Tuesday Nov. 14, 2006
Two days after leaving my personal little beach front campsite at Mazatlan and having ridden through the city of Tepic I was arriving in PV. I knew it would be a tourist town and thought I may not stay long, but every city in Mexico is different so I had to give it a chance. I was looking for the hostel listed in my LP book when an American riding a BMW F650 wearing only jeans, boots and a muscle shirt pulls up beside me and starts firing off questions faster than I could answer. After stopping and talking over a cool drink, he says he's staying in a condo downtown on the beach and that I'm welcome to stay with him, for free, as long as I like. Oh, and he's also heading south by bike, is in no rush, was born in Argentina and speaks fluent Spanish. My new friends' name is Chris.
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PV is the busiest tourist city I've seen so far. I'm glad it's the off season. The Malecon (boardwalk) really comes alive at night when artists, vendors and performers of all types come out to make a buck. The temperatures and humidity are still a bit high for this time of year (25/35 Celsius low/high), but it seems much more bearable than Mazatlan. I guess an air conditioned condo to spend time in while not swimming in the small rooftop pool overlooking the ocean also helps.
No matter how picturesque this all sounds, reality is much less than perfect. Mexico is full of contrasts. Air, ground, noise and water pollution can be found everywhere and people live in buildings that look like a concrete project started by a 12 year old with a trowel. It's surprising that such a highly reveered tourist attraction hasn't been able to present a better image than this. But, no matter how obvious these points are, the old, hilly, stone laiden streets, traditional cathedrals, white Spanish style homes and live violin music every night from the plaza still manage to induce feelings of a romantic old European village.
To get an idea of how much money people earn in Mexico - keeping in mind that this is a tourist location and people here earn slightly more - here are a few numbers we got from a local. A good waiter in PV gets paid $4000 pesos/month and a mason gets $60-80 pesos/day. Remember, $10 pesos = $1 US.
The Malecon is full of interesting artwork including several large sculptures in a small bar with a large roll shutter style front opening.
One of our day trips from PV included a short ride south along the ocean front to a small hidden beach and then into the jungle that engulfs the entire area. I wasn't expecting to see jungles like this until Brazil.
Several movies have been filmed in this area, including Night of the Iguana with Elizabeth Taylor, and Predator with Arnold Schwartzeneger.
Another day trip from PV included a bus then water taxi ride south to yet another beautiful beach (Las Animas) that is not accessible by road. Don't get the wrong idea, it was a lot like work here today: I had to work on my suntan, finishing a fresh Red Snapper lunch and holding my breath while searching for sea life with my new goggles.
It was the evening of Thursday Nov. 16th, and we had planned to hit the road south in the morning. But after talking with locals, our plans were revised to leave on Tuesday the 21st instead. It seemed this weekend was a long weekend (Friday and Monday off) for a national holiday celebrating the Mexican Revolution. That meant locals would flock to beaches in droves and causing congestion on highways and as well as accommodations.
This changed things for me, because I had everything ready to go and for the first time in my travels I felt like I had excess time on my hands. It allowed me to really relax and enjoy what I felt was the first vacation from my adventure. If you're wondering why this whole trip isn't a vacation, then you've probably never traveled alone, for long periods, in a foreign country far from home on a motorcycle.
Perhaps it's because of my limited international travel experience (OK, none) that it seems like there are so many interesting things to experience each day, and I just can't express them all (but I'm trying). Photographs help, and of course we all experience things in different ways, but I realized I really hadn't expressed the sense of being here yet, so here goes.
It's 28 degrees at 10:30 pm and I'm sitting on a bench on the malecon with a gentle breeze coming off the Pacific. Sounds are everywhere as traffic toots and roars on the main strip behind be. Live violin music from the plaza behind the road seeps in between beeping horns, car alarms, booming bass stereos and throttle stomping, muffler desperate buses. Old style, hot-rod VW Beetles, Police in white uniforms on ATV's, pickups loaded with people and 125cc motorcycles shooting flames from their exhaust all compete for the two, one-way lanes of embedded stone.
In front of me, hundreds of people stroll past communicating with strange words while bargaining with vendors selling sea-shell necklaces, BBQ corn on the cob, cotton candy and iced fermented coconut juice. Smells of perfume float randomly through the salty sea air along with popcorn, body odor and diesel while a giant cruise ship floats silently behind everyone on the malecon. It's like a massive moving building all lit-up in the blackness of the Pacific.
Below the massive malecon along the beach people stack rocks in gravity-defying positions, others create huge candle-lit sand sculptures while four men fly around a tall pole suspended only by a rope at their feet while playing a whistle. An old Spanish war ship sails past with a single row of lights strung along the top of its main sail illuminating the party goers on board and fires off what sound like cannons but turn out to be fireworks which are rallied back and forth from the beach for a short time.
It doesn't matter what day it is, you're in Puerto Vallarta.
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