I've since learned the existence of these places is a South American phenomenon. Couples pay for two or four-hour intervals of sexual intimacy, that they enjoy far from the prying eyes of relatives and friends. When my husband first told me about them, I initially thought he was joking, and then after I realized he was serious, I thought they sounded interesting.

Then, after I started working on Sextv, I pitched it as an idea, got the greenlight to do the story and started to make contacts. Since I had previously visited a couple of these hotels for research (seriously!), I thought it would be no sweat to call and speak to a couple of the owners, telling them how much I enjoyed staying in their hotels and how interesting it would be for more Canadians to have a peak inside via the window of television.

Boy, was I wrong. What followed was a cat-and-mouse game as I began phoning and emailing to numerous different places in Mendoza and Buenos Aires. When I called, I was usually told that I would have to speak to the manager or owner, who apparently never answered the phone, then I would get the name of an owner, be told to call back at a specific time, but when I would call back, either the manager/owner would never be there or in some cases, the names I had been given were for people who didn't exist. Not one to give up easily, I enlisted a friend in Mendoza to do the research. My thinking was if he could make face to face contact, explain what we wanted to do, things would go much more smoothly.

And that's the way it seemed to go, because by the time we arrived in Mendoza to shoot the story, he had lined up interviews with two owners. But when we showed up to shoot the interviews, we were back at square one, because both owners backed out. Then we drove from one end of the city to another and went to about a dozen hotels, again hoping that the personal touch would be more successful than phone calls. No such luck. Not one owner would even agree to meet us for a cup of coffee, never mind let us shoot inside their hotels or give us an on-camera interview. So we went ahead and did it without permission.

We had been filming all of our attempts at getting access to the hotels, shot exteriors and driven through the hotels, we had enlisted people who went to these hotels, and had found a couple who used them regularly and had agreed to let us shoot an interview inside. But getting inside to do the shoot meant we had to pay for two rooms. (They will never allow two couples in one room, partly for moral reasons, but mostly financial reasons, because they'd lose income)

So, my cameraman and I sat in the backseat, pretending to be a horny couple, and we asked for two rooms, although we only used one to shoot the interview and the room's interior. When we drove up to the hotel, it's much like the window at a fast-food drive-through, except there's a dark glass and you can't see the person behind it and supposedly they don't see you. It's not uncommon for people, particularly women, to turn their back so the person inside won't see them, so I was sitting behind the driver and turned my back to the window, not to hide my identity, but to shield the big Betacam that was rolling and capturing everything that transpired.

It was a little nerve wracking. I don't know what hotel security would have done if we would have been found out, but I didn't want to find out. (We did get chased away from at least one hotel when they noticed us sitting out front filming cars as they went in and out). The interview went well, we finished our shoot and managed to drive out without incident. However, after we stopped along the dark and deserted country road where we met up with my husband and his friend who had been shooting the car's exterior with the digital camera, we were suddenly bathed in the revolving lights of a police car as it pulled up behind us. Shit!

We didn't want to have to explain what we were doing there, so we all just got back in the cars and started on our way. They followed behind for awhile, but lucky for us, that was the end of that. There's a problem with crime in Mendoza right now and apparently the police wanted to make sure we weren't up to any funny business by the side of the road. If they only knew!

Karen Murray
Associate Producer, SEXTV