Lee Wei Ling: Nobody knows tomorrow
By Lee Wei Ling, for the Sunday Times, 01 Mar 2009
The Straits Times carried last week a story about a group of Singaporeans whose rented minibus had careened off the highway and plunged down an embankment near Milford Sound in New Zealand.
Two passengers had to be airlifted to hospital. The most seriously injured was a 59-year-old woman who fractured her spine, arm and collarbone and required surgery.
Police believe that the driver was driving too fast and may also ‘have been distracted by the spectacular view’. Those injured had not worn their seat belts.
The report brought back memories of my own close brush with death on Dec 23, 1995. I was on a hiking holiday in New Zealand, having arrived in Christchurch the preceding day.
A car rental company had delivered a brand new Holden direct from the factory to my hotel on the morning of Dec 23. I drove across Arthur’s Pass to Punakaiki (Pancake Rocks) on the west coast of South Island. After walking around a scenic lookout, I drove south along the coastal road to Greymouth, where I had reserved a motel room.
On my right, a sheer drop thousands of metres below, was the azure Tasman Sea. On my left was the mountain, into the sides of which the road with hairpin bends was carved. I kept one eye on the road and the other on the sea with its pounding surf. The scenery was magnificent.
Suddenly, I noticed a road sign - ‘30km/hr’ - just before a very sharp bend in the road. I stepped on the brakes. The next moment, the car was spinning out of control.
‘Damn it, what an inconvenient place to have an accident,’ I thought as I pictured in my mind’s eye the car on the ocean bed, divers trying to cut open the car door, people leafing through my wet passport, and the Singapore High Commission in Wellington telephoning my parents in Singapore.
The car crashed into the mountainside with such tremendous force it turned 180 degrees. The front of the car faced the road, while the rear end was ramped up the mountainside as it slid into the ditch beside the road. If I had not had my seat belt on, I would have been flung against the windscreen. Instead, to my astonishment, I was totally unharmed.
My next problem was to get the car out of the ditch. I walked down to a village a few kilometres from the site of the accident and went into a house that had its door wide open. A man appeared in response to my loud ‘Hello, hello’.
After hearing my story, he fetched a thick rope, drove his car to the site of the bashed-up Holden, tied his car to it and managed to tow it out of the ditch. He then test-drove the Holden. He told me that I could drive the short distance to my motel but to be careful because the bonnet was no longer secure and might at any moment spring up and obscure my vision. I thanked him profusely and thought to myself: ‘New Zealanders are kinder than Singaporeans. I am not sure I would have done the same if our situations had been reversed!’
I got to my motel safely but found that there was no vacancy for Dec 24. By hook or by crook, I had to get the rental car replaced and drive on to my next motel near the Franz Josef and Fox glaciers the next day.
Next morning, the rental car company replaced my car and I continued on the rest of my holiday as planned. I was pleased with myself for having been calm and cool throughout the episode and had no intention of letting my parents know what had happened.
On Dec 31, I returned to Singapore as planned. When I arrived at Changi Airport, I phoned my mother and said: ‘Hi Ma, I am home safe.’ A few weeks later, my cousin told me that my mother had subsequently said to her: ‘Something happened to Ling on that trip. I’d rather not know what.’
My mother knew me better than I knew myself. She sensed that the phone call from Changi Airport indicated that I must have encountered danger during the trip.
I have been hiking since my youth, usually alone. By hiking alone, I break the first rule in any hiking book. I know the risk I am taking. I always calculate my risks. Where hikes are concerned, I balance the pleasure of solitude, the beauty of nature and the physical challenge of the hike against the risks of each particular route, as determined by the terrain and the weather. I have had many close calls but the incident in New Zealand was the closest.
My hiking and my occupation as a doctor bring home to me the saying that no one knows tomorrow; in fact, we don’t even know our next moment. I go hiking alone, courting danger, yet fate has spared me many times. On the other hand, while safely in Singapore, medical mishaps have on several occasions put me in very precarious situations.
The two lessons of this story that I hope to share with readers are:
Lee Wei Ling
The writer is director of the National Neuroscience Institute
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