Nestled on the pacific Coast of Mexico, only a non-stop flight away from Middle America, you’ll find Hollywood hills rising out of the sea and a South Beach strip dotted with small restaurants and bars. You’ll find statues that Salvador Dali might have crafted had he fallen asleep listening to Jimmy Buffett and sunsets that show you just why Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor fell in love with Puerto Vallarta nearly forty years ago. You’ll also find a Hooters and a Sam’s Club and one hundred and seventy thousand people who are trying to sell you something.
The moment you arrive you can feel the equatorial sun scrape that wintry rust from your body. You can hear waves crashing in the distance and taste one of the many exquisite Mexican beers not named Corona (the best are Negra Modelo and Pacifico). But it is also a land of contradictions, a place where globalization is creeping through a once unique seascape like a kudzu vine. The beaches are awash with commerce, and the hotels are packed with “ugly Americans.” Each day, the swelling tide of Yankee tourism seems to diminish the city’s ample charm a little more. If you have the good fortune to visit Puerto Vallarta, you’ll find its most defining and interesting characteristic is the interplay between everything you’ve dreamed a tropical paradise to be and everything you’re afraid it has become.
My girlfriend, my brother, his wife, and I made our way to the Jalisco province of Mexico via Chicago and stayed for a very affordable rate at the Villa del Palmar, a resort style hotel that was one of many between the airport and the downtown. Puerto Vallarta bends around the Bahia de Banderas like a crooked arm at the base of the Sierra Madre Mountains. The downtown strip lies directly across the bay from the hotels, and both are perfectly positioned to see the sun setting each evening. We arrived at the end of the dry season, just after the spring breakers had ravaged the landscape and before the rains came and transformed the arid hills into dense jungle. We were hopeful that our timing and the fact that two of us were fluent in Spanish would allow us to enjoy the city’s well-worn tourist path, but also deviate from it when we chose.
When we set foot on the Gustavo Diaz Ordaz International Airport tarmac, we were following in glamorous footsteps. The village originally called “Las Penas de Santa Maria Guadalupe” had enjoyed a wild ride from unanimity to its current status as the Jessica Simpson of Mexico—curvaceous, attractive, maddeningly brilliant and ridiculously stupid at the same time (Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton are in a constant battle to be Cancun’s comparison point. Currently, I feel Lindsay is winning, but this is a debate for another time.) Puerto Vallarta’s rise to prominence began when two starlets of a different era arrived, Ava Gardner and Elizabeth Taylor, the former to star alongside Richard Burton in John Huston‘s adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play, The Night of the Iguana, and the latter to star alongside him on secluded beaches and in softly lit bedrooms. Taylor and Burton‘s affair, along with the sultry subject matter of the film, turned Puerto Vallarta into an international hotspot overnight and, in all likelihood, bewildered its then 12,500 residents. The city’s popularity and population only grew when, thirteen years later, it enjoyed another star turn as a destination for The Love Boat.
During our stay the residents were extremely friendly and helpful. Because so few of them had lived in Puerto Vallarta forty years ago, they seemed to view tourists as welcome visitors, sources of economic prosperity rather than trespassers trampling their culture. This lack of animosity and the large percentage of English-speaking locals made the city feel extremely safe. You needn’t be afraid of exploring the downtown at night or wandering off the edges of the map you were given at the hotel. Though there is still a sense of being somewhere foreign and unpredictable, you can take wrong turns and indulge curiosities without putting yourself in any danger. This delicate balance of mystery and safety is one of Puerto Vallarta’s strongest attractions, particularly for anyone who wants to experience Mexico but like me, inexplicably took French in high school.
Like all winter wanderers, we spent our first day thawing out at the nearest available beach, which the people at the Villa del Palmar were kind enough to provide for us. The beach stretched across the property of several hotels, including a monstrous, new resort that should be ready sometime in the summer of 2009. The sounds of distant construction aside, I was filled with contentment when I felt the sand beneath my toes and was welcomed by a breeze that kept the temperature on the razor’s edge between too hot and too cold. I was thrilled by the seclusion of the place, the way its L shaped shore and the mountains that encompassed it made it seem to have a life of its own, one completely separate from the world I’d left behind, the way the azure water slowly turned to indigo and seemed to fall suddenly away when it reached the horizon. In short, I had a sense of wanderlust fulfilled. This feeling of being somewhere distant and unreachable (though I could still get roaming cell phone service) only increased the first time I put my limited Spanish vocabulary to use. A woman shuffled over the sand in my direction, back arched under the weight of a myriad of rainbow colored blankets, young daughter in tow. “Would you like a blanket, amigo?” she asked. With apparent pride, I smiled and said “no, gracias.” I was pleased with myself for being so polite but firm, not realizing that it was already too late. The signal that new blood had arrived was already being transmitted.
