Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 29, 1995 TAG: 9510300001
SECTION: TRAVEL PAGE: G-8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAVID ALDRICH
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
These talented and testy movie stars squabbled over everything except how they felt about Puerto Vallarta: they all agreed it was a tropical paradise. Wide sandy beaches lined the 40-mile horseshoe bay ringed by mountains. The weather was balmy, the people friendly, the town unspoiled.
Puerto Vallarta is no less beautiful today. Temperatures reach the 80s in February, warm Pacific waves splash onto the white beaches, and palm trees still sway in the breeze. But the town is no longer unspoiled. Far from it. John Huston's movie single-handedly created a resort city of 300,000 that attracts 700,000 visitors a year.
As a result, you won't come home from Puerto Vallarta feeling that you've learned a lot about Mexican culture or have seen the real Mexico. But you'll have fun. A person would in fact have to work very hard not to have fun in Puerto Vallarta. It's a friendly, laid-back place where the food is good, the water drinkable, and the prices low.
If you arrive from the wintry north, you'll probably grope through your luggage just long enough to find your swimsuit, then head for the water. The beaches are broad and sandy, the waves strong. If you tire of sunning and swimming, you can kayak, rent a sailboat, or go parasailing right off the beach ($30 for a 10-minute ride). For snorkeling and scuba diving, you'll need a boat to reach the good sites.
The widest and least crowded beaches belong to large hotels north of town, but are open to the public. The most interesting downtown beach is the disturbingly named Playa de Los Muertos ("Beach of the Dead"). Far from dead, it fills with sunbathers and strolling vendors selling everything from serapes to soft drinks, fish-on-a-stick to papier mache parrots.
Puerto Vallarta stretches for several miles along the bay. The downtown is crowded with cafes, jewelry stores, music, bumper-to-bumper cars and buses, polite sidewalk vendors, palms, white houses trimmed in violets, pinks, yellows, blues and greens - and more T-shirt shops per block than anywhere else in the world. This is a tourist town ... and it's delightful. The cool evenings are especially inviting, when the sidewalks and the seaside walkway - the Malecon - fill with equal numbers of visitors and residents. The town is well-policed and safe.
Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton liked Puerto Vallarta so well that they held their first wedding in its central cathedral. They then bought hillside homes connected by a pink bridge in a neighborhood called Gringo Gulch for its large American population. You'll want to stroll through this quiet and hilly section of town with its broad view of the bay. The pink bridge still stands.
A small river - the Rio Cuale - bisects Puerto Vallarta, with the newer hotels and Gringo Gulch to the north, the interesting and less-visited Old Town to the south. In the river's middle sits an island, the Isla Rio Cuale. At its east end you'll discover a peacefulness that is sometimes hard to find elsewhere in Puerto Vallarta.
People come here to read on the white iron benches, to stroll through the plantings of bamboo, hibiscus, mango and tulip trees, or to dine at quiet cafes. Women arrive daily to wash their clothes in the river. Iguanas laze on the rocks.
The other end of the island is livelier. Here you find rows of open-air shops selling bright blouses, pottery, sandals and the ubiquitous Mexican blanket in cheery red/blue/green/yellow stripes. As in much of Puerto Vallarta, there is music everywhere.
It comes from shops, it comes from car radios; it comes from workmen singing. All day you find yourself slipping from one overlapping musical zone into the next.
On the bridges, expect to be approached by amiable boys with plump, tame, pensive iguanas with which you can be photographed for a dollar or two, with the three-foot beast draped over your head if you're not squeamish.
Mexico is filled with ruins dating back many centuries. But the most popular ruin in Puerto Vallarta dates from 1963: the site of the filming of "Night of the Iguana." These remains lie six miles south of town on an unkempt knoll overlooking the ocean. An enormous hotel now overwhelms the adjacent bay, but you'll have fun scrambling among the roofless gray walls and trying to remember this or that scene from the movie. Look for iguanas sunning in the rubble. A taxi cost about $10 from downtown, or for under a dollar catch a white minibus labeled "Mismaloya" at Plaza Lazaro Cardenas. (Prices, given here in U.S. dollars, may change rapidly because of the peso's current fluctuations.)
For a look at rural Puerto Vallarta, follow the blacktop road beyond Mismaloya. You'll see red roosters pecking in dry river beds, and you'll hear them crowing. (The sound of crowing roosters is everywhere in Puerto Vallarta, even in upscale Gringo Gulch.)
You'll come upon small wooden houses covered with gorgeous tumