Porn Valley Dispatch: Adios, Ensenada

While our own nation's heart and nipples go out to the Comeback Gras in New Orleans, the Latin-inflected parts of the world celebrate Carnaval. Our own Gram Ponante eschewed the cruder terms "sex tourist" and "swinger" for the more genteel "Pornisto" for his trip to Ensenada in Baja California.

Full report after el gap. - G. Ponante

I believe that one can have so much sex it loses its meaning. I have been on my own quest for meaninglessness for some time and, having never gone to one of those Southern party cities for Spring Break prior to graduating college last year, I thought it was about time to circle away from Tijuana's donkey shows and go to Ensenada, where two cruise ships a weekend (and recently the Queen Mary II) belched forth thousands of tourists to get wild in a land where the natives think all blondes look the same.

Tourists have a few options when leaving a ship; they can go to La Buffadora, a natural blowhole down the coast, where water from the Pacific Ocean shoots up from a natural hole in the rocks, a shopping tour, in which silver trinkets, five-dollar blankets, and Viagra can be purchased in the first few streets from the dock, or the liquor tour, in which everyone goes to one place and becomes insane.

My friends and I drove down to Ensenada from L.A., a trip that took about seven hours (two of which were spent getting out of the city of Los Angeles on a Friday afternoon).

We spent our time exclusively at three bars. One was Hussong's a joint opened in 1892 which features sad-eyed mariachis and that caters to old and young alike, Papas & Beer, which was 95 percent staffed and frequented by Americans in full Girls Gone Wild or Partners of Girls Gone Wild mode (no one waited for the t-shirts to get wet before taking them off, and I'm fairly certain that my dad never had to fight off women making out with each other in the men's bathroom), and a very tasteful bar/hooker terminal called Anthony's.

If one just wanted to sit in a big red room and listen to a Mexican bar band crunch their way through Creedence covers all night, all the while drinking beers at slightly inflated prices, Anthony's would be the place to go. As it was, one could also engage in a stylized dance of summoning the waiter to further summon the prostitute one liked to one's table, buy her a few drinks she wouldn't touch, and negotiate for escapading in the adjacent hotel.

Ourselves, we jawed with some older swingers from San Diego who managed an interfaith nursing home. We couldn't help noticing that the guy, Tom, would order drinks for us and his wife, Barb, would stick her finger in each shot glass before her husband passed them over to us. We didn't get it. It must have been a sex thing.

"Barb says I can buy one of these hookers when I'm 80," Tom said. "That gives me 24 years." Until then, Barb kept the flame alive by sticking her press-ons into my tequila.

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Previously: Porn Valley Dispatch Archive