Tequila Oil: Getting Lost In Mexico

by HughThomson (Author)

• Used

  Illustrated
  2010

  $3.25

  'Try this tequila oil, Hugito. Just as the alcohol hits your stomach, the chilli will as well and blow it back into your brain. It will take your head off.' Explorer Hugh Thomson takes on Mexico.

  It's 1979, Hugh Thomson is eighteen, far from home, with time to kill - and on his way to Mexico. When a stranger tells him there's money to be made by driving a car over the US border to sell on the black market in Central America, Hugh decides to give it a go.

  Throwing himself on the mercy of Mexicans he meets or crashes into, Hugh and his Oldsmobile 98 journey through the region, meeting their fate in the slums of Belize City.

  Thirty years on, Hugh returns - older but not necessarily wiser - to complete his journey.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2009

  $3.25

  An account of Hugh Thomson's first wild adventure in Mexico, which ignited his love for Latin America, and of his subsequent exploration of the country, its people and its history. Tequila Oil reveals a much more dangerous side of Mexico than that seen by the package holiday-makers, taking the reader from the badlands of Chihuahua to the forests of the Yucatan; the book ends deep in the Mexican jungle, face to face with one the most enigmatic and least understood cultures on the planet, the Maya, with a sense of humility at how little we still know about the pre-Columbian past. Just as in The Motorcycle Diaries, by throwing himself on the kindness, hospitality and mercy of the Mexicans he met (or crashed into), Hugh was given an unusual and peculiarly vulnerable insight into Mexico. He returns many years later with a deeper understanding and the ability to explore the deep roots of pre-Columbian culture within Mexican life and to see how much archaeologists have revealed about the Maya and the Aztecs in just the last few years.