A few miles from Guatemala, Tapachula is part bustling border town and part sleepy beach community. In town, you’ll find streets lined with sagging wooden buildings and women pulling threadbare sheets from clotheslines. Not far away, high fences and heavy gates protect luxurious homes with back doors that open to pristine private beaches.

Here, you can’t escape the juxtaposition of wealthy and not, of upscale and barebones – of an ice cold beer and a well-mixed cocktail.

Tapachula’s Playa Linda is truly unspoiled, dotted with a handful of palapas and open-air restaurants, but escaping the high rises and mega-resorts of other places on the coast. On one end, there’s a little bar with white plastic chairs and a view of the Pacific Ocean that almost doesn’t seem real. One of the best drinks the Spiritual Cowboy crew has ever enjoyed was right there at that little beachside bar where you can get a cold bottle of beer and a front row seat to a truly spectacular sunset for about $1.

Not too far away, the crew had another memorable drink on the tiled patio of a stunning beach house. They were visiting a new friend and sipped top-shelf tequila on ice while looking out onto their own little slice of Playa Linda.

One drink wasn’t any better than the other, just like one side of town isn’t any better than the other. They were just different.

To truly know a place is to see it from all sides, to embrace what makes it unique, what makes it real, and what makes it worth coming back to.