In March I experienced what it is to be a complete Tourist. I was a passenger on the SS Elation on a cruise of "the Mexican Riviera." We stopped at Puerto Vallarta, Mazatlan, and Cabo San Lucas for intervals ranging from three to 12 hours each. At each stop, we were met by large encampments of merchants hawking everything from hats to belts to carved obsidian to glassware to abalone madonnas. We would line up to trample down the gangway into these villages, wearing strawhats, sunburns and huarachi sandals so that we could be more easily identified targets. We spent so little time in each place that none of us really got a handle on what value Mexican money had, so we would pay for everything with the largest denomination bill we had and trust in the innate honesty of these trinket-hustlers. We would emerge from these markets dazed and sweating, our pockets full of ambiguous change, bearing armloads of stuff that was destined to be placed in cardboard boxes and stacked at the back of the garage in about two months, and we would look for the true essence of the particular town in the 45 minutes we had left before the boat gave it's departure whistle. Usually the essence could be found in some dingy sea-side palapa bar- an ice cold cerveza with a napkin wrapped around it. On the way back to the boat, we stumbled through the still-busy market, where the merchants were as busy as dairy farmers working a herd of cows that badly needed milking. "Hey Amigo! Amigo!" they would call to us,"come back!" as if they were truly sorry to see us go back up the gangway, into the relatively sane artificial environment of the cruise ship, where we would collapse in our staterooms for twenty minutes before donning as many trophies of our recent on-shore adventure as we could manage. Then, casting a furtive glance at our rather ridiculous tourist visage reflected in the mirror, we would make the walk up to the aptly-named prominade deck, order Pina Coladas, and see relected in each other's eyes the world-weary self-satisfied look of the true tourist.LEJ