I am not a natural cynic but after reading the account of a Dutch lady’s 18 day ordeal in the Nerja mountains (today’s El Pais) I am unconvinced of its truthfulness. Mary-Anne Goosens was ‘trapped between crags’ after clambering in to it.
She wasn’t disabled or injured. She told hikers who found her and offered to help her out of the gulley she was too weak to do so. I presume they wouldn’t have offered had they not thought she was capable of doing so. Maybe she was weak after 18 days she says she was in there but it takes fortitude to live in the open for so long without food; that fortitude had deserted her when the option to climb out was much less arduous.
She was 'self sufficient enough to survive' and knew a few survival tricks but on the other hand she had behaved like an irresponsible child by breaking every rule in the book. Not telling anyone she was setting out; the usual advice.
She had a helicopter ride home. She refused to talk with the media until she got to Holland. There her children had set up a Press conference. Would local Spanish journalists be far more familiar with such predicaments and have been a little too inquisitive? I can smell a book coming out of this one.