- - - - - - - - - - T A B L E_T A L K World travelers discuss going where the tourists don't in Table Talk's Wanderlust area R E C E N T L Y Arigato, Nagano By Cintra Wilson Weird TV, naked hot springs and the big heart of Japan (02/24/98) Tara and Michelle are great and I am a worthless protozoa clinging to their skates By Cintra Wilson (02/23/98) Lost in Nagano By Cintra Wilson Our correspondent's innocent search for the men's slalom turns into an amazing half-day odyssey (02/20/98) Figure skating shocker By Jonathan Broder Lipinski upsets Kwan to take the gold. What happened? Skating expert Christine Brennan analyzes events on -- and off -- the ice in Nagano (02/20/98) Flying away By Cintra Wilson I sold my soul to the scalpers to watch mechanized super-teens Michelle and Tara kiss ass? (02/20/98) Browse the Feature archives		BY D.T. MAX | Cabo San Lucas is at the tip of Baja California, where the Sea of Cortes and the Pacific Ocean meet. On the drive in from the airport, it looks like a construction site. The crane, the joke goes, is the national bird. But this dusty town in fact has a storied history. It has long been known as the center of Baja sport fishing, the place to go to catch the Big One. The marlin are enormous and the tuna and sailfish plentiful. More recently the town embraced a different kind of visitor. In the early '90s the 800-mile-long trans-Baja highway was completed. With the new road and enlarged airport, southern Baja was suddenly a day trip away. Cabo became Daytona Beach west, a place to go to party, to get high with other American college students. Now a third twist has entered the picture. In the last couple of years the flying wedge of the post-Cold War cult of the dollar has reached Baja. With trade barriers down, luxury builders have moved in with their hotel and real estate money. Cabo wants to compete with the Mauis and St. Maartens of the world, to become the place upscale travelers go to get away. When you visit, you sense these three Cabos rubbing up against each other continuously. I take them in reverse chronological order. Cabo No. 3: My girlfriend and I live it up Mexico is a land of nostalgia. That may be why the brand-new $30 million luxury resort Las Ventanas was built to look old. It has the look of a village on a beach. The copper urns that give the walkways visual texture could have been pulled off the set of "All the Pretty Horses." The furniture is stone and handmade and beautiful. The vast rooms have jacuzzis whose faucets are green with patina. There are a lot of wrought-iron gates. Everything hums here, hiding a lot of hard work and careful planning. Las Ventanas has four staff members for every guest. "The situation here is almost Indonesian," Edward Steiner, the general manager, explained to me. He had managed Washington's Watergate Hotel for years, and now he was teaching 250 people from an intimate culture how not to be. He had put the employees in sage and khaki uniforms, which the hotel took back to wash every night. A network of staff tunnels had been built underneath the public areas. Each week he posted a lesson on the walls. Shortly before we got there the lesson had been: "Own your perimeter." Anything that happened within 10 feet of a staff member was his or hers to deal with. The lesson was already taking. Our towels were refolded each time we left the room. Las Ventanas was enormously seductive. The sky was deep blue with puffy El Greco clouds. The water was light green, the cerulean swells marked by the splash of putty-colored pelicans. The cuisine was Mexican-Mediterranean, full of cilantro and tuna paillard. My girlfriend and I agreed this was the most relaxing place we'd ever been to, on a par with the womb. Better, in fact, because of that waveless pool. When you swam, the displaced water overflowed into a kind of outer moat, which recycled it silently into the main tank. Doing laps was as tranquil as reading. There was the sea, then the waveless pool, then the Texan women reading Vogue. I took up a post on a stone barstool in the pool and started reading a book about travel writer Bruce Chatwin. Chatwin chucked his job and went to Patagonia in the middle of winter. He wanted to get away from dour England, but what kind of person went to Baja out of season? It was hot, if pleasant by the water. I asked, but most guests were not eager to talk. You could talk to the staff though. They were young and educated. They came from everywhere but Baja: Mexico City, Guadalajara, Acapulco. Under Steiner they had developed the esprit of actors with day jobs. They seemed in the deepest sense un-Mexican, because they had a less brutal idea of what work had to be. My girlfriend had noted something else. One of the hotel's drivers introduced her to a new word: Seña. It was an alternative to Señorita and Señora: "Ms." We were delighted. We started to try it out. The results weren't promising. The women laughed. The male staff started hanging out by our bungalow. I know luxury is something people go a good distance out of their way for, but although the resort was doing what it did wonderfully, for us it began to feel a bit weird. Being waited on is uncomfortable, especially being waited on by people you relate to so well. We began to subvert the group-think in small ways. We made our bed, putting the previous night's gift of a ceramic starfish back on the covers. My girlfriend started keeping food in the room, so no one would have to walk down those long tunnels just to bring us breakfast rolls. The maids found it and threw it out, owning their perimeter. It was time to break out. N E X T+P A G E+| Woooo! Party! - - - - - - - - - - - - PHOTOGRAPH: CORBIS/BETTMANN