5

Why Latin America Isn’t the World’s Number One Tourist Destination and Probably Never Will Be

No place needs a good PR agency more than Latin America. For a region with so much going in its favor—food, scenery, the most hospitable locals on earth—it has a worse reputation than the Florida Division of Elections.

On the surface, stumping for Latin America might seem unnecessary. Cancún, Rio, and chalupa didn’t become household words in this country because Americans don’t love them. With about 19 million visitors a year, Mexico is the top foreign destination for American travelers.

In the murky world of travel, however, statistics rarely tell the complete story. Of the 41.3 million Hispanics living in the United States, more than half are of Mexican heritage. These people don’t just inflict loud-mouth hacks like Carlos Mencia on the public and make politicians nervous during election years, they screw up travel stats on a year-round basis. Mexican Americans and just plain old Mexicans living in America travel back and forth across the border more often than Major League scouts. Because they frequently speak the language and have family or otherwise feel comfortable traveling in a place most Americans associate with agonizing diarrhea, Mexican Americans don’t necessarily conform to the definition of “tourist” as broadly implied in statistical abstracts. Eliminate traveling Mexicans, businessmen who make the country the United States’ second-largest trading partner, condo owners, and frat boys permanently squatting at Señor Frog’s, and American tourism looks less impressive.

Falling predominantly within U.S. time zones, most of the rest of Latin America still qualifies as “undiscovered,” at least in the relative view of the travel industry. After Mexico, no Latin American country even cracks the top ten list of foreign destinations for traveling Americans. With fewer than a million visits a year, massive Switzerland sees more yanqui faces than the legendary nature preserves of Costa Rica. Despite being home to Angel Falls, the Gran Sabana wilderness, and parts of the Andes, Amazon River, and Caribbean coastline, fewer than half a million international visitors venture into the majestic Venezuelan countryside, leaving it, like most of South America, with some of the most neglected natural beauty in the world. This is in large part due to the fact that, fear being the leitmotif of all good propaganda, about 75 percent of Americans are convinced that any trip south of Texas will involve some combination of bribery, kidnapping, armed revolt, the most toxic GI diseases this side of the Congo, knives pulled in macho bar duels, and a probable colonoscopy at the border.

Conversations like the one I had with Glasser several years ago sum up the prevailing attitude many Americans have about our brethren to the south. Glasser had shown up on the West Coast vacationing with a “lady friend” whom he was keenly interested in showing a good time. He literally snorted when I suggested a drive down Mexico’s magnificent Pacific Coast.

“I’m not sure you understand.” Glasser addressed me like a Cambridge don explaining mathematics to a particularly stupid eight-year-old. “I’d like to go someplace where we can actually leave the hotel.”

I told him I’d been to Mexico and points south dozens of times and always found the paranoia of Americans to be unfounded.

“Will they let me bring my handgun across the border?” he asked.

 

Venezuela’s landscape surprised me, but the country that sealed my impression of Latin America was Panama. Though I had no interest in laying over for five hours in Houston to get there, I’d grudgingly accepted an assignment from the once L.A.-based, now defunct Escape magazine because, like all freelance writers, I live in constant fear that every job will be my last and would probably compile an oral history of jock itch if somebody paid me to do it. The three-hundred-word opus I once wrote for a weekly newspaper in Oregon previewing a Chippendale’s-like ladies-only cruise may not have been my journalistic high point, but I’m not ashamed of my decision to write it or the fifty bucks I got to do so. (Soothing factoid for struggling writers: Kurt Vonnegut began his career writing PR copy for General Electric in Schenectady, New York.)

I traveled to Panama with such low expectations—visions of a ghetto Miami, marines blasting Guns N’ Roses at Manuel Noriega outside the Vatican embassy—that anything short of a junta-backed drug war would have looked good. From the moment I paddled my dugout canoe around Panama’s palm-covered San Blas Islands, however, I knew my preconceptions of the country were as off the mark as the five-hundred-dollar bet I laid down on the Raiders to cover against Tampa Bay in Super Bowl XXXVII.

Panama was a paradise of forests, rivers, islands, and wildlife. Better still, apart from a handful of adventuresome Swedes, wealthy yachties cruising the Panama Canal, and a mild-mannered group of bird-watchers, no one was there. I encountered the birders on the outdoor deck of a bar where we watched massive ships glide like blimps through the astounding canal and debated the finer points of white-bellied antbird vs. green-rumped parrotlet. Not exactly Mary Ann vs. Ginger or even Cooler Ranch vs. Spicy Nacho, but enough of an argument to burn a good two or three minutes of small talk with strangers.

