THRILL of the dare
Is a meal of potentially toxic pufferfish a risk worth taking? Lance Richardson thinks so.
WHILE PREPARING for a trip to Osaka recently, I came across this sentence in an article by Adam Platt in The New York Times : ‘‘In parts of Japan, legend has it, the bodies of fugu-overdose victims were once laid beside their open caskets for several days to ensure that they were not being buried alive.’’
Fugu is the Japanese word for pufferfish, which carries the paralysing poison tetrodotoxin.
I had been contemplating a meal of fugu in Japan for several weeks, but these sorts of details made me wary.
Platt punctuates his degustation menu with grim figures, such as the 315 poisonings in a decade, including 31 fatalities.
His final verdict is ambivalent. One course, he writes, is like ‘‘warm curds of milk’’. Most harrowing is the fact that there is no known antidote to tetrodotoxin. Doctors administer a charcoal purgative and hope for the best. You put your life in the hands of a single chef and his fugu-hiki knife. Still, the idea lingered in my mind like a dare.
I emailed Chris Noble, general manager of WorldNomads.com, a company that bills itself as offering ‘‘travel insurance for adventurous travellers’’ or ‘‘those of us who like to do more than sit on a beach for two weeks’’. The website offers an A to Z of intrepid activities, with coverage for everything from sleigh rides to clay-pigeon shooting and hydrofoiling. Neither ‘‘fugu’’ nor ‘‘Russian roulette’’ was on the list, but I asked Noble whether an insurance plan would cover a traveller in the event that they never made it through dessert.
‘‘There is a lot of grey around these types of edgy cases,’’ he replied. ‘‘If it’s generally regarded as a highly dangerous thing to do, then an insurer will look at it the same way and ask the question whether you ’actively put yourself in harm’s way’.’’ I should not expect my insurance to automatically cover it, in other words.
Maybe, Noble suggested in jest, I could ‘‘stick to the calamari’’. But where’s the story in that?
A great deal of modern travel employs a quiet sleight of hand, where risk is cloaked behind assurances of comfort and safety. Package tours and cruise holidays are presented as travel flushed of risk, and this is part of their attraction: the only cost a passenger needs to contemplate to see the world is the one printed on their ticket. But the horror of the Costa Concordia, which capsized off the coast of Italy, comes from the unsettling reminder that this is illusory.
Just like the Carnival Spirit, where a couple fell overboard last May, the Costa Concordia proves that all travel involves risk, even the most innocuous. A traveller may not be bungy jumping over the Zambezi River, feeling the elastic snap above Nile crocodiles, but they take a chance every time they get their passport stamped.
The real question is not who avoids risks and who takes them – we all do – but how each person approaches the odds to determine what is acceptable.
This is where calculated risk comes into play, a term often used in economics to describe the prediction of an outcome based on all available evidence. In travel, an individual makes risk assessments
I cannot know, for instance, that walking down a particular street in Beijing is bad until the thief has his hand in my pocket.
using acquired knowledge, common sense and personal taste.
The odds of disaster during flight, for example, still seem so small to me as to be essentially negligible. Cave diving beneath the Nullarbor Plain in Australia, on the other hand, is on my permanent blacklist.
A seasoned diver with extensive training has no problem pushing into the six-kilometre Cocklebiddy Cave, though, and almost anybody with aviophobia (the fear of flying) would find my negligible risk completely unacceptable.
The scale is subjective. No one can know everything, either. Calculating risk is the same as educated guessing, which is why resources such as Smartraveller and health advisories are popular and useful.
These information sites