In Taunton, Chorley, Northwich, Maidenhead and North London, five families are contemplating a sudden and inexpressible loss. In the coastal Ecuadorean town of Puerto López, the young mothers for whom 17 young Britons were going to help to build a crèche have been told that they will not be coming after all. In the universities to which some of the victims of Sunday's bus crash planned to go in September, there will be vacancies instead of young women with horizons broadened and lives immeasurably enriched by their travels.

This was, as Robin Logie said soon after learning of the death of his daughter, Rebecca, an accident. The sum of grief it has caused would have been no different had the victims been from the next village. Yet there is something especially poignant about accidents in which fate seems to punish endeavour. Rebecca Logie, Indira Swann, Elizabeth Pincock and Emily Sadler were “gap-year students”. There is nothing wrong with the label, but in the circumstances it trivialises what they were doing. Far from home, barely conversant in the local language, they had seized a chance to answer three deeply human yearnings: for knowledge, self-knowledge and to see the world. That they were also powerfully motivated to help others only accentuates the sense of wasted potential left by their deaths.

These four, and Sarah Howard, their guide, have not yet been laid to rest. But a fierce practical debate about the rights and wrongs of gap-year travel has already been resumed. Is this peculiarly British phenomenon peculiarly dangerous? Are parents, travel companies and the travellers themselves doing enough to mitigate the risks? The blunt truth is that one appalling crash on the road to Puerto López does not change any of the answers.

Gap-year travel entails risks that no amount of planning or pre-paid insurance can or should eliminate. This is partly a reflection of the youth and inexperience of those setting out with bold itineraries and hard-earned savings (or, in a decreasing proportion of cases, with parental handouts). It is chiefly a reflection of the nature of the world - which will always be risky, for the careless as for the desperately unlucky, but no less worth exploring for that.

In the aftermath of the Ecuadorean tragedy pressures will mount, on parents and their children, to stick with experienced specialist travel companies when planning gap-year activities. At the same time some universities are actively discouraging science and medical students from taking time off after school for fear that they will forget the finer points of calculus. Statistically, a package mixing adventure travel and volunteer work, such as that offered by VentureCo in Ecuador, will probably remain the safest way for students to visit such countries. Going straight to higher education without straying beyond Folkestone might be even safer. But a gap year's true value to the student is as an exercise in independence. Its true value to universities and employers is as a rite of passage, not merely a long holiday. From it, teenagers can return as young adults, worldlier than when they left but also more engaged with the world and aware of their potential roles in it.

The tragedy that cut short these five lives is already profound. It would only be compounded, as the father of one of the victims has bravely noted, if others were dissuaded from embarking on adventures as a result.