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[OM] Re: What's up with the OM list? It's gone strange and insular.

Subject: [OM] Re: What's up with the OM list? It's gone strange and insular.
From: "Wayne Culberson" <waynecul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2006 10:15:02 -0300
jmac wrote
> I'm preparing to go to Peru and Bolivia in the
> spring and the list of warnings about dangerous criminal assault potential
> is quite long.

I've been going to Bolivia on a fairly regular basis for 11 years, and will 
probably be going again soon. Things have changed there a lot in the time 
I've been going. In the cities, be very cautious. A friend and I had one 
serious deliberate attempt on our lives, by a driver of a bus. Just be very 
careful in the cities. The most dangerous weapons you'll encounter there 
have 4 wheels, seriously! And they don't have to answer for it. The smaller 
weapons are also becoming much more common in crime in the cities. But for 
the most part, the people are great, and very friendly. And the photography 
opportunities are really great!

>As always, you are entitled to your opinion. If you lived
> where grizzly bears or wolves might jump your bones, you might carry a
> weapon too. /jmac

We don't have wolves or grizzly bears, but we do have coyotes and black 
bears. I don't think the coyotes here are very dangerous. I put a picture on 
my site of a little one I saw yesterday. Black bears, generally speaking, 
aren't very dangerous either. However, from someone who has hunted them, and 
has been close to quite a few in the wild even when not hunting them, they 
are not to be taken for granted. I encountered one in May of 1988 or '89 
(can't remember for sure) that weighed a bit over 400 pounds, just out of 
hibernation, and I'm quite certain I would have been dead, had I not had a 
certain object in my hands with which to defend myself. Thankfully I still 
have my head on my shoulders, while his is on the wall. That experience 
definitely changed my attitude toward them a bit, as before that I'd always 
heard and believed they were always afraid of humans. Well, now I know, "Not 
Always". There have been at least two other occasions with black bears that 
I'm glad I had the option of self-defense, and one more occasion I was 
really wishing I had it, but as is usually the case, it wasn't needed in the 
end.

Thankfully, I've never had an experience like our list-mom described.

Wayne


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