"Can I get a Coke?" asked the American girl. She didn’t look up from the book in her lap, on which she was building a long, tapered spliff.

The waitress, a Mexican who couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen, had the hairiest arms I’ve ever seen on a girl. I thanked her for the food and asked if I could please have another beer. She nodded and retreated back to the kitchen with our dirty plates, her flip-flops kicking up the sand as they slapped against the soles of her broad brown feet.

The American girl raised the finished spliff to her lips and snapped a silver Zippo into life, tilting her head and cupping her free hand to save the flame from the stiff coastal breeze. She inhaled and allowed the smoke to drift from her half-opened lips, the wind snatching at it in little gusts.

I was going to miss those lips.

"You know, this is my last Mexican spliff, for a while at least."

I told her to make the most of it.

"Fuck yeah." She took another drag.

The waitress returned with our drinks.

"Thank you so much," said the American girl. She was good at ‘thank you,’ but I’d never heard her say ‘please.’

I thanked the waitress and raised my beer in a toast to a safe journey home. The beer bottle was cloaked with beads of condensation. I took a drink. It was cold and delicious.

"Vomitos! Vomitos!"

The bus driver pulled over and as the side door slid open the hot mountain air rushed in, as if filling a vacuum. I helped the American girl from the van and stood over her, holding her hair back from her face as her body convulsed and watery vomit speckled with rice and morsels of half-digested chicken spattered on to the roadside.

The driver came and stood by me. He winked and smiled. "Vomitos, eh?" He laughed softly. He had kind eyes and I decided I liked him.

I asked the American girl if she was okay.

"Better."

I asked her if she’d like me to rub her back.

"Thanks."

I rubbed her back in slow circular motions, feeling the knuckles of her spine through her thin vest. She wore no bra.

Nothing but rocky grey mountains and parched brown valleys all around, clumps of cacti flourishing grimly in places and in the blue sky black buzzards wheeling on unseen currents.

I asked if she was okay to get back on the bus.

"Give me a minute. Water?"

I reached back into the minibus and handed her my bottle of water, warm despite the bus’s aircon.

The driver said something I didn’t understand, his eyes still smiling. He moved his arm in a serpentine motion, nodding to me.

I laughed and imitated his snaky mime. For the last four hours the road from Oaxaca up and over the precipitous slopes of the Sierra Madre had been nothing but switchbacks.

He cackled and slapped me on the back.

"Okay, I guess I’m ready to go." The American girl stood up. Her hair was matted with sweat and rivulets ran over her temples and down her neck. "Thank you so much. I felt pretty bad back there."

I told her she should keep my water bottle.

She smiled. "Thank you. You’re very kind."

That was a month ago.

By the time the minibus pulled into the little town of Pochutla we’d already decided to take the next bus out to the coast at Puerto Angel, then share the short taxi ride to Zipolite, where a liberal attitude to drugs and nudity attracted a predictable crowd of young travelers and old hippies, the carefree and the curious. That’s what I and countless others were jetting from continent to continent for, searching for sex and drugs, sun and sea. Travelers. Not tourists. What was the difference? We read different guidebooks.

Did we have a different agenda? Not really, except we - the travelers - had time on our side. We didn’t have to wring every ounce of fun from a two-week holiday, before heading home on a charter flight under the accusing glares of a stressed-out and jet-lagged cabin crew, to make it back to work and start saving for our next two weeks in the sun.

That first night in Zipolite we found a café serving good pizza and 2-for-1 cocktails. We bought some grass and walked the length of the beach, smoking and talking.

The next day the American girl gave up her room and moved into mine. We spent the days smoking and drinking, lounging in hammocks or in one of the little beach cafés, playing in the surf, or strolling up and down the beach.

And then of course there was the sex.

Sun-kissed and saltwater-washed by months on the beaches of India, South-East Asia, Australia and Mexico, the American girl’s body was lithe and smooth and tanned. The traveling lifestyle - a relentlessly supine kind of hedonism with its routine of sun-bathing, sea-paddling and grass-smoking - suited her and gave rise to an enervated sexuality that I had become a slave to.

It was our last day together.

I asked what she’d miss most about traveling. She’d been away a year.

"You know, what I’ll miss most is all the beautiful people I’ve met." She didn’t mean me. "All these people who have nothing at all but are still so sweet and so happy."

I asked her what she most looking forward to when she arrived in New York.

"Fuck, I can’t wait to see all the stuff I’ve had shipped back from my travels. I got the most gorgeous rugs from India, beautiful silk suits from Vietnam, two hundred CDs from Thailand, woodcarvings from Indonesia, and then there’s all the silver jewellery I bought in Oaxaca that I FedExed back home. And, of course, I can’t wait to see my folks."

I had no plans to return to my small hometown in Northern England. I was going to stay in Zipolite for another week or so, then maybe head up the coast to Jalisco State. The truth was I had lost my enthusiasm for airports and visas, new languages and customs. Mexico was as good as anywhere and let’s face it, beach life was pretty much the same wherever in the world you went, more or less.

The wind was picking up, spiraling the sand slantwise across the beach and whipping up at the few stragglers still savouring the last of the day’s sun, before it ebbed behind the mountains. Twenty yards out to sea, where the spume began to lift from the massing waves, a train of brown pelicans flew by in procession. They seemed to know to where they were heading.

"This grass is making me horny," said the American girl, rising from the table.

I picked the beer bottle from the puddle on the table where condensation had pooled and drained a final mouthful, warmed and soured by the heat of the day. I looked out to sea at the brown pelicans topping over the waves and followed the American girl back up the beach to our room.