Post Vallarta zen

We spent the weekend in Puerto Vallarta and didn’t travel much beyond our hotel complex. We had the ocean right at our front door, and an Oxxo convenience store just a few blocks away, which sold salty snacks and elusive-in-Mexico-City Coors Light. Sitting in our balcony jacuzzi and sipping a Coors… life was just about perfect at that moment.

We stayed at the Playa Hotel Conchas Chinas, an older, charming spot on the south side of PV. All the 19 rooms there have ocean views, and they’ve got two restaurants and a small beach area. On Saturday after breakfast, we plopped ourselves under a palapa, ordered a bucket of beers (it was two-for-one!) and read and listened to the waves. The only vendors were quiet men walking around with skewers of fish and shrimp, and they only stopped if you flagged them down. Of course I did — had to try the shrimp doused in lime and hot sauce.

Even though Mexico City is less than two hours away by plane, the place felt much closer to California. We heard a lot of California accents, saw lots of tanned college guys in Hollister T-shirts and flip-flops, and Audrina Patridge-y girls in huge sunglasses and smocked coverups. Flour tortillas, not corn, came with food, which I was lukewarm about. On Sunday we ate real nachos — also hard to find in Mexico City — at a bar called Andale, whose logo was a Mexican in a sombero sitting next to a donkey. The waiter kept asking random people who walked by, “Ready for lunch, amigos?”

Overall, what really struck me about Puerto Vallarta was the amount of money there — or at least in Nuevo Vallarta, the area near the airport. In the taxi heading to our hotel, American-style strip malls lined the avenue, and high-rise hotels and condo towers were grouped along the shore. One billboard advertised “the new luxury beachfront address” next to a photo of a new condo development. We also sped by the most gigantic Liverpools department store ever, at the Galerias Vallarta mall. It was practically the size of Dallas City Hall.

Of course, at my insistence, we did take advantage of the upper-class scene — all that money means PV has some fabulous restaurants. We went to a place called Trio on Saturday night for fresh Mediterranean food. Everything was delicious: homemade bread and garlic butter, sauteed calamari in a spicy tomato broth, homemade ricotta ravioli, the seafood couscous with chunks of marlin, octopus and shrimp…

I didn’t want to leave, but it was kind of nice to come back to cool, rainy weather in Mexico City. Puerto Vallarta felt like a sauna.

A few more pictures from our trip: