The movie had it wrong. Bo wasn't perfect, the Mexican beach was—and most still are. Bob Payne tests nine world-class resort towns, from classic Acapulco to authentic Zihuatanejo

In the 1994 film The Shawshank Redemption, a wrongly imprisoned convict sustains himself through nineteen years of hard time with a dream of someday escaping to Zihuatanejo, Mexico, where he hopes to "open a little hotel right on the beach, buy some worthless old boat and fix it up like new, take my guests out charter fishing." I don't remember where he got the idea. Maybe he just liked the way the word rolls off the tongue—zee-wha-ta-NAY-ho. But, yes, I thought at the time, that is a dream worth having. That is a place worth visiting.

Yet for almost a decade, while I kept the image of the hotel and the beach in my head, I didn't get down there. The reason? Somewhere along the way, I became the kind of traveler for whom the most alluring journeys are the ones that take you farthest away. Distance, I thought, determined desirability. Why go to Mexico when you can go to Madagascar—a trip I had been making plans for on 9/11. But now that favored destinations are those you can walk home from if you have to, I thought again of Zihuatanejo, and began planning to go there.

Partway through my research, though, I learned that at the close of the film, when the convict finally does escape and you see him working on just the boat you imagined, on a sunny beach with a bright blue ocean in the background, the scene was actually shot in the U.S. Virgin Islands, which look considerably different from the west coast of Mexico. All that time, I had been carrying around the wrong image of Zihuatanejo. And if I was wrong about that, I was probably also wrong about all the other Mexican beach resorts, which I had always pictured, sometimes with more dubious help from Hollywood, as differing only slightly from one another in their mix of sun, sand, margaritas, and mariachi bands. So what else could I do, faced with the possibility of leaving false impressions uncorrected, but expand my trip into a journey along two coasts, to almost a dozen resort areas?

I began on the west coast, at the tip of Baja California, on a stretch of desert, sea, and developments collectively called Los Cabos. Actually three contiguous areas catering to three different types of visitors, Los Cabos is one of Mexico's most popular, and expensive, resort clusters and is so influenced by American culture that more than once I heard it called Orange County South.

At one end of Los Cabos is the town of Cabo San Lucas. When John Steinbeck wrote lyrical prose about the region in the 1940s ("And on the shore the wild doves mourn in the evening . . .") following a trip there with the marine biologist who would become the inspiration for Doc, the hero of his novel Cannery Row, Cabo San Lucas was barely a village, little more than a few fishing shacks on a dirt track. You can go a long way toward understanding what it is now, though, simply by reading the signs you'll find at some of the more popular bars and restaurants, such as Cabo Wabo, El Squid Roe, and the Giggling Marlin: SORRY, WE ARE OPEN, says one sign. PERFECT ENGLISH BROKEN HERE, says another.