Today we went to Rio Lagartos (Alligator River). It is not a river, and there are no alligators -- a miscue by the Spanish colonialists who named the place.

There are, however, crocodiles. Well, at least there was one crocodile who happily came over our way and bumped her or his (I don’t know which) snout into our boat in search of food. Fascinating creatures, but I prefer to keep my distance, thank you very much.

You couldn’t really blame the crocodile (did I mention it was about 8’ long?). The boat captain encouraged our friend, Poncho the Croc, by splashing his foot in the water as bait!

There was no danger to any of us tourists, though I can’t say the same for the captain’s appendage.

And this got me thinking. What risks and efforts do our hosts engage in to deliver excitement to tourists? We come to places like Alligator River, expecting to see wildlife -- with an emphasis on the “wild.” Pink flamingos are cool, but let’s be honest, if you go to a place like Alligator River, you’re expecting some Croc Hunter action, right?

So, the media have conditioned us to expect certain things, and our hosts have a certain pressure to deliver the goods, even if that means dangling a foot over the boat as bait in a dangerous performance with nature. Risking a foot, I suppose, is safer than risking a bored tourists whose expectations are not met.

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Later in the day, we got a spa treatment -- sort of. This involved floating in thick salt  water and caking ourselves with mineral enriched mud. (Sorry, folks, we didn’t have a camera, so that image is tucked away safely in our heads.) My skin is nicely exfoliated now, in case you were wondering.

What was really interesting about this, however, was how the act of gazing was reversed. Tourism, in many important ways, is about gazing and being gazed upon. And let me tell you, we were certainly gazed upon. Our hosts and others in the village got a big kick out of seeing nine American tourists roll up to the dock caked in white mud.

Perhaps this was a liminal space -- a space where structures of power are overturned for only a brief moment before returning to normal patterns of hierarchy and exchange. This experience had a Carnivalesque feel to it, I suppose, and we were the clowns.

If nothing else, this experience should have given us some sense of what it is like being always on stage, always being asked to perform, to entertain, to excite. The difference, of course, is that our livelihoods did not depend on such performances. We were there to play. They were there to work.

Hosts/guests, seeing/being seen -- these are the relationships and experiences we’ll be exploring in class tonight.

Hasta luego….