Surviving holidays (mostly) intact

LAST December, a group of nine friends were on a minibus in Phuket, Thailand, when the vehicle collided with a motorcycle at high speed before swerving off-road and plunging into a pile of sand.

As smoke streamed from the bonnet, they were extricated and taken to the hospital just in time.

All survived by dint of chance - the outcome could have been graver had the van hit a tree or a house, or else exploded.

I was one of the nine victims.

The crash brought home the realisation that mishaps, when they occur, swoop in suddenly, randomly and unexpectedly - and they are not uncommon.

Just last month, another group of nine Singaporeans were also on a minibus that crashed - this time in New Zealand. The van careened off the highway and plunged down an embankment. Two passengers were airlifted to hospital.

There have been other, fatal cases. With Singaporeans making more trips abroad, the chances of everyone staying safe all of the time can be less likely.

This is not a call to stay at home. But before leaving, precautions that can prevent a bad situation from slipping into a worse one should be taken:

Travel insurance
The cost of this is negligible considering that medical and hospitalisation bills can run into the thousands, as it was for myself and some of my fellow passengers.

Getting the best treatment available - a key consideration when one is hurt in places with widely uneven levels of medical care - costs. Insurance offers peace of mind. Keep the contact number of the insurer and the insurance policy number on your body.

Embassy contacts
If you are hapless and distressed in a foreign land, it makes sense to let the nearest consular authorities know - they have the experience of helping many Singaporeans before you.

After the crash, my friends and I were taken to different village hospitals. The Singapore Embassy in Bangkok helped us circumvent the language barrier by calling the hospital staff on our behalf to find out how everyone was doing.

Later on, they linked us up with Silkair so we could depart on short notice upon being discharged from hospital.

So keep the phone number of the nearest Singapore diplomatic office with you - and register with the Foreign Affairs Ministry before leaving home.

Other measures one can take include:
* Noting the local emergency services numbers.

* If language can be a barrier, having the contacts of locals in the country who can converse in your language and theirs can come in useful.

* Keeping a spare phone, extra mobile phone batteries or a mobile phone charger on you. In the chaos that follows a mishap, it may take a while before you find a power point. In any case, a power socket is useless if one has been separated from the charger and travel adaptor in the luggage. This was the case for my friends and I.

Here or abroad, life is full of what-ifs, so it is impossible to create an exhaustive list of everything that can be done should things go wrong.

But if they do - and when they do - a mastery of what we can control can mitigate the fall-out of what we can't.