My social positionality as an alleged sex tourist when I arrived as an `unaccompanied' woman traveling to a town in Caribbean Costa Rica to study women's adventure tourism, initiated a shift in ethnographic focus to female tourists' heterosexual sexual relations with locals. Using methodology that relies upon immersion I situated myself within the community and participated in everyday life in and beyond touristic events. I interacted with and interviewed female tourists predominantly, but also local men, local women and resident foreigners. This methodology was productive but presented a major dilemma for me: Where sex is both talked about and kept hidden, I had to negotiate the many layers and performances of the public secrecy about sex that pervade and play out in this transnational town, including how to transform `data' into representation. I conclude that the immersion of the anthropologist in the everyday lives of tourists in touristic settings reveals insights into the complexity of global sexual tourism, and presents problems too.
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