They were as bracing as the frozen grapes delivered to our chaises in the sand that morning; as refreshing as the mango sorbet served poolside later that afternoon.

At a high-end resort in the Riviera Maya, they don't let you sit around and sweat.

The longer you linger at the pool, the beach or the spa, the more you are surprised with "amenities," as in, "Hello, Ms. Latson, may I offer you this amenity?"

You get used to it.

I had almost forgotten about my Mexican vacation. The week before, I slogged through muddy Galveston streets looking for stories of loss and recovery from Hurricane Ike. There, I felt grateful for a room in a dark hotel where I could prop open the windows for a breeze. Swatting mosquitoes and scrounging for MREs occupied my free time.

Poring over notes by lantern light one night, I noticed the circle on my calendar that marked a trip with my college roommate Andrew to Mayakoba - the newly developed cluster of luxury resorts on the Yucatan Peninsula, about an hour south of Cancun. Andrew was there on business; I tagged along for a vacation I otherwise could not have afforded.

The only similarity between storm-ravaged Galveston and tropical Mexico was the cloud of mosquitoes. But at these resorts, where rooms average from $500 to well more than $1,000 a night, we had people to spray us with insect repellent and taxi us by golf cart from spa to restaurant to beach to suite.

At Rosewood Mayakoba, we were shuttled by boat through a network of canals to our suite, a two-story limestone structure with a full wall of glass jutting out over the clear water. The region is carved by mangrove-lined lagoons, and the resorts have incorporated the waterways into their designs, largely preserving their natural states. Rosewood's staff biologist and a team of workers prevent the lagoons from becoming too swampy - they're part of what seems to be a cast of thousands who keep the resort pristine and running smoothly.

Our room came with five people dedicated to our comfort. Besides the cleaning crew, we had two butlers: one for the morning and one for the evening. The staff anticipated our needs in a way that eventually prompted the eerie realization that they were watching our every move and communicating it to each other by two-way radio.

On our first day at the resort, while Andrew was hip-deep in a two-hour traditional Maya spa treatment, I got a pedicure. Midway through a lengthy process of sloughing, buffing, moisturizing and polishing, I thought about how I might enjoy a snack. Suddenly a uniformed waiter appeared with a tray, bearing a delicate kiwi-and-strawberry salsa and a champagne flute of chaya juice.

"Hello, Ms. Latson, may I offer you this amenity?"

I ran into our evening butler, J.C., on the path back from the spa. He had just taken the liberty, he said, of drawing me a bubble bath. He had set the mood just so, with low lighting and aromatherapy. I instantly regretted having left my sweaty sports bra on the bathroom doorknob to dry out.

We bumped into J.C. again on our way back from dinner, when he casually hailed us a golf cart as if our encounter on a jungle path had been a lucky coincidence. When we got back, we realized he had just left the suite, timing the rendezvous perfectly.

Inside our suite, the clothes we had strewn about were folded and hung. J.C. had set a dish of chocolate truffles (inexplicably resting on a bed of margarita salt) on the table in the front hall. He had drawn another bubble bath, which was still warm. He organized my sunblock, moisturizer and bug spray in a tidy row by the sink. He closed the bedroom curtains and set slippers on both sides of the bed.

J.C. left bottles of Fiji on the bedside tables and tucked a lavender sachet in among the pillows. Downstairs, he had replaced our fruit bowl, organized the sections of the newspaper I had tossed on the couch, and inserted a Rosewood bookmark into the book where I had left a Houston Chronicle bookmark. My old bookmark remained, in case I wished to keep it out of nostalgia.

At first, I didn't know what to do with the constant solicitude. But when we later moved to a room without quite so many amenities at the Fairmont Mayakoba, I found myself offended at the sudden lack of attention.

"Has no one drawn a bath?" I wondered, irked, when turndown service consisted simply of turning down the bedsheets.

At the Maroma Resort and Spa, just up the coast from Fairmont and Rosewood, I snorkeled for my first time, above the world's second-largest coral reef. Too nervous to venture far from our guide, I gradually overcame an as-yet untested fear of sharks and cavorted with schools of neon yellow fish I previously had seen only in Disney movies.

Near dusk, I participated in a sort of spiritual sauna: the temazcal, a traditional Mexican sweat lodge. The ceremony took place in the tiny, pitch-black interior of a clay pyramid facing Maroma's beachfront. It was meant - according to our shaman, Nancy - to re-create the comfort and healing power of the womb. For me, the hourlong ritual induced less a sense of comfort than it did paroxysms of claustrophobic panic. But I did feel a certain rush of euphoria when I left the hut, reborn, and plunged into the ocean.

Over the course of the week, I got a taste of what it's like to run in the same circles as TomKat or Cherie and Tony Blair, all guests of the same resorts. But it alarmed me to see how quickly I could get accustomed to such a lavish lifestyle.

At our least favorite hotel - still superior to anything one could afford on a newspaper reporter's salary - Andrew and I were assigned a small room on a murky lagoon. It seemed to us nearly as dark and cramped as the temazcal. There was no bowl of fresh fruit waiting for us. No one rushed to the beach before us to spread towels across our chairs. No one offered amenities.

Standing under a palapa in the warm moonlight, we waited nearly 10 minutes for a golf cart to pick us up for dinner at the beachfront restaurant.

"Well!" Andrew said, in the same terse tone of voice he once used whenever a mouse scurried across the floor of our old apartment.

"This is horrible," I agreed.

This article appeared on page E - 3 of the San Francisco Chronicle