I can safely say that I almost never felt like I was in any real danger while I was traveling. That is not to say that people near me were never dead or dying. They were. So in reality, I was in the vicinity of death on several occasions, but was fortunately able to get by unscathed. Some situations were mysterious, so it’s impossible to say whether or not it could have been me, but in other cases I could have easily been party to a deadly incident.

The first such incident came during my first few days on Utila. I was taking a Rescue Diver course, which was in the afternoon, so I wasn’t on the early boat. I was just waking up when some divers I was bunking with returned. I asked them how their dive was, but their pallid faces said it all. It turns out that the divers had descended upon a recently murdered human body. An older caucasian man had been stabbed in the neck and sunk with a backpack full of rocks. My friend Chris was the one who had to bring the body to the surface and hand it over to the police. You would think that this would be big news on a small island, but it went relatively unnoticed. The only reason I heard anything more about it was because Chris, a local, heard some information from the police. Most people on the island had no idea it had happened. They never found out who killed the man, who he was, or why he was killed. It was all just quietly swept under the rug. Honduras is well known as the murder capital of the world, but it is usually localized in the big cities and leaves the tourist areas alone. Obviously there are exceptions to every rule. That being said, I never felt like I was in any danger in Utila. There were several occasions when I was walking the dark empty streets deep in the night. Perhaps this man was doing the same, but just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. However, this sort of speculation serves no useful purpose, nor does worrying that I could meet a similar fate. Thus, even after the murder I had no issue with wandering the dark, empty streets of Utila.

Another such occasion hit much closer to home, as we could have easily been the ones killed. While on our way to Lago Coatepeque in El Salvador the bus was taking much longer to arrive than we expected. However, buses being late is business as usual in Central America. I would have been more concerned had it been on time. Shortly after it came, we realized what had caused the delay. The earlier bus to Coatepeque had crashed into the side of a cliff. As we passed, we saw that the bus was pretty severely mangled, so it must have been traveling at a pretty high rate of speed. These buses are usually packed the the gills, and as they are just modified school buses, they don’t offer seat belts. I have no way of knowing for sure, but I can’t imagine that there weren’t at least a few casualties. Had we gotten on the earlier bus, it could have easily been us.

The death adjacent experience was traveling in Southwestern Colombia. This area of Colombia still has some areas controlled by the rebel group FARC. We were told that there was a relatively long standing cease fire, but unbeknownst to us, it was falling apart while we were there. Hence, the road we were traveling on was bombed a mere few hours after we had safely passed. Hostages were taken, but it sounds like they were just shaken down for a few hundred dollars and set free. In this case no one was killed, but you never know what can happen when explosives and armed rebels are in play. We didn’t realize we were in any danger until we were safely out of harms way.

Had we known, well, it probably wouldn’t have changed anything. We would still need to get where we were going and we weren’t about to wait for FARC to give in to the government. All the worry in the world wouldn’t have prevented it from happening. All of this goes to show that worrying gets you nowhere. In fact, it is stifling. If you worry too much about everything that can happen, then nothing, literally nothing will happen. You will live in fear and miss out on all the wonderful things in life. As evidenced here, most of the things that can actually kill you are the things you would never even think to worry about anyway.