meters of water. Sounds like most of the dead were from Bulgaria. A terrible tragedy, obviously. It’s such a beautiful place to visit that it’s painful to think anyone might have been as excited as I was to arrive and then have things go so badly. (Another fascinating thing about that lake, if memory serves… A special kind of eel breeds in Lake Ohrid, but then normally lives in the Sargasso Sea! Yes, the eels swim all the way through the Mediterranean and up rivers to get to the lake for breeding season. It’s a very long way to there from the Sargasso Sea.)

So far I’ve been lucky to avoid any frightening-looking boats or airplanes on my various travels. (Domestic airlines in India, for instance, seem to be fantastic.) Almost all of my scares have involved taxis.

The worst single taxi incident was probably when my father came to Egypt for a week during my first year there. I insisted on riding with him back to the airport. The taxi driver wanted to put my father’s luggage on the roof, but he wisely refused to go along with that arrangement. And it was a good thing… As we drove on the viaduct high above downtown Cairo, we blew a tire and swerved. No question the luggage would have been lost, and there was a small chance we could have gone over the low railing and toppled to our deaths behind the Egyptian Museum. But the driver regained control, and we exited the vehicle and flagged down another taxi.

Don’t get me wrong– Cairo driving is certainly quite terrible. But the worst taxi rides I have ever had were elsewhere than in Egypt:

1. Goa

2. Rio de Janeiro

No offense intended to Portuguese blood… I found the driving in Portugal itself to be pretty good, despite Lonely Planet’s weirdly hysterical warnings about Portuguese car behavior. (I saw no problems with the driving at all, and we drove extensively around the entire lower half of the country.)

Goa was definitely the scariest. It was a taxi ride from Goa Airport to the center of Panajim, the largest city in the region. The driver did many stupid things, of which the most unnerving was passing a car even with a car coming in the other lane. We went straight down the middle of the road, between two other cars. And that’s apparently normal there, since the driver did it as a matter of course and the other two drivers did not seem to react badly to it. (But every morning in the Goa newspaper I would see ads for a dozen or so funerals linked to traffic fatalities.)

The Rio cab ride that horrified me most was from Copacabana back to the Rio Airport. Here it was a simple matter of excessive speed– absurdly excessive, in fact.

And though I never rode on a scary-looking airplane while traveling, there is one case where I may have ridden on a scary one without knowing it. My first trip from Cairo to Sharm el-Sheikh was on Flash Airlines. One of their planes crashed in early 2004, killing all on board (mostly French citizens). I flew twice with Flash, meaning a 75 percent chance that I flew on the one that crashed, since they only had two aircraft in the fleet. They went out of business after losing that one.