Amazonia

But like most overnight, blazing success stories, Playa Amazonia finally began to burn out. It was simple: the women had apparently gotten enough of what they wanted and stopped taking prisoners. Sensing the end, we at AAT raised our trip rates into the stratosphere, but the extravagant cost soon filled our junkets with rich tech-weenies (like me, but with billions), venal Wall Streeters, and other highly successful types who were really, sadly, not Amazon material. So the women stopped raiding altogether. You could hardly blame them.

Ivy and I were married at the height of the AAT bubble. Shortly after the wedding, Ivan foresaw the bust and sold the company for $28 million to a young, seriously buff hedge fund manager who had been passed over by the Amazons five times. I understood his need to somehow be accepted by these women, and wasn’t surprised that after his cash buy-out, he spent an entire three months at Playa Amazonia — I mean right down there on the sand where the canoes might come up — living in a quickly constructed cinderblock “mansion,” oiling up and lifting free weights on the beach every day, making deals on his satellite phone, hoping for the Amazons to come.

I felt for him. But I got mine.