Touts & other dangers

I met some Canadians from Manitoba in Starbucks one sunny afternoon (like most others) & got into talking about arriving at the airport among other things. They were accosted by time share agents who arranged free taxi rides to the city in exchange for attending a seminar the next day. They drew the line to the proceedings when asked for their credit card details next morning. I bypassed these airport people of course and traveled by local rickety bus to my place & held a halting Spanish chat with a local to determine my impending stop.
Touts are a fact of life here....it's hard to avoid the taxi drivers who squawk 'taxi' each time without fail as you pass. Then there's the tequila merchants who accost you outside their premises to try out their brands inside. There are the tour agents plying their trade, the restauranteurs, the guys walking the beaches with trays of dubious jewelery. By the jetty the water taxi and boat tours agents are active. However they are all reasonably polite & a firm 'gracias' usually does the trick to keep them at bay.Eventually they just become the backdrop to a fascinating canvass of life in another culture.
I've seen a few things that would spin the wheels of an NZ Safety inspector. By the seafront along the Malecon (translates as breakwater but promenade will do)I saw an unprotected area with no wall with a 6 foot drop on to beach rocks below. Parents allow their kids to roam around freely nearby. The wooden plank suspension bridge over the Rio Cuale has a couple of gaps about a foot wide which even the daring like me tread over cautiously. Some people ride around in dune buggies on the regular roads with no belts or protection...others ride standing up unrestrained in the back of pickup trucks. On a rooftop opposite my condo I saw a man sitting on top of a turret with no safety rope cleaning it. One slip on the curved tiled surface & he would have tumbled 25 feet to the street below. Maybe life is not so precious here or the nanny state has not arrived.