How Buffy's secret wedding bewitched the paparazzi

On a ghoulish stakeout last weekend, I found myself stalking Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the Hollywood actress Sarah Michelle Gellar) as she mutated into a blushing bride and tied the knot in Mexico with Freddie Prinze Jr, her co-star from the inane summer comedy Scooby-Doo.

The couple had met on the teen horror movie set of I Know What You Did Last Summer and paranoia is part of their romance. Certainly, they were under constant surveillance by freelance videographers, rival entertainment weeklies, and the US tabloid press. A prominent American magazine had called me in to co-ordinate logistics for a phalanx of snoops who had never been south of the border. As I've covered coups, spy trials, volcanic eruptions and even state-sanctioned murders, I had not thought that the banalities of a celebrity wedding would present much of a challenge. Ha.

First we had to confirm exactly when and where it was happening, although all the participants were sworn to secrecy and the guests were not told their destination. Reporters who examine rubbish for clues about celebrity menus or bouquets learned that in the tropics maggots make this tactic a bio-hazard. An easier approach might be to chat up the cleaners, I suggested.

The wedding party had booked all hotel rooms and villas within view of the cliff-top ceremony at Punto Careyes, so we were forced to stay miles down the coast at a disco resort with the improbable name of Blue Bay of the Crazy Angels (los angeles locos). As we were reporting about these locos from Los Angeles, it seemed appropriate.

Even the security seemed straight out of central casting. The 15 beefy guards from California were jittery, spoke little Spanish, and treated the locals with contempt.

In Jalisco state, where even mariachi singers pack pistols, these gringo guards from the movie lots were ridiculed because Mexican law forbids foreigners from carrying weapons. (Perhaps they were meant to rely on Gellar's kickboxing prowess.)

The scramble to pinpoint Gellar soon resembled one of Buffy's cheesy television plots. I felt like part of a vampire gang out to nail the slayer when she was most vulnerable.

We considered circulating a list of the actors' distinguishing marks, since so few working-class Mexicans were familiar with these foreign stars.

The tattooed bride sports a Celtic rune on her left hip, a Chinese ideograph on her lower back and a dagger dangling over a heart etched on her inner right ankle. Hirsute Freddie plucks his eyebrow every day so it will appear he has two.

Some of us definitely deserved danger money. Crocodiles lurked in the mangrove lagoons adjacent to Buffy's beach. The jungle-clad cliffs required a machete and heavy-duty mosquito repellant. (One young reporter from California regretted wearing a thong because fire ants got up her skirt.) Scorpions hid in driftwood logs and those miniature bats were not vampire wedding favours, but denizens of the tropical night.

Mobile phones and pagers did not work, so we all had to queue up at a single pay phone to ring our editors, dropping our voices when anyone might eavesdrop. The weather did not help. It is always blustery here in low season and the thunder rumbles almost as frequently as the Pacific slams against the cliffs. But on the eve of the wedding, when we'd hoped to hire a dinghy and catch Buffy frolicking at her bachelorette beach party, we faced towering waves and gusts of gritty wind.

Unless Hurricane Hernan changed course, we'd be right in its path. This threatened to evolve into the kind of disaster I was used to reporting. By sunset, the hurricane had veered seaward, although small-craft warnings remained in place.

I was only sure we had blundered our way to the wedding venue on Sunday when a helicopter buzzed a tangerine-coloured mansion with waiters gathered on the top terrace. Bongo drums and trumpets blared out over the bay.

We waited. The sunset glowed and the mosquitoes bit, but we could not hear a salsa rendition of Mendelssohn's Wedding March. However, sure enough, from the public beach below, I could make out swaths of white tulle and what could have been a tiered cake.

The next day, just as the last wedding guests were checking out of the Careyes hotel, a quake measuring 4.6 on the Richter scale rocked the coastline. It did less damage than a lightning bolt that had struck an electric pylon and blacked out all power. And that was how the newly wed vampire slayer slipped away from the paparazzi walking dead.