“Where are all the Americans?” I asked one of the Panamanian guides. I was staring at a toucan in a nearby tree, aware for the first time that the animal existed beyond the borders of a cereal box.

He shrugged. “They’re afraid to come here.” It was the same response I’d get at El Avila National Park in Caracas, in the Andes in Colombia, at Chapada Diamantina National Park in Brazil, amid Mayan ruins in Guatemala, along the Honduran coast, at the bottom of Copper Canyon, Mexico, and just about everywhere else in Latin America that doesn’t pump premixed margarita slushies from plastic jugs.

Since the youth of America are almost the only real tourists going to Mexico—though mainly to the party deck at Cabo Wabo—you can’t go blaming them for the mistrustful American attitudes toward Latin America. That means responsibility must be pinned on the next best scapegoat: Nicholas Trist.

Sent by President James Polk in 1848 to negotiate the end of the Mexican-American War, Trist arrived in the town of Guadalupe Hidalgo, just north of Mexico City, ready and able by all accounts to carry out his sacred duty. Notwithstanding the recent overwhelming American military victory, however, Trist failed to execute one of his most basic instructions from the Polk White House by somehow managing not to obtain an American naval outlet on the Gulf of California. Trist fouled the job so completely that he accepted, according to one historian, “such terms as Mexico might have imposed if she had won the war.” This goes to show you that the tequila they served in Mexico back in the day was every bit as lethal as it is now.

But the Mexicans didn’t leave the table smelling like a rose-scented margarita, either. This was the deal in which the United States picked up Arizona, New Mexico, parts of Colorado, Nevada, and Utah, and intellectual property rights on all future Los Lobos albums. Not to mention a little state called California, the entirety of which belonged to Mexico at the time and in which, just two weeks before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed in February 1848, a man named James Marshall discovered a lump of gold at Sutter’s Mill. Word of the California gold strike wouldn’t reach the public until March, too late by days for Mexico to make any claims to it. This piece of manifest-destiny-style Providence—or yanqui duplicity, depending on your perspective—altered the fate of North and South America, and cemented in the American psyche the idea that God put all the good parts of the continent above the Rio Grande and that anyone named Gomez, Lopez, or Chavez now had considerable justification for hating our guts.

As it loves to do when given the chance to incite nationalist paranoia, the media has ever since reinforced the idea of a corrupt, third-rate, and dangerous Latin America awash in anarchy, diseased water, and molten-blooded hotties who’ll gladly do a striptease one minute and throw a frying pan across the dining room at you the next. I’ve seen the myth created firsthand. While I was features editor there, Maxim magazine hired a writer I’ll call Peter Henderson to do a story about Coca Sek, a soft drink being manufactured and peddled by a group of Nasa Indians of Colombia. The hook was that Coca Sek was made from coca leaves—the base ingredient in cocaine—and contained trace elements of coca.

Never mind that the Nasa were using the coca as a way of preserving their indigenous heritage, that Coca Sek bore no resemblance to narcotic cocaine, and that shotgunning four consecutive bottles, as I did in a hotel room in Cali, produced approximately the same effect as downing three Snapples with a Red Bull kicker. The combination of a coke-laced beverage, the world’s kidnapping capital, and a Scarface-obsessed American public was too intoxicating for the world’s largest men’s magazine to pass up. Henderson was dispatched to Colombia. I tagged along as the magazine’s official envoy and photographer.

The Maxim staff rallied round to say good-bye in case no one ever saw us again. There was a widespread belief that “death wish” described the mental state of anyone who agreed to a trip to Colombia. Everyone figured the company brass secretly hoped Henderson and I would be kidnapped, thrown in jail, or, if things went really well, mowed down in a back-alley shootout with tin-pot drug lords. That’s why you send wide-eyed gringos to Colombia with an expense account. Either that or to trawl for mail-order brides in the destitute countryside, which is the story GQ sent a writer to Colombia to cover only a few months before the Maxim expedition.

