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Think Naked Open Secrets, Part II: Baja Beach Babylon By Tom Byrnes
As for the afternoons? Well, they offered natural, oft-concealed beauty of a different sort. And to tell the truth, I never did come to feel exactly normal about it. But I will say this: Stripping off my wetsuit in the hot sun and getting naked in public—at one of the rare spots in Latin America where this is sanctioned made the trip that much more memorable. Eroticism is a splendid thing. Like the tiger shark, it's an idea that holds our attention. But when eroticism goes public, something else happens. People have issues. Plenty of prudes insist upon splitting such matters between right and wrong. As my friend David Shaw put it in his 1996 book The Pleasure Police, "A growing number of people have become determined to make us all think that life is worse—less pleasurable and more dangerous—than it really is." On the other hand, blue-noses serve a useful function. They make it easier to be naughty, even when you're all grown up. Two hours nonstop from Los Angeles, Loreto is one of those quintessential windswept Baja villages. Back in the 1980s, it was supposed to become another of Mexico's high-rise tourist traps. A single resort went up on the beach south of town, but then the government changed its mind; Cabo San Lucas, 250 miles to the south, was developed instead. Tourism in Loreto has struggled ever since, with the one-time Diamond Eden Resort, now the Desert Sun Resort, passing from owner to owner in search of a niche. During the last few years, it seems to have found one, attracting an adults-only mix of golfers, fishermen, and divers—as well as couples who prefer to sunbathe nude. The sprawling resort accommodates the clothed and the naked on different sides of a dense oleander hedge. For our part, we already knew what it was like to hang around with the golfers and fishermen in their Bermuda shorts, so my wife and I decided to brave the other side of the oleander. Being a gentleman, I allowed my wife to go first.
Tom Byrnes wrote about windsurfing Alaska's Turnagain Arm in the June 2000 issue of Outside.
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