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.