Colombia has been a goblin in America’s imagination ever since Teddy Roosevelt stole the country’s most prized possession, the Isthmus of Panama, in 1903. The story Henderson and I returned from Colombia with echoed the timeless expectations of a trip-wire nation steeped in danger and immorality. While allowing that one had to “take the kidnapping hype with a grain of salt,” most of the piece focused on “some of the world’s most dangerous countryside,” “a land of guerrillas and cocaine lords,” “a territory flush with indiscriminate right-wing paramilitaries,” “machine-gun-infested FARC land,” and “one of the highest murder rates on the planet.” It caused a small, angry sensation in Colombia when it came out there.

Meanwhile, GQ pandered to another substratum of salacious typecasting by asking its readers to consider the possibility that the subject of its story, a thirty-eight-year-old American with a history of dating strippers who’d traveled to Colombia to exploit Third World poverty by purchasing the affection of an exclusively “model-quality” eighteen-to-twenty-two-year-old girl, wasn’t a loser. And people call Maxim a magazine for degenerates.

The problem with our story, at least, was that while none of the details were demonstrably false (in fact all were demonstrably true), they were disingenuously skewed for dramatic effect. While middle-class Americans trembling through the territory of narco-terrorist blood feuds might make for compelling copy, the larger truth was that the four days Henderson and I spent traveling through Colombia were some of the most enjoyable either of us had experienced anywhere. This from two guys with seventy or eighty passport stamps between them.

Second only to the Himalayas for mountain drama, the turbulent beauty of the Andes provided a backdrop of overwhelming grandeur. Cafés with courteous staffs served meals alive with flavor—Americans don’t realize how bland factory farms, agribusiness, and synthetic ingredients have made the food we eat. We chugged beer with friendly strangers, had lunch in an immaculate shopping mall where we met an easygoing Colombian who gave us a lift across town in his Beamer, and walked fearlessly through the nighttime streets of Cali—“home of the infamous Cali cartel,” we reminded readers, even though we saw no blow there. But who buys magazines to read that? Our readers had seen Maria Full of Grace, they knew about the latex bullets of cocaine you shit out when you come back from South America. We had expectations to meet.

Once accepted by the public at large, media-created myths such as Latino lawlessness are tough to change. The principle works on more than travel. Consider the absurd revisionism regularly reprised in the music press that’s turned Blondie’s “Rapture” into the song that introduced white America to rap music. As anyone born before 1970 knows, this is an unmitigated lie manufactured by a myopic New York press so obsessed with its own assumed position at the center of the universe that every five years or so it proclaims another middling New York rock band (Lou Reed, Blondie, the Strokes, Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs) as the bellwether of world hipsterhood. “Rapture” was released in 1981, long after the Sugarhill Gang put out “Rapper’s Delight” in 1979, a song whose lyrics I clearly recall memorizing on the floor of Tom Kollin’s bedroom in the second-whitest state in the union. (Congratulations, Utah!) By 1981, I was on to “Apache” and revolted by “Rapture”—with Debbie Harry’s “pioneering” Fab Five Freddie breakdown—even as a teenager able to recognize shoddy mimicry when I heard it. This might seem like a small-potatoes argument, but the people who care about these things measure their impact in millions of dollars and immortalizing nominations to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

The same self-fulfilling solipsism applies to the parrot-like sports media’s baseless proposition that Cal Ripken Jr. and the tainted Mark McGwire/Sammy Sosa homerun chase of 1998 “saved baseball” after the strike season of 1994 presumably raped a nation of its innocence. As though the century-and-a-half-old institution embraced by half of the planet hadn’t endured scandal and trouble with the help before. Precisely 27.6 percent of the cynicism I carry around to this day is the direct result of the 1981 baseball strike, which destroyed my “dream summer” vacation that was to have included stops at Wrigley Field (prelights) and Yankee and Dodger stadiums. Somehow the national pastime bounced back from that.

None of this, however, should imply that Latin America hasn’t earned at least part of its fearsome reputation. It’s possible to defend the region as a whole while acknowledging, for example, that among its most persistent myths, the crooked-cop shakedown endures as a legitimate symbol, perhaps just below don’t-drink-the-water, on the traveler’s anxiety scale. There’s no denying the word-of-mouth power of tourists who return from Mexico spewing tales of bravado, corruption, and near brushes with the inside of a Tijuana jail. Let the rhetorical flames die down, though, and you find the best way to cope with Latin American cops is to understand their side of the bargain.

