COLUMN: Venturing into the World outside the Gates

By Tobin Barnes
We’ve been lolling in the lap of luxury for a couple days now, ever since our flight into Los Cabos, Mexico, and our desperate escape from the freak show at the airport.

Once ensconced, things in this vacationer’s paradise are much better than we had expected. In the mornings, we walk for miles on the pristine sandy beach and, in the afternoons, sit around the pool with the swells who can actually afford all this on a regular basis. (Can they tell we’re from the South Dakota branch of the Clampett family? Maybe, but our room’s just as nice as theirs. Har!)

The army-sized resort staff jumps and almost runs into each other whenever we change positions in our beach chairs, seemingly always in a bother about what more they can do for us.

“So, you’re living like a big-ga shot-ta!” my Italian grandfather would say...if I had an Italian grandfather.

But since I don’t, I’ll tell you what my old man would say if he were still alive: “Champagne appetite on a beer salary, huh?”

And he’d be exactly right.

We could almost get used to this, the high life of wealthy, pasty-faced gringos, but that won’t happen since it takes a long time to accumulate the points we’ve used to stake this, our don’t-get-used-to-it place in the sun.

Other vacationers around us probably just took the funds out of petty cash. What’s big to us is probably small to them. (One thing that always astounds me when I travel is how much money there is beyond the humble confines of South Dakota.)

So we’re rubbing shoulders with the well-to-do, trying to act like it’s no big deal getting pampered.

However, small pangs of guilt, but only occasionally, cross our minds when we think about the overly indulgent digs we’re inhabiting or when we think of how needy the staff must be to work so hard to cadge a few bucks in tips here and there.

But then, what can WE do to solve the world’s problems midway through a vacation? After all, what should we do about such inequality, go home? Protest this excessive luxury by rejecting it? Such would amount to a drop in the bucket, wouldn’t it?

Or should we tip these poor people as much as we ourselves can afford? Which, admittedly, isn’t much.

These distressing pangs, I’ll have to admit to my regret, though considered, don’t last long amidst the balmy breezes.

But they were more evident the day before on our trip into town. Then we were rubbing shoulders not with rich gringos, but with the hard-working locals.

Well aware of costs we actually had to pay, we had decided to ride the local bus ten miles into Cabo San Lucas rather than take a taxi the way well-funded vacationers do. It saved us about forty-some bucks, despite the advice of the bellhop: “You might want to take a taxi. Those buses get crowded.”

And indeed they do.

The bus stop was outside the gates of the resort, beside a racetrack of a highway. We waited 15 minutes, trying not to get sucked into the backwash of some insanely high-speed traffic—people drive around here like they’re Jeff Gordon in the Darlington 500. But then the bus arrived and we were on our way, but standing up and hanging on.

Yeah, all the seats were taken. As many people were hanging on for dear life, just like us, as were sitting. The genial, smiling faces of the locals, who happily served as members of the resort staff, was replaced by the now impassive faces of laborers going to or getting off from a hard day’s work.

As we rode along, we caught glimpses of the dusty and humbly small, non-resort habitations of the local population—places where the people on this bus lived. It was their relatively inexpensive labor that enabled paradise-like conditions enjoyed by Mr. and Mrs. Gotbucks at the resorts.

From people we talked to, a vast majority of the workers had come from other parts of Mexico to find what were considered well-above average jobs in Los Cabos. So, I guess, rich and poor were both getting a good deal here, though when I thought about it—occasionally—it all seemed a little lopsided.