Willy Trolove: Our cabbies have a lot to learn about adventure rides

Forget jumping off a bridge with a rubber band strapped to your feet, or leaping out of a plane with a parachute instructor strapped to your back. Forget jetboats, white-water rafts and council meetings with Banksie. If you want an adrenalin rush, think taxis.

Our taxi drivers have a lot to learn when it comes to scaring the insides out of their passengers. The taxi ranks of Bangkok, Beijing and Bombay are full of Class A lunatics trained to terrorise their passengers to the edge of that loose-rocked precipice above hell's bubbling tar-pots.

If New Zealand wants to be an adventure-tourism mecca, our drivers must follow their lead, and drive more recklessly.

I propose urgent legislation. Our cabbies should be dispatched to third-world mega-cities for off-season training. The best of them will graduate to Cairo, the Top Gun Fighter School of taxi-driving.

My nearest-to-death experience came on Cairo's dusty streets en route to the pyramids. With me was Don, a lobsterman from California, and Tracey, a champion haggler from somewhere out the back of New South Wales.

Our trip started well. Tracey negotiated a price for the ride that would, according to the taxi driver, bankrupt his family and doom the grandchildren of his grandchildren to wash in the dung of camels.

He made us pay for our low fare. At first we thought he was weaving through the traffic to demonstrate how well he could control the taxi if he happened to lose a wheel, the brakes or his mind. We soon realised that he had lost one of those already. We approached an intersection. The light was red. Thoughtlessly, a truck and a bus had come to a halt in front of us. Instead of slowing down or - as is the usual custom - stopping, the driver steered our taxi through the narrow ravine of death separating them, and we shot across the intersection.

Our collective intake of breath between clenched teeth was matched by an insistent sharpening in the groin.

This only encouraged the driver. As soon as we were through the intersection and onto a straight piece of traffic-choked road, he sped up so that we were travelling at least three times as fast as anyone else.

The traffic ahead was unaware of the suicidal tendencies of our driver. Cars, buses and trucks stopped abruptly or changed lanes without warning to dodge children, papyrus salesmen or camels. Our driver took this as an excuse to go even faster. He carved out the narrowest path between each obstacle by swerving, braking and then accelerating, exposing his passengers to g-forces not normally experienced outside the Space Shuttle programme.

He took all reasonable steps to protect our safety by occasionally tooting the horn.

Instead of putting a halt to this madness, the traffic policemen waved the taxi through and grinned like brides after the third glass of Lindauer. Here was a driver they could respect - a man single-handedly tackling Cairo's traffic congestion.

We were not so impressed. The gap between our speeding taxi and the almost stationary traffic was so narrow that you couldn't pass wind through it.

In the front seat, Don - usually as laid back as, well, a Californian - didn't know whether to wail in despair or bail out on an inside curve. In the back, Tracey and I were as happy as crash-test dummies in a side-impact demonstration. We gasped. We cringed. We wept. We would have clung to our seatbelts but there weren't any. We clung to each other instead.

The inattention of our driver was distressing. Only sparingly did he look at the road. His hands spent more time under the dashboard searching for a cassette tape of Greatest Ever Belly-Dancing Hits than they did on the steering wheel.

As we swerved around a truck parked across two lanes, he fumbled for a cigarette with one hand, lit it with the other, and turned around to smile at us.

It was an act. It had to be. Either our man was a stunt driver or the taxi was being driven by remote control. There is no other way to explain how we could pass so close to so many things without hitting any of them.

The final dash down Al-Harem (Pyramids Road) was so nerve-racking that it felt like the mine-train chase in the closing scenes of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

But somehow we made it alive. We spilled out of the taxi like Jonahs delivered from the whale, and with one breath solved the mystery of the pyramids. These mountains of stone were built to help the Egyptians cheat death - no wonder they were so bloody afraid of it.

Now imagine if New Zealand's taxi drivers had that kind of effect on their passengers.