On a road trip for Escape magazine down the entire 1,057-mile length of the Baja peninsula from the border to Los Cabos, I was pulled over at a police checkpoint outside a dusty heap of stone dwellings called Loreto. In the car with me was John May, my laid-back Texan travel companion who’d been christened Juan Mayo for the trip, partly because his superior Spanish was expected to carry us through the rural parts of our journey. The cop asked to see our tourist cards, and when we informed him that neither of us had one, he frowned, shook his head, and stroked his mustache, all time-honored methods of making Whitey squirm while a police officer who earns a few dollars a day sizes up the likely holdings of the rolling ATM before him. I’d seen something in a guidebook about tourist cards, but I hadn’t taken the warning seriously, my typical attitude toward bureaucracy being to ignore it and hope it goes away.

While four or five of his comrades smoked and fiddled with assorted Vietnam-era weaponry nearby, the officer asked Juan Mayo and me to step out of the car. We followed him across the road into a dark little concrete hut reminiscent of the bunkers and pillboxes the Germans left all over Europe in the 1940s. He motioned toward a pair of creaky wooden stools next to a desk with a battered Formica top, then took a seat across from us. Inside there were no lights, no electricity, just a pervasive smell like the bottom of a canteen.

“Traveling without a tourist card is a serious offense,” he told us. “You will have to leave Mexico immediately. The fine will be several hundred dollars. And we must seize your rental car.”

After letting the bad news sink in, he riffed some more about our regrettable lack of proper documentation, then discreetly slid a sheet of ragged notebook paper across the desk. In faint pencil, six words were scratched across the top of the yellowed page: “You help my, I help you.” John and I studied the paper like leaves in a teacup.

“We have no desire to leave Mexico, and we need our car to get to Cabo,” John said. As he spoke, he slid a pair of hundred-peso notes across the desk in more or less the same fashion the notebook paper had come to us. Without looking down, the cop returned our warm smiles. Minutes later, we were back on the road heading south.

Americans love being outraged by graft in any form, and while this sort of experience might raise a few hackles, it’s merely indicative of a more honest and efficient system of police tax than the one we have in the States. Though less transparent, the fines we pay at home for speeding and illegal parking are levied for the exact same purpose: to put food on a cop’s table. The only difference is that in the United States the money travels through a more complex apparatus—clerks, assistants, public defenders, judges, and all manner of circuit and county parasites get their cut—which is why it’s more expensive to break the law in El Paso than it is in Juarez. But a chunk of any check cashed for a violation in the States ultimately winds up right where Juan Mayo’s pesos did in Loreto—inside some policeman’s front pocket. In Mexico, they just eliminate the middleman.

 

For all the anxiety many Americans have about getting along in a foreign country, there’s another group who act as though leaving U.S. soil gives them license to behave like the First Marine Division in Fallujah. Often, visitors who run afoul of Latin justice seem to deserve it.

A few years ago, I found myself inside the bathroom of legendary frat-guy hangout Hussong’s in Ensenada taking a leak next to a swaying, sun-torched gringo named Clint who’d left his shirt behind somewhere earlier in the day.

“Pretty fucking wild place, huh?!” Clint was shouting and giving me the forty-five-degree urinal glance, enough angle for me to see the redness in his eyes and sheets of saliva flying onto the tile wall as he spoke.

“Pretty fucking wild.” I nodded in that condescending way you get around hair-trigger drunks whose good sides turn over faster than the night crew at Denny’s.

“This is my first time back to Hussong’s in twenty years! We used to drive down here from Long Beach State! Last time I was here I got thrown out with a gun pointed at my head!”

“Why’d you get thrown out?”

“I poured beer down some chick’s blouse!”

“Nice.”

“Hey, man, your manhood never leaves you, you know?”

With exaggerated effort, Clint coaxed his hog back into his pants, zipped up, and stumbled away. A couple hours later, I saw him on a busy street with a group of paunchy tourists shouting propositions at passing “mamacitas.” I don’t know if Clint spent the night in an Ensenada jail, but I wouldn’t have held it against any cop who hauled him in.

Something about Latin America encourages a lax approach to strictly legal behavior, though much of the thrill has simply to do with escaping the overcautious zeitgeist of an America in which half the population now behaves like insurance adjusters. This is, of course, one of the pleasures of leaving the United States. Forget about immigrants taking over, when did half of this country turn into nagging mothers? When the beer companies start running ads lecturing the public about responsible behavior, you sense a civilization in decline.

