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Think Naked
Baja, Pt. II

By Tom Byrnes

Maui, Pt. I | Maui, Pt II | Maui, Pt III | Baja, Pt I | Baja, Pt II

Passing through an opening in the hedge, we saw an empty volleyball court, an open-air bar, and a vast star-shaped hot tub. I counted 30 naked and oiled people soaking up sun, standing, sprawled on loungers, sitting and sipping drinks. They generally ranged in age from their thirties to their sixties: pudgy, skinny, tanned, pale, droopy, firm, you name it.

We said hello to one group. Liisa draped her towel over an adjacent chaise lounge. No hesitation. Off came her top. Down went her bottom. Smiles all around. I tried to remember the axiom of scuba diving: Don't lose control of your breathing. "The only tan-line I want," she announced, "is from my wedding ring.

This was not what I imagined nudism to be, at least not the blasé variety in which naturists sit naked and splay-legged in mixed company playing shuffleboard and rummy, almost trying to prove that nothing is off. But neither did we sense the overt expectation of swingers. Instead, the people here seemed to be in some personal, racy in-between. They were flashers, they were voyeurs. The proximity of other naked bodies added a certain frisson of possibility, but the targets of people's hedonism seemed their own partners. A woman and her man would stare at each other with the flushing pride of prom dates, perpetually startled and pleased by the absence of costume. Liisa and I realized that most of the couples on this side of the oleander hedge were madly in love&3151;and found daring the buff in the Mexican sunshine a remarkably loving thing. So while I don't know if I'll ever feel completely normal about it, I discovered that being naked in public with my wife was just all right with me—thrilling, but relaxing, too.

Maui, Pt. I | Maui, Pt II | Maui, Pt III | Baja, Pt I | Baja, Pt II

Tom Byrnes wrote about windsurfing Alaska's Turnagain Arm in the June 2000 issue of Outside.