As you can see, I wasn't driving. I had injured my toe on some coral while swimming. I didn't want to pay for a U.S. doctor, so I just let it fester. I still have the coral in my toe as a souvenir.
The driver was a young guy I met at the hostel in S.F.
The mountain road started to wind charmingly downhill. The guidebook says "The twisting two-lane highway ... clings tenaciously to steep rock cliffs."
The guy behind the wheel got a bit nervous. I asked what was wrong, and he explained he had never driven on mountain roads before. I wondered what the big deal was. Sure, there was a sheer drop at the edge of the road, but with careful driving there was nothing to fear.
As the bends got tighter and the road steeper, the car went faster and faster. In those days I was very polite, so I began saying, in a measured tone to disguise my own rising panic, "perhaps it would be an idea to brake on this curve" ... "you might like to brake here". He explained to me, quite seriously, that he only recently passed his test and had never really mastered how to use brakes.
As we gathered even more speed and started to slide into the curves, he was wrestling with the wheel and I was screaming at him: "just step on the effing brake" ... "stop the effing car" etc.
It was as if he was deaf. It was like some kind of psycho movie. He should never have been allowed to drive. I could have driven better with a septic toe. If he's still alive today, he must have mastered the footbrake in the meantime.
