Many years ago, in a weekly newspaper called The Sunday Post, there was a regular column by a reporter known as The Hon Man. (Nobody ever figured out where he got the name, as far as I know.) One year, he went around the world interviewing ex-pat Scots. He wrote an article about his experience in Australia - again, driving to Alice Springs, but I believe he was westbound, not eastbound. About half-way there, he passed an 18-wheeler; a few hours later, his rental car engine overheated and died. Figuring there was no point in walking to Alice Springs (which was still several hours by car) and no point in walking back (as he'd been driving for several hours) he struck out cross country. After about 45 minutes, he heard voices, walked toward them, and hailed them, quite unaware that he was doing anything out of the ordinary. The ranchers, who were probably the only other human beings within 60 miles, read him the riot act and gave him some no-nonsense lectures about traveling in the desert.

The problem, I think, is that to most people from Britain, or Europe, the concept of being able to walk for an hour in any direction without encountering civilisation is more or less inconceivable. They've grown up thinking that being 5 miles from the nearest town is the back of beyond. I agree with the police sergeant who is calling for hire car agencies to provide mandatory instructions to foreign tourists in the event of breakdowns. It's too simple to chalk this up to one exceptionally stupid person; agencies whose stock-in-trade is dealing with foreign tourists have (IMO) a responsibility to understand cultural differences and how those could end up endangering their customers.

Yes, it may seem obvious to us that, if you're travelling to a foreign country, you should familiarize yourself with the local hazards, but that's not always as easy as it sounds, and in any event, the vast majority of people don't spend a great deal of time thinking about "worst case scenarios and how to handle them", as we've seen.

To take one example, a co-worker and I attended a security training conference in Baltimore some years back. There was an overhead pedestrian walkway from the rear of our hotel to the conference centre. The evening session finished rather late (it was dark, anyway) and we walked back to the hotel via the walkway. About halfway, we started feeling very uneasy - at the time, Baltimore had (I think) a fairly high crime rate, and here were we, a couple of stupid Canadian tourists, merrily walking along an unlighted overhead path with no way off except forward or back. We would have been easy pickings for any muggers who needed a quick score. But being from Canada, and moreover from a part of Canada with a rather low crime rate (at that time, anyway), we didn't think anything of it until we were at the point of "Oh s**t, maybe this wasn't such a good idea". (For those who are interested, we continued on to the hotel without incident; presumably, the reputation for street crime in US cities was exaggerated in our minds. But there's no doubt that the locals avoided unlit, empty pathways at that hour of the night and took the long way around, by the well-lighted, well-travelled main street.)