Latin America shares little of the stifling obsession with ticky-tack regulations that’s turned regular America into the most pussyfooted nation on earth, after Japan. In the coffee region of Panama, I rode on top the cab of a truck—eighteen workers stacked in the bed like Red Army recruits being shipped to the front—clutching the driver’s four-year-old son as we lumbered up a rutted mountain road. In Brazil, my body was lifted off the ground, the-Who-in-Cincinnati-style, by a throbbing Carnival crowd. I was carried the fifty most thrilling yards of my life and deposited in the middle of a road just in time to have my foot run over by a car actually trying to force its way through the throbbing madness. And in Mexico, I met Ernesto.

Twelve miles off the coast of Ensenada lies Isla Todos Santos, the legendary surfer’s Eden where in 1998 a madman named Taylor Knox rode a thirty-five-foot wave—fifty-two feet, according to one Baja newspaper—to capture the K2 Big Wave Challenge. I didn’t intend to mount such a wave, but returning up the Baja Peninsula with Juan Mayo, it occurred to me that the readers of Escape might feel cheated if I didn’t at least see one.

Getting to the island meant stopping in Ensenada and hanging around the marina until we found a panga to take us there. Pangas are fifteen-to-thirty-foot open skiffs with high-horsepower outboards attached. The pangeros who drive them are jacks-of-all-trades who do whatever it takes to make a living. Sometimes they dive for lobsters, sometimes they commercial fish, sometimes they hire themselves out to visiting surfers and divers and guys like me who aren’t quite sure what they’re looking for until they find it. The best pangeros get snatched up by fishermen at daybreak. By the time Juan Mayo and I arrived at the docks, all but one were gone for the day.

“She is very fast,” Ernesto said, bragging about the 125-horsepower Evinrude attached by two rusty bolts to the back of his panga, the Slayamahi II.

John and I handed over a fistful of pesos and hopped in. Ernesto yanked the engine to life, manfully revved the throttle, flashed a wicked two-teeth-missing smile at the black exhaust filling the air, popped open a can of Tecate, sparked up a doobie, and offered us a hit. All before we’d cleared the marina. If there were any “No Wake in the Harbor” signs, we were moving too fast to see them.

Out in open water, the six-foot Pacific swells might have kept a lesser man from demonstrating the electrifying capacity of the engine. But Slayamahi II was soon ripping along at sixty miles per hour, bucking whitecaps, tilting sideways like a Busch Gardens vomit-launcher, and slamming our asses into the bench seats until all four cheeks were bruised. Twice, I was nearly thrown from the boat. After the third time, John swung around to face me with a look of mangled terror and ecstasy.

“We were totally airborne on that last one!” he roared, not realizing that his death hold on the gunwales was producing a set of blisters that would prevent him from gripping anything but a frosty beer for the next two weeks. I shrieked at Ernesto.

“Are these boats supposed to fly completely out of the water?”

“Not supposed to, not not supposed to. Sometime happens!”

We rammed the chop dead-on, and once more the boat floated into the air for a weightless, pregnant second. Ernesto’s oily baseball cap flew off, revealing a bald skull filled with dents, scars, and erratic patches of hair. While I was recoiling from this unexpected sight, all twenty feet of the hull smacked into a swell, rocking us hard starboard. The boat took on about forty gallons of water before Ernesto righted us with a crazy swerve, dumping most of the water back over the port side. The guy had talent; no one could take that away from him. I wheeled my head around to see land slipping into a distant horizon. Ernesto opened another Tecate.

“Does any of this make you wonder what happened to Slayamahi I?” John screamed over the din of the motor as Ernesto sped us farther out to sea.

In fact, I hadn’t considered the good ship Slayamahi’s predecessor until John brought it up. Until then, most of my thoughts had been about staying alive, being thankful I was working for the nontraditional Escape, and writing off the possibility of reselling my story anywhere else. Death rides in the open sea with shit-faced daredevils at the helm don’t line up with the vision most newspapers and magazines expect out of travel writers returning from Mexico.²

 

Latin America’s liberal approach to individual rights and laissez-faire stance regarding personal safety and corporate responsibility can be exhilarating, but it also works against the region’s aspirations as a mass travel destination. Americans have grown accustomed to stifling government regulation and control. Any suspension of these by business or large public institutions leads to sort of a neurotic leeriness. Leeriness leads to mistrust and fear. Even so, dicey as it can be in places, the fact that approximately 500 million men, women, and children live, eat, work, and go to school, church, and the market in Latin America suggests a stable and mature culture where it’s actually pretty easy to get through a day without being killed, maimed, robbed, or disfigured by a runaway panga.

