Robinson Diaz lives in a small cottage high in the Andes Mountains of South America. Diaz is a "cable racer", and every morning he faces the difficult task of taking the local teacher to her school. To do this, he first walks for an hour up to a place the locals call Los Pinos, right at the edge of the 400-foot deep gorge of the Negro valley. Here, one end of a thick metal cable has been fixed to a wooden post. The cable stretches right across the deep valley to the other side, a kilometer away. A metal hook is fixed to the cable, with leather straps hanging from it. Diaz fastens the straps around his shoulders and waist, does a quick safety check and then, without hesitating, throws himself off the edge of the mountain. Attached to the cable by only the metal hook, he rapidly picks up speed and soon he is racing through the air. Crossing the valley by wire takes him 30 seconds, instead of the two hours it would take him to walk down through the rain forest and climb up the steep muddy slopes on the other side. As Diaz begins his trip, Diana Rios, a 23-year-old elementary teacher, is waiting on the other side of the gorge for the moment when he will come racing through the mist towards her at 100 mph. She will then return with him, hanging on to him as he goes back along the cable. Diana had no idea when she took the teaching job that just getting to work in the village school would be dangerous. "At first I wanted to cry," she says, clutching her hook as the metal cable starts to rattle  violently at Diaz's approach. "But I soon got used to it." She still prefers to go with Diaz, though, rather than making the frightening and dangerous crossing on her own. For the inhabitants of Los Pinos, the wire cable is a lifeline. For more than 50 years, it has served the community as a form of transport to and from the rest of the world. Everything that comes arrives via the cable----bricks and wood for building, sacks of rice and corn. Pregnant mothers, who must get to the nearest clinic, cross the wire during the darkness of the night, returning with their newborn babies. It is dangerous, but they have no choice. This time Robinson Diaz makes a perfect landing on Diana's side of the gorge. For him, the dangers of this daily journey are insignificant. "What I'm really scared of are snakes," he says. "This is nothing in comparison." Then Dianna straps herself into her harness and hooks herself up to the wire behind Diaz, holding on to him tightly. He turns, flashes her a smile, releases the brake and kicks away. Within seconds, the teacher and the cable-racer have disappeared back into the mist. What does Diaz say about using the cable?
He does not find it as frightening as other things. He does not think there is any risk. He is happy that he can help the teacher. He is worried about the danger of snakes