In response to the new technological possibilities, a community of more than a hundred expatriates, who have lived here quietly following their bliss for many years, has recently blossomed with entrepreneurial spirit. Of 33 rentals currently advertised on one Web site, 18 are offered by gringos, some of them trying to recoup their own rents and home maintenance expenses, and perhaps to make a living of their own; some entering joint ventures with locals, investing in houses and sharing the rentals with the landowners. This building activity pays local construction workers, and the visitors the houses attract pump money into the town. In addition the site lists a dozen retreats and yoga workshops hosted by outsiders.

The mere existence of yelapa.info, a free Web service run by longtime Yelapa visitor David Johnson out of Vancouver, B.C., indicates the biggest change in Yelapa: It is now globally accessible. When I came to stay here in 1989, you had to take the water taxi from Puerto Vallarta and set foot on Yelapa earth in order to rent a room. Now you can reserve a bungalow from Des Moines; you can also pay for it online, in which case the money may never even enter Mexico. The town-owned Lagunita Hotel now gets 40 percent of its reservations via the Internet.

The globalization has even become literal: Under a rock near the waterfall that is the town's main tourist attraction is a small package cached by a group of scavenger hunters who have posted its latitude and longitude online and invited its members to track it down with their GPS devices. So far three have found their way here and done so. Eco-bicyclists have discovered the bulldozed road and now skid down the mountainside and pedal incongruously through town in helmets and Spandex.

With global commerce has come its underside, crime and crack cocaine. Locally grown marijuana has always been available in Yelapa, and not a few of the northern visitors have brought their own pharmacopeia; but crack showed up only a few years ago and quickly caught on among a small part of the younger set. Late in 2002, a South African woman who has lived more than 30 years in Yelapa was brutally beaten and knifed by a group of youths who had been smoking crack and decided to steal her refrigerator. The physical attack was in retaliation for her having filed a complaint about the theft. It is a rueful comment on globalization that this group called itself the "Bin Ladens."

The tax problems and crack are seen by some here as threats to local autonomy. Although they have extraordinary rights as an indigenous community, Yelapans are also Mexican citizens and are part of a municipality based in the city of El Tuito, a few miles inland. It is from PAN governments in Tuito and Guadalajara (the capital of Jalisco) that funds have come for many of Yelapa's new civic improvements. Now fiscal sins and the mini-crime wave caused by half a dozen crack users have opened the door for Tuito to establish a bureaucratic beachhead in the town. Several police have been assigned to Yelapa, and for the first time in its history, it will have to observe an outside authority on its own turf. When you link with the world, the world links back.

Next: Paradise at $250 a square meter.

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