Across the water, on the island of Roatan, where I went next, the members of the Honduran legislature had all come over to sign a new law making the Bay Islands a free port—eliminating hotel and sales taxes for visitors as well as ending import duties and income tax for tourism businesses. Part of the deal is a new fifty-million-dollar terminal and deepwater port constructed by Carnival Cruise Lines that will be up and running in 2009 and will host up to seven thousand visitors a day.

Such major developments are under way all along the coast, not just in Honduras. Citizens in southern Belize are protesting the six-hundred-acre Ara Macao Resort & Marina, which will be built over the next five years at the top of the thread-thin peninsula leading to Placencia. They fear that it will completely overwhelm resources and undermine the largely Garifuna communities in between. Known locally as Scarlet Macaw, the development—to include a marina, 456 condos, 296 villas, two nine-hole golf courses, a casino, a hotel, and retail space—will be able to accommodate at capacity thirteen thousand people. In Panama's Bocas del Toro, there are environmental and community concerns about Red Frog Beach, an eight-hundred-unit residential-tourism development next to a national marine park.

For me, Little Corn Island, forty miles off the east coast of Nicaragua, seemed pretty close to perfect. There are fruit trees and beaches, no cars (everything is more or less within walking distance), and no large developments in the offing. After tramping around for an hour or so along unmarked paths through the forest, I managed to find an empty little beach stretching out beneath crystal, calm water. There were a couple of houses and a garden higher up on the shore, but other than three puppies busily investigating an overturned boat, I was alone. Drenched in sweat, I peeled off my sun-protective long-sleeve shirt, sarong, and oversized hat and dove in. While cooling off, I watched the shore. On the porch of one of the houses, a long-limbed young woman dressed only in a Tâ¬shirt came out to hang laundry. Aware that I looked like some sort of ghastly North American apparition—wet, fat, pale, yet overdressed—I approached and tried to explain that I had no idea where I was. Could she give me directions back to town?

She smiled. "If you can wait a minute while I get dressed, I'll walk you back," she volunteered. We chatted as I followed her along the trail: I admired the flowers painted on her toes; she agreed that her beach is the island's most perfect. But Yetty was deeply bored. What she really wanted was to be a dancer, yet Little Corn—population 250 to 1,000—offered little opportunity. She shrugged and, changing the subject, said that if I liked, she'd show me some of the island's other great beaches the next day.

Yetty showed up in the morning carrying four sweet yellow mangoes that she had gathered for me. This was the first time she'd been on the grounds of the Casa Iguana, where I was happily installed in a cool cabin overlooking the sea; she felt very shy about being there. She had also brought a small bag of nail polishes, and she offered to decorate my toes, too.