Nervous Nellie vs. Mr. Wing-It

When the bus finally came, I bumbled on with my duffel and backpack. Old men reached up to help me with the bags. Young girls smiled, patting the seats next to them. "Hola." "Gracias." It was a bath of Mexican goodwill. I tried to relax, but questions niggled the Nervous Nellie inside me as we rattled up the highway on a Saturday afternoon toward Rincon de Guayabitos. It would be weekend, high season, in a hopping tourist beach town. Would there be room at the inn? Or would we end up in some cockroach-infested room with sagging mattresses, stained sheets and a view of the town dump?

Couldn't we just, like, call ahead?

I love planning trips. Browsing online on a gray winter day, I picture myself swinging in a hammock in the exotic Mexican garden spa found on Hotels.com, or catching the warmth of first morning sun through the arched windows of the cliffside condo on Vacation Rentals by Owner.

That's fantasyland to Bob. He likes his investigations on-site, eyeball to keyhole, and that's what we did after we stepped off the bus in Rincon, into the hotel zone. Boy, was I wrong. "Si Vacantes" signs were everywhere along the oceanfront. Nellie had a home for the night.

Our unit at Bungalows Anai, recommended in the guide, wasn't cheap for Mexico -- about $75 a night -- and it wasn't fancy. The light fixtures were crooked, the refrigerator rusted, the faucets oxidized and the glasses chipped. But the place was clean, with air conditioning and fans, and we had a nice view across a manicured garden and a pool to the busy beach, where vendors pedaled bicycle carts full of inflatable water toys and skewered shrimp, and volleyball players set and spiked. Water-bike hot-doggers made roostertails in the surf, the machine whine mingling with the tinkle of ice cream carts and the distant buh-boom of rap blasting from trucks cruising the main drag.

If Sayulita was Laguna Beach, this was Coney Island. We were soon longing for seclusion, peace and quiet.

Bob pulled out his Lonely Planet guide, and his finger drifted north to Chacala, a fishing town on a cup of a bay surrounded by jungle. It was tiny, a speck, a guidebook paragraph -- so remote it didn't even merit a turn-off sign on the main highway. I was convinced we didn't have a chance at finding an empty room. And that's when I sneaked onto the computer in a Rincon Internet cafe and got busted.

Bob looked at me with a mix of sympathy and disgust. He may have used the word "cheater."

Contrite, I clocked off the computer, waved down a taxi and away we rumbled, leaving behind the buh-boom and blow-up beach toys and heading north into the lush groves of mango and jackfruit that crawled up the sides of an ancient boulder-strewn volcano overlooking remote Chacala Bay.

Six miles off the main highway, the taxi dropped us off on the dirt road serving as Chacala's main drag, in front of a deeply tanned couple who looked bemused when I asked them, a bit anxiously, if there was anywhere to stay in the town.

They pointed at the cobbled side streets above us, to a hotel, condo rentals, the half-dozen Mexican homes that take in tourists. They pointed down the beach to a holistic retreat center called Mar de Jade. "There, and there, and there." Then they pointed to a place about 20 steps away. "And here."

"Here" turned out to be a sweet beachside hotel called Las Brisas. "A hole diferent Vacations"(sic) read the hotel's brochure, in English translation.