Roving Gastronome — Food and travel writing by Zora O'Neill

My brother, Casey McFarland, is in Chile right now. He’s a wildlife tracker and the author of Bird Feathers: A Guide to North American Species which is released today. In Chile, he’s supposed to be tracking mountain lions, though it sounds a lot more like he’s taking 20-mile hikes in armpit-deep snow and seeing everything but mountain lions.

I’m a little hazy on the details because I’m a city mouse; Casey’s a country mouse. It’s very thoughtful that Casey thought to put his wilderness experience in Chile in even terms I could understand. He sent me this photo:

He writes:

super rad little place on the “highway” from coyaique to cochrane- a 300 km stretch of rutted, potholed dirt road through the mountains.

run by a really nice gal- a wood stove and the griddle heats the place… two buses welded together. she made a mean “churasco completo” which is the chilean hamburger, more or less. but it’s just a big slab of meat on pan, with mashed avocados, sliced tomatoes and a little mayo (or sickeningly massive amounts if you’re not careful). pretty damn good.

spring seems to be here- some flamingos showed up the other day- funny to see them standing in the bleary, high grassland mountain lakes with snow covered peaks all around.

Funny, that’s exactly what I thought about the bus–something so tropically colored in a totally wrong environment, like it took a hard left somewhere in Colombia and just eventually got stuck in that snowbank.

Casey’s still in Chile, even as Bird Feathers: A Guide to North American Species is released. Spread the word to all your birder friends!

He and his co-author worked insanely on it–there are some great candid shots of them elbow-deep in feathers at the book website.

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I was dismayed to check the news today and see headlines about a bar getting bombed in Cancun–this is tragic, no matter what. My additional worry was that some nightclub full of tourists has been blown up. But it’s not the case. The bar, the Castillo del Mar, is well out of any area tourists would go.

Here’s a Google map I made. The approximate location of the bar is marked in red. Tourist zones are highlighted in green. Even my very adventurous app guide to Cancun doesn’t go farther than these green areas.

View Cancun bar bombing in a larger map

The bombing apparently had something to do with organized crime, and it hit staff, not customers. Of course this doesn’t mean a complete guarantee of safety for tourists, but it is extremely unlikely a tourist would get hurt in Cancun, and no one should change their travel plans based on this event.

I’m especially peeved about the news item on Momento 24, which calls the Castillo del Mar a “bar of tourists,” which is patently not the case. Fox News is almost is bad, because it IDs Cancun as a “resort area” and never explains where the bar is. And surprisingly, BBC is also flaky, as it never locates the bar either.

CNN is much more responsible, as it explains the location of the bar.

And the Diario de Yucatan coverage (the moderate Merida paper, the biggest in the region) doesn’t mention tourists at all!

MSNBC initially reported that the bar was in a tourist area (Twitter post was “Mexico Violence in Tourist Area of Cancun”), but issued an update on Twitter later and posted an updated story.

UPDATE: Per a comment below and several online news sources (including a corrected Diario de Yucatan story), I’ve moved the location of the bar. Guess what? It’s even farther from possible tourist zones.

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