"Are we all going to wake up dead tomorrow?" asks my pal Dave as our taxi crawls up a steep, winding road on a fog-drenched mountain.
"Think positive, think of the next beer when we get there," I reply, gnawing at my nails. And then another car emerges through the mist ahead, mere meters away, and hurtles past us. Again we thank God that it didn't hit us head on and . . . kill us.
With visibility down to about 5 meters, we hear an ambulance's siren ahead, but only at the last second do we see its flashing lights shoot by. Then the crash scene: A huge truck smashed into a bank on the side of the road, its body buckled, almost broken in half by a big van embedded in its side. Twenty minutes later -- and after tearing half our hair out -- our cab is flagged down by a gaijin guy with a security pass.