Over the course of the day, I learned to repeat “no, gracias” as rhythmically and naturally as I knew to blink. Jewelry? No, gracias. T-shirts? No, gracias. Booze cruise? No, gracias. Fake tattoos to officially mark you as a jackass-American willing to spend money dios mio? No, gracias. In the midst of these bi-hourly interruptions to stretches of total relaxation, I learned an important travel lesson, one well worth passing on to anyone considering a trip to Mexico: Fear the word, “amigo.” This is, in fact, the Spanish word for “gringo sucker.”
In time for happy hour and the sunset, we took a bus from outside our hotel to the downtown, El Centro. Taxis are plentiful and cheap in Puerto Vallarta, but the bus is just as convenient and offers a closer glimpse of local life. It proves one of the very few places in the tourist section of P.V. where you can experience local culture that is not in fact produced for you.
In about ten minutes we reached our destination, a well-organized and easily explored grid of streets that I had been daydreaming about all afternoon (and yet immediately surpassed my expectations). We ambled down, El Malecon, the waterfront drive where bars, restaurants, and silversmiths overlooked the sea, and young men slowly cruised in their cars while playing their music loudly. Marking the distance between these stores and eateries, there were streets that began at the water’s edge and disappeared into the hills, each lined with the white walls of Spanish colonial architecture and patches of bright vibrant color that shined against this backdrop. The statues spaced evenly along the promenade were a revelation: gods and goddesses swirling in a maelstrom towards the palms, twisting in the midst of physical transformation, looking down upon their thrones, and ordering their monks to build them a ladder to the heavens. The synthesis of these sights and sounds created the atmosphere you crave when traveling southward. If you want history and refinement, if you want the waltz, go to Europe. But if you want creativity and vitality, the samba, the salsa, or the tango, go to a place like Puerto Vallarta. As the sunset waned and spread it’s pinks and oranges across the horizon, we passed the Cathedral of Our Lady Guadalupe that towered over the town, turned left along the brine river where children were still playing, and walked through a faintly lit open market shaded by banyan trees. Finally, we crossed the river and curved back towards El Malecon.
Then, the dream unraveled. The very last building on this paradise corridor was in fact a Hooters.
Now, I’m a red-blooded American male. In certain situations, I might be willing to listen to arguments that Hooters itself is paradise. But not here. Not now. Not in the middle of the “Romantic Zone,” two hundred yards from the Virgin Guadalupe‘s cathedral, in the village of Puerto Vallarta, in the state of Jalisco, in the nation of Mexico. Our visions of salsa and tango were eclipsed, and in their place we could see the insidious bumping and grinding of drunken college kids.
And then as quickly as it had appeared, the nightmare faded. We found ourselves on the streets running parallel to El Malecon, amidst restaurants of all styles and art galleries filled with daring and intriguing work. We walked past gift shops filled with regional crafts, scrawling down names and addresses so we could return the next day. Struck by that overwhelming desire for food brought on by a few sunset margaritas, we continued up the hill, eventually passing out of this suddenly discovered art district. It seemed as if we had been transported from Mexico to Myrtle Beach, and then to Chelsea, and then to Mexico once more. We were diving through wave after wave of varying culture, having to travel no further than a block or two for something new.
We followed our well-penned directions around the places where the road curved and seemed about to disappear. We passed by apartments and said buenos noches, to the men sitting just outside their front doors, fanning themselves, and watching Chivas Guadalajara’s football match (yes, I call it football, not soccer—I’m pretentious about my footie.) We watched young girls walk arm in arm with young boys in the nighttime heat, moving slowly, but speaking with that teenage urgency. Suddenly, I wanted to buy an apartment, to stay and live in Puerto Vallarta and learn how to navigate it, discover which parts of its culture were theirs and which parts a reflection of my own. It was too tall a task for a four-day vacation, but the import of this desire was that I was falling in love with P.V., contradictions and all.
Puerto Vallarta has so much to offer, not the least of which are sunshine and sea air. But its most enduring gift is the vision you have of what it once must have been. If you’re considering a trip to Mexico, and you should be, Puerto Vallarta is a wonderful entry point, alluring, and safe, with a Sam’s Club if you need it. But I’m certain, that as you return home, you will crave a deep, true Mexican experience. So book your trip to P.V. and enjoy your first taste of our neighbor to the south. Then go sign up for those Spanish classes and get yourself ready for next year.