The only time I really, really thought I was going to die.
I've done a whole bunch of adrenaline-sport-type nonsense involving bungie ropes, snowboards, paragliders and kitesurfers (not all at the same time), but the most terrified I've ever been was in a minibus.

Mid '90s. Me and five other blokes - two mates of mine and three of their mates who I didn't know - were on a week's hols in Majorca. Suntan, beer and birds was the plan, and so far, it was going well. I had, against all odds and reason, pulled the night before, but we'd booked the minibus rental so we were GOING on a trip round the island, driven by the only one of us old enough to drive the bus - a guy named Chris. All was fine as we drove up the east coast, all was fine as we headed into the mountains in the north. Then we stopped for a drink and saw the postcards for a place called Torrente de Pareils, which looked impressive, and from the shop/cafe we could see the sign pointing down the road. "Thattaway" was agreed, so we piled into the bus and got moving. Mistake.

Straight line distance from the junction to the pretty little coastal village of Sa Calobra is less than three miles. What we didn't realise was that in those three miles there was:
(a) a vertical drop of several thousand feet
(b) about sixty hairpin bends with huge drops off the side
(c) roads so narrow there was barely room for one vehicle, let alone two
(d) at least six burned out remains of vehicles that had clearly recently failed to negotiate the above and had fallen to their fiery deaths off the side of the road and into the chasms beneath.

Add to that Chris's unfailing enthusiasm, annoying laugh, and tendency to turn round and tell bad jokes to the rest of us instead of looking at the road, and I really, honestly, thought I was going to die. I was sitting in that bus thinking "I pulled last night. I am definitely on for another go tonight... but it's never going to happen, because I am going to die in the wreckage of this bus with this cockney w****r probably still bloody braying like a donkey as I breath my last." And I was in the middle row of the bus, and in relatively good spirits compared to the two guys in the back, who if me and another bloke weren't in the way would probably have killed Chris with their flipflops and thrown him in the sea.

Obviously we made it down to the coast - alive, but not undamaged, Chris managed to crash into a coach (a COACH!) that was coming the other way.

A couple of years ago I went back there, and this time drove myself. I wondered if I was perhaps in my memory exaggerating how scary the road was. I wasn't. On the way back up out of the place, people were stopping to take pictures of where, presumably within the last week or two, a seventy seater luxury coach had gone over one of the cliffs as it tried to negotiate the road, and having fallen "only" fifty feet or so was still clearly visible, upside down in a tree still a couple of hundred feet from the rocks beneath, held where it had stopped by webbing straps presumably put there by some sort of salvage crew.
(SonofRojBlake, Tue 10 Apr 2012, 12:43, Reply)