Visually, the bay is magnificent, a broad horseshoe of sand between hills and sea. But as much as for the beaches, many come to Acapulco for the all-night partying, which you can verify for yourself at popular discos like Baby'O, the Mandara, and the Palladium. I did, once, and then happily retreated to my room at Los Flamingos, a bright pink motel-like structure on the peninsula at the western end of the bay, where the most exciting event is the weekly homage to pozole, a soup of pork and hominy that locals traditionally eat on Thursday afternoons. Which is quite a change, I imagine, from the 1950s, when Los Flamingos was owned by John Wayne and some of his Hollywood friends, including Johnny Weissmuller, who died in Acapulco in 1984 after spending the last years of his life at the hotel. "John Wayne? A nice man who liked tequila," said the hotel's current owner, Adolfo Santiago González. And he should know. In 1954, the Duke and his friends hired nineteen-year-old Santiago, whom they'd met on the beach, to work at Los Flamingos as a busboy.

One night in the restaurant—which, by the way, is one of the best spots in Acapulco for a sundowner—I asked Santiago what the difference was between being a busboy and an owner. "Not so much," he said, and went back to playing the guitar for his guests.

Some four hundred miles southeast of Acapulco, I was sitting in another restaurant, at the Camino Real Zaashila in Huatulco, and being reminded that breakfast, if one is not careful, can make you wish you'd just ordered huevos.

The waiter and I seemed to be getting along so well—he even recognized my Spanish for "I have no coffee cup"—that I had asked if there was anything local I could try, perhaps even something not on the menu.

"Si, si," he said, flourishing his pad and saying, as he scribbled, "One grasshopper omelet."

Worms and insects, especially grasshoppers and ants, are common ingredients in the native Indian cuisine of the state of Oaxaca. As I ate what was undoubtedly the crunchiest omelet I have ever tasted, it occurred to me that its culinary eccentricities are just one reason this resort area holds the most potential for discovery. Huatulco is the name not of a particular town but of an area of sculptured coastline consisting of nine small bays separated by rocky headlands that are the site of another government tourism project being created out of what until a few years ago was virgin jungle and shore. Meant to be more exclusive than Cancún, it is still in development, although I didn't see much construction going on. A half-dozen luxury hotels—including the Camino Real, with its excellent private beach and a pool big enough to make you think you are already in the ocean—are ranged around one of the bays, Tangolunda. But by hiring a boat or venturing down dirt tracks, you can have most of the other bays, virtually all with their own crescent of sand, pretty much to yourself. For now.