Misplaced anxiety hides true tourist traps

Don't worry about the plane crashing or catching rare diseases on your trip, advises SIMON CALDER.

Perspective, not perception, will help keep you alive. Unless you are remarkably unlucky, you will not be devoured by a shark nor consumed from within by the Ebola virus while on holiday.

But becoming part of the grim annual cull of tourists is all too easy. Too many travellers allow apprehension about highly unlikely events to deflect their attention from much more significant risks.

Fretting about a flight to La Paz in Bolivia, for example, is pretty pointless because commercial air travel is extremely safe. Instead, consider how your body will cope with arriving at the breathless height of 14,000ft. And worry aplenty about catching a geriatric local bus on the road linking Bolivia's capital to the Yungas; this terrifying descent is notorious as a backpackers' graveyard.

Travel is wonderful, but is it worth dying for? Probably not. That's the view of countless prospective tourists, who see the news reports of everything from Real IRA bomb blasts in Northern Ireland to rabies in Central Africa, and decide to stay at home or, at least, go somewhere less dangerous.

In choosing a "safer" destination, their perceptions may well place them in greater danger. Travelling for 8000km on the Trans-Siberian Railway from Moscow to Beijing is a far less risky transportation proposition than driving a rental car through Portugal and, when you reach the Chinese capital, the chances of suffering any kind of violent attack are infinitesimal.

The exception is a violent attack of illness, at least according to a British Holiday Which? magazine report on travel health. Three out of 10 visitors to China fall ill, says the Consumers' Association survey, compared with an overall average of 11 per cent.

I suggest this medical survey deserves something of a health warning itself. In Kenya, it says, "you have a 50/50 chance of falling sick." This assertion is based on just 20 reports of illness among the 42 self-selecting members of Holiday Which? who answered a questionnaire on the East African country.

Mike Pedley, who worked on the survey, defends the numbers as "statistically significant." Yet Peru owes its position at the top of the table, "with an incredible two-thirds of visitors suffering some sort of illness," to the fact that 21 out of 32 members experienced health problems there.

Dr Mike Smith, a London GP, told BBC Radio that two out of three people on his tour group to the Andes fell ill. Most suffered from altitude sickness through failing to acclimatise properly. He also mentioned that the majority were fellow medical practitioners, who perhaps should have been better prepared.

Evidence, I suggest, of a wider malaise: an unwillingness to take personal responsibility for wellbeing. Just because an airline is prepared to take you far and wide doesn't mean you can ignore your safety instincts when the "fasten your seat belts" light goes off.

Poor old Peru: another setback. The Maoist guerrilla group, the Shining Path, almost extinguished the tourist trade in the mid-80s by declaring that they would attack visitors. Other terrorist groups around the world have latched on to the technique, most lethally in Egypt, where attacks in Luxor in 1997 and 1998 killed nearly 100 visitors.

Yet the fashion for placing tourists in the frontline of guerrilla campaigns has really not caught on. Such events are so rare, in fact, that a visitor to Spain is far more likely to have a fatal fall from a hotel balcony than die at the hands of the Basque separatists, ETA.

To cut the risk of coming home in a body-bag, stop worrying about becoming a victim of wanton political violence or obscure tropical diseases (but do keep taking the malaria pills). Concentrate on mundane worries, such as swimming, to enhance your chances of surviving the seaside.

Your main focus, however, should be on the "skills" of local drivers. Traffic accidents are the largest killer of travellers abroad. In popular countries such as Turkey, Portugal and South Africa the fatal accident rates are so alarming that a sensible traveller will research rail travel options to avoid going by road.

Anyone who disdains the backpack trail in favour of being cossetted should beware. The Holiday Which? survey found that while one holidaymaker in nine fell ill on average, the figure deteriorated to one in seven among people staying at an all-inclusive resort. For the ultimate in luxury, an ocean cruise, the rate was worse than one in six.

The world is at your feet. But sometimes it kicks back.

- INDEPENDENT