A rally delayed our departure from Puerto Inca to Nazca by five hours.
We only realised that it wasn’t one of the political variety when we rounded a bend and passed a crumpled racing car on its roof in the ravine beside the road.
The road to Nazca was short and we pulled up at the gates of the incongruously named Swiss Hotel in good time for lunch.
The cook crew created yet another permutation on the humble sandwich – which is pretty clever, as we have eaten them for forty days straight so far. As we munched, a mild mannered man moved amongst us, picking up potential bookings for a trip to fly over the Nazca Lines.
The Bolivian Death Road trumpeted its deadly credentials as a calling card. It boasted a hit rate of twenty-six tourists in just over ten years. Estimating sixty riders per day, we calculated a death rate of one in ten thousand – pretty good when you consider that a higher proportion of people die in bed – or hospital – or the car.
The Nazca day trip was a little less vocal about its safety record. A plane crashes once every five years on average and the last one did flaming cartwheels off the runway nearly three years ago. Assuming eight died in each crash and that five flights per day go up, the death rate reaches a suspiciously similar level to the Death Road.
About one in ten thousand.
Strangely, the almost identical chances of dying in a plane crash sent a ripple of anxiety through the truck that the Death Road did not.
It could be the element of control that is absent from being a passenger in a plane.
Perhaps it was the dollar-cost to death ratio that upset people.
Maybe it is the inevitability of death that comforts people. After all - fall off your bike on the Death Road and you don’t stop tumbling for over 1,000m.
The plane never reaches an altitude of over 200m and the chances of a straight plummet are pretty slim unless a wing falls off. That leaves the grisly prospect of seeing the crash unfold - from the first slightly concerned radio transmission to the bent metal and flaming aviation fuel – all from a disconcertingly close ring-side seat.
We contemplated these considerations as we dropped pebbles down the inconceivably deep well next to the car park at the hotel. The pebble took six seconds to hit the water, somewhere deep in the earth’s crust, suggesting a depth of over 400m. The electro-pop that echoed back up the well shaft merely reminded us of the distance we had to fall if the wings decided to take an unscheduled break from the fuselage.
Alive to the negative preconceptions - that TJ and Izzy did little to dispel by making clear that they could not facilitate the booking due to the danger – the polite man from the airline unloaded a barrage of statistics with which to reassure us.
“Yes, planes do crash from time to time but we now check the aircraft periodically for missing wings” he opened apologetically.
“Yes, we now pay our pilots enough so they no longer have to moonlight as whiskey-tasters” he added later.
“Yes, we only buy genuine replacement parts now - and no, we no longer use marshmallows as fuel filters” he emphasised more confidently.
In the end, he only lost one waverer, apparently unsatisfied with his attempts to explain whether policies were in place to protect against alien abduction whilst over the Lines themselves.
Wiping the mayonnaise from our chins, we climbed into his truck and travelled the 40m to the airport where we parted with the cash and, one by one, climbed on the weighing-scales to determine seat position in the single engine Cessna that would be home for the next thirty minutes.
As we waited to climb on board, our unease grew.
I’m not saying that I actually saw marshmallows in the toolbox and maybe the gaffer tape round the tail-fin was purely precautionary.
But there was definitely an empty bottle of Jim Beam in the cockpit.
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