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I wanted to see Mexico. I was past 50 and I had never been south of the Rio Grande - and I longed to go to the country that had produced Frida Kahlo and Emiliano Zapata, Chichen Itza and mole sauce.

The problem was that I had no one to go with. In my other travels (mostly through Europe and the U.S.), I had no trouble being on my own; often, I preferred it. But Mexico was another matter. Like everyone else, I had heard that bad things can happen to Canadian tourists down there. Since I wanted to come back in one piece, it seemed wise to take an organized tour. But weren't tours for old people in Tilley hats and Bermuda shorts?

"Not to worry," said my local travel agent, and handed me a catalogue from a company that seemed to break the mould. The cover talked about "adventure," and there wasn't a grey hair to be seen on the exuberant folks in the pictures. "Travelling on your own?" read the blurb. "This is your kind of tour." It was as if they had me in mind.

I was impressed, too, by how reasonable the prices were - under $1,000 for a two-week tour of Mexico. And they talked my kind of language. "Sustainable tourism" seemed to be more than just a buzzword; they devoted a whole page to it, detailing how they worked with local communities to minimize the negative impact of tourism. I could travel through Mexico cheaply and at the same time feel virtuous about it. I was hooked.

But, as the saying goes, be careful what you wish for. My first unpleasant surprise came when I met the other members of the tour: Their average age was about 20. A couple were still in their teens, fresh out of high school. The oldest was the tour guide, a world-weary 26. I was old enough to be their father, a disparity that everyone, except me, found amusing. How I longed to see a Tilley hat or two.

Another unpleasant surprise was finding out just how much touring this tour involved. The theme was the pre-Columbian civilizations of Mexico, and I imagined a leisurely trip to Chichen Itza and other famous ruins, interspersed with visits to pretty towns. Instead, we found ourselves enlisted in a Long March through Mexico - set to cover a whopping 3,000 kilometres in two weeks. (There was no mention of that distance in the promotional material.)

The rhythm of the tour was a couple of nights in each town and then long bus rides (eight or nine hours on average) to the next town. There was even one night we were to spend entirely on the bus - a 12-hour marathon. When I was in my 20s, this might have seemed like an "adventure," but now it just seemed like torture.

And then there was the heat. I had never been to tropical climes, let alone in the dead of summer. My worst heat experience up to this point was not being able to sleep on muggy nights in Toronto.

Heat in Mexico was something else. From day one, I found myself staggering around in a daze. Even getting a few blocks from the hotel to a café or bar was an exhausting effort. And it wasn't long before I had the added pleasure of undergoing a Mexican rite of passage - spending more nights on the toilet than in bed.

As if all that weren't bad enough, when we got to Merida, an old Spanish colonial town, the run-down hotel we were booked into had no air conditioning. This was no oversight: We had signed up for "sustainable tourism" and now we were going to live it. The rooms were airless cubicles, and the only comfort to be had was from an old fan that merely spread the heat around.

But the worst of it was the mosquitoes. On the way to Merida, we had been warned repeatedly that this was "malaria country." Though we were assured that the risk was small, it clearly wasn't so small that it could be ignored. We were all told to get insect repellent and wear long sleeves and long pants, especially at dusk.

So imagine my delight when I hit the shower (looking for a little respite from the heat) and heard that telltale buzzing sound. Arrayed overhead was a squadron of bloodsucking disease-delivery systems.

The room clerk was ready for my complaint. He had obviously heard it before. He pulled out a contraption I hadn't seen since I was a child - an air pump like the ones you use for bike tires, attached to a tuna-can-sized canister of insecticide. After a good many wheezes from the canister, the room was free of malaria-carriers. But now it was filled with a sickly sweet odour that also brought back childhood memories - of halcyon days when people happily sprayed their lawns and homes with that wonder-working chemical DDT. (Long banned in Canada, it has never gone out of use in poorer parts of the world.)

This really was too much. Here I was, lying sleepless in a sweatbox of a room, plagued by the runs and dehydration, stuck on a torturous tour with a bunch of juveniles, and on top of all that I was now going to spend a whole night inhaling toxic fumes - in the name of "sustainable tourism," no less. If I hadn't been sick to my stomach, I would have described the irony as delicious.

The next day, I left the tour and changed hotels. My new abode had air conditioning and no mosquitoes. It turns out these two things were not unrelated: Mosquitoes and cool air don't mix. In other words, doing the politically correct thing of forgoing air conditioning had needlessly exposed us to an added risk of serious illness.

That summed up my brief and unhappy experience of sustainable tourism - it didn't seem to include sustaining a tourist.