A little caution does keep us on our toes abroad, of course, and probably saves lives. Or at least prevents injury and illness. Common sense and a well-honed surrender instinct also come in handy, as I discovered at the check-out desk of the worst hotel in which I ever spent a night.

Following the advice of a pair of Carnival drunks in Salvador, I’d endured refrigerator-sized potholes, a broken fan belt, and vulture-baiting temperatures on an eight-hour drive through a landscape of cactus and dust to a Brazilian backwater called Paulo Afonso. The gritty outpost, I’d been promised, was the launch point for a fascinating cruise down a mighty Amazon rival called Rio São Francisco. The river existed—muddy and emphatically non-Amazonian—but the boat trip didn’t. Paulo Afonso was little more than a series of confounding traffic circles, closed restaurants, and asphalt soccer fields.

Hellish drives and wasted days chasing down bad tips, however, are part of the travel writer’s lot. In reasonably good humor, I scarfed a bag of stale potato chips and checked into the regally named Hotel Monarch, a freshly painted two-story job that looked like the town’s only decent place to stay.

At one in the morning, I stirred in half sleep with a foggy realization that I’d been intermittently scratching at my left leg for the past hour. In the darkness, I clawed at it some more and tried to get back to sleep, but eventually wondered if something beyond just filthy sheets was irritating my legs. I rolled across the mattress, flicked on a light, threw back the blanket, and gagged the way you do when you take a blind swig from a cup expecting water and instead get a mouthful of milk or warm beer.

An army of ants so dense that it formed a garment of solid black was crawling through the canyons between my toes, investigating each stem of hair around my ankles, and engulfing my calves on an industrious march northward. Across the room, a reconnaissance in force was patrolling every cranny of my open pack. It was a green bag and my clothes were the usual hodgepodge of colors, but, like my legs, the bag and its contents had become a black organ of pulsing legs, thoraxes, gasters, heads, and antennae.

My ensuing convulsion of kicking, swatting, and swearing must have triggered little ant pheromones because the alarming though as yet nonhostile swarm began biting me with remarkable ferocity. I cursed in anger and pain, but efforts to wipe the ants off of my legs merely relocated more intrepid units to my hands and arms. Where I come from ants are pretty easy to deal with, but on the horn of South America, it takes more than girlish screams and a heavy shoe to repel them.

Picking up my bag along the way, I charged into the shower and said a hasty prayer (“Please, God, make it work”) to the rusty handle. My first stroke of luck of the day—the ants couldn’t cling against the torrent. The hot water even lasted a couple of minutes. I spent the next hour in and out of the cold shower rinsing clothes and soaping myself as dry as the surrounding sertão. Every time I thought the enemy had been vanquished, I’d towel off and crawl back into bed, only to be attacked anew. In a moment of inspiration, I popped open a can of Coke and poured a large puddle in a far corner of the floor, imagining this would divert the horde. Instead, an entirely new stream of six-legged soldiers issued forth from a crack in the baseboard to lap up the sweet icon of American commercial dominion.

That I finished the night in that room is a testament to how bad rural Brazilian roads are and how closed the Monarch’s reception desk was after midnight. In alternating rounds, I showered, stood sentry, dozed fitfully, and battled an insect brigade as relentless as the Chinese at Chosin. At six in the morning, I fled.

Just coming on duty, the front-desk clerk received my complaints with an emotion that somehow conveyed both apathy and hostility. I’d spent the night working up a convincing speech justifying my refusal to pay the bill and had imagined delivering it to one of the welcoming female Carnival types I’d run across all over Salvador. I hadn’t anticipated a sullen brute behind the counter who looked exactly like the kind of guy they send back for second and third rounds of training at company customer-relations workshops. Rather than fight the good fight, I sized up the scowling clerk, bowed my head, forked over the thirty dollars, and trudged out the door into the already bright Brazilian sunshine.

Life isn’t perfect below the border; I’d known that going in. But sometimes you just have to have faith that you’ve brought enough nerve to deal with the unexpected, enough cash to make more friends than enemies, and enough perspective to judge a place for what it is rather than for what you’ve heard it’s supposed to be.