Can you get lost in the jungles of Cozumel

[Colibri]

@k9bfriender

I do think that some of you are underestimating just how far a mile is.

It’s a very short distance in a car. It’s not so long a distance on foot on a road.

In dense undergrowth, though, a mile is a long way. Someone said that they should be able to make 1mph. That seems optimistic for uneven ground and dense underbrush with someone who is probably exhausted.

I’ve spent a lot of time bushwhacking through scrub and low forest on small tropical islands. Yes, the going can be tough, and it might be slower than 1 mph in the worst cases, but I’ve never seen any place where I couldn’t have covered several miles in a day if I had to. (And the guy said he was resting during the heat of the day so he shouldn’t have been exhausted.)

@k9bfriender

Someone mentioned the lights of the city at night. Well, that may help him get his bearings at night, but it is still too dark to travel toward that light, so he would have to try to remember and hold that direction once the sun came up.

Walking towards the sun every morning and away from it in the afternoons (or vice versa) should have gotten him to the coast in a couple of days. It’s really not hard to determine that.

@StGermain

Aren’t most people who are lost told to sit and wait for someone to find him? I’d always hear you’re supposed to “Hug a tree”. He may have spent the first few days trying to be found, rather than trying to find his way back.

Fromthis article

Wilson said he had gotten lost because he stepped away from his group of friends when it was about noon. With the sun directly overhead, he couldn’t get his bearings. He said he had thought he was heading back toward the group when he was actually stabbing deeper into the jungle.

But if the going was actually as tough as has been claimed, he couldn’t have gotten very far.

Catherine and Douglas Goergens, who own West End Diving Centers, had gone on the trip with Wilson. After he got lost, they organized search parties and beseeched Mexican officials and U.S. legislators to keep up the hunt.

Wilson said an organization called the National Emergency Commission, financed by Mayan ranchers, had conducted most of the searches.

“The local ranchers and the land owners went out every day and beat the brush,” he said. "They would just strap on buckets of water and go out in the jungle and try to track me down, which was just about impossible.

If he stayed anywhere near where he had gotten lost he should have been found within a few days at most.