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9. Easiest way to turn your mouth into a blast furnace
Eat an innocent-looking little habanero, the hottest chili in Mexico. It is sometimes yellow, sometimes green, sometimes red and always merciless. Too much habanero—and a bite is too much—and your eyes start doing the strangling scene in Hitchcock's Rope, your nose runs like the Rio Grande, and you dunk your head in the aquarium. People have been known to bite into a habanero—called in some regions "crying tongue"—and faint away like Scarlett O'Hara. Luckily, we give you...

10. Best way to cure chili mouth after you have drunk every beer at your table and the table next to yours
Try forming an O with your lips, then suck in hard. Eat some bread and salt. Sugar works too.

11. How to lie about fishing
More than 40,000 marlin are caught every year off Los Cabos. Here the blue waters of the Pacific meet the green of the Sea of Cort�s. People usually have to roll up their yacht windows to keep the fish from jumping in. But if you come to Los Cabos and don't catch a fish, don't despair. Pull the old bucket trick: Tie a bucket to the end of your line and drop it into the sea. Then have the captain pull out at three-quarter speed. The bucket will pull your pole until it looks like a marlin is on the line. Quick, get the Instamatic. "I'm tellin' you, if I'd have caught this baby, I'd have needed two dens to hang it.'

12. After this, you might wish you had used the bucket trick
When the golden fish, about the size of a bread box, is hooked, it leaps as high as 12 feet in the air and puts on a beautiful battle dance, changing from bright gold to blue to green. This fish can take hours to bring in and, legend has it, can reach speeds of up to 30 miles per hour.

13. Best vision in Mexico

Twenty-one years ago, Gian Franco Brignone, an Italian banker, took a few men and some machetes and hacked his way 30 miles through the jungle to a place he would name Costa Careyes (Turtle Coast), halfway down the Mexican Pacific. Now he has a part-Mediterranean, part-Mexican paradise painted in unforgettable pastels and designed in a style best known as postprimitive luxury.

Two hours south of Puerto Vallarta, one hour north of Manzanillo, Careyes seems like a planet of its own. "European people get here and they say, 'Ahhh, this is Mexico,' " says Brignone, 62. "And Mexican people come here and say, 'Ahhhh, this is Europe.' "

What it is, though, is the most luxurious, tasteful, sensual port in Mexico, a sort of Anti-pulco, where there are no stuffed armadillos, no phones, just gorgeous water, architecture and people. Europe's jet set flits down once in a while for the polo, the Swiss chef and the animal preserve that protects jaguars, turtles, crocodiles and hundreds of varieties of rare birds.

But the most beautiful thing of all in Careyes is the open-air, cornerless villa that Brignone built for himself on a cliff overlooking the ocean. Darryl Dawkins always said he came from "Lovetron," and this may be it. From every room there is a view Donald Trump would kill for. One outdoor couch is so sensual that Calvin Klein came down just to shoot one Obsession perfume ad on it.

Brignone lost an eye while building his villa (a nail flew into his eye while he was hammering) and so he named the place Mi Ojo (My Eye). He also created a monolith near the beach, a huge white wall that fills a small crevice in the land. In the middle of the wall is a circle with slide-away doors. He calls it El ojo de Venado (Eye of the Deer).