Sometimes you really don’t know you should have been scared when you should have been.
And a corollary to that might be that you don’t always know when you barely escaped a close call with death, dismemberment, loss of cell phone coverage or ice cold beer–all common risks during global adventure travel.
Take the original impetus of this post, being a story on NPR just last Friday, which predicts a major earthquake coming to Indonesia.
“Scientists who have been studying earthquakes in the eastern Indian Ocean say they’ve got new evidence that a huge earthquake could strike there in the next few decades, and perhaps create a giant tsunami.”
How do they know?
Well, silly, obviously it’s when the coral starts looking like a sombrero. (At least according to the Caltech geologist quoted in the NPR story.)
Back in October I posted a number of stories about my September dive trip to the Indonesian island of North Sulawesi.
So when I heard that story on the radio last Friday morning that the big one may be coming to that part of the world, my first reaction was, “gee, I guess I better get out of bed and get to the toilet before I have an accident.”
And my second reaction was, “gee, lucky I already went diving in Indonesia and made it back alive.”
But my real shock came when I was doing the important research that I always do for my well written blog posts, and doing what I spend most of my web browsing time doing and that is looking for pictures.
No, not those kinds of pictures. (“No, dear, my Google image search for ‘Island Beauties’ is for tropical plants.”)
I spend lots of time ferreting out just the right photos for my posts in the hope that they distract from the poor prose, lousy grammar, and incomprehensible spelling errors.
The shock was when I found an article that said there already was a big earthquake in the area I was diving in, just a couple of months after my trip.
If you look at the map of the areas at risk you will see the town of Monado. Well that is precisely where we started and ended our weeklong dive trip.
And when I say, “ended,” I am happy to say that I meant as in “it was time to go home,” not ended as in “all in, all done.”
So how much do you think about unpredictable natural disasters when you travel the world?
Sometimes I think I may be better off not knowing about these almost close calls.
After all, something like this might really cause a personal hygiene issue requiring a change of underclothes.
Or maybe I just need to do a better job looking for sombrero-shaped coral sea mounds?
And then swim like hell the other way.
if they can predict earthquakes that far in advance why couldnt they predict the one in 2006? i dont buy it!
I guess if you predict something (like an earthquake) might happen in the future that has happened repeatedly in the past it’s kind of like saying that I will likely say something to piss off my wife in the next few months (minutes?).
The only real question for both is, exactly when and how big.