{"id":88,"date":"2005-11-05T08:16:39","date_gmt":"2005-11-05T13:16:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/?p=88"},"modified":"2008-04-19T10:08:37","modified_gmt":"2008-04-19T18:08:37","slug":"lost-in-the-wilds-of-mexico","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/index.php\/2005\/11\/05\/lost-in-the-wilds-of-mexico\/","title":{"rendered":"Lost in the wilds of Mexico"},"content":{"rendered":"

Much wilder than the guy expected, it turned out. <\/a>
\n

The link is to a New York Times review of a book called “Trail of Feathers, Searching for Philip True,” by Robert Rivard. True was a reporter for the San Antonio Express-News who adored Mexico and its people. <\/p>\n

True developed a passion for the outdoors and a fascination with Mexico and the Spanish language. A nonstop talker, he was socially fearless. On his road trips, he never booked a motel room. He assumed, usually correctly, that he would meet people along the way who would put him up. “You’re too paranoid, you need to trust people,” he told a girlfriend who went along on one of his trips. “You can always work things out.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In 1998, True decided to take a hundred-mile hike deep into the Sierra Madre to meet the members of an obscure Indian tribe called the Huichol. <\/p>\n

\nTrue miscalculated badly. His romanticized notion of the Huichols did not allow for their extreme suspiciousness of outsiders. Travelers generally applied for permission to enter a village and almost always came with a Huichol guide. True had often run into danger on the road, but had always been able to talk his way out of it. This time he couldn’t.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What happened was: they killed him. The book is the story of his editor at the San Antonio paper, who dug up his reporter’s body with his bare hands and spent the time since then trying to bring the killers to justice. You know, in Mexico, where the justice system is without peer.
\n

The story caught my eye because it was so similar to what happened to a co-worker of mine three newspapers back. He wasn’t merely visiting one of the most dangerous coca-cultivation regions of Peru, he was going around with a camera and notebook talking to people. The guys who abducted him didn’t believe he was really a reporter for an American newspaper. They thought he was DEA and strangled him, presumably because the local drug lords had put a bounty on the heads of any DEA agents found in the region.
\n

What’s this got to do with hiking? Mostly, it’s about being mindful of local custom in a foreign land. Other journalists visited that dangerous Peruvian valley and came back alive because they traveled with the protection of the local authorities. My co-worker opted to go it alone — I’m sure he was getting a great story right up the moment the torture began.
\n

Anyway, words to the wise: If you’re going someplace dangerous, the key to survival is finding out how others have done it, and following their advice. (I realize how obvious this advice sounds; what’s amazing is how many people don’t follow it).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Much wilder than the guy expected, it turned out. The link is to a New York Times review of a book called “Trail of Feathers, Searching for Philip True,” by Robert Rivard. True was a reporter for the San Antonio…<\/p>\n

Read the whole thing<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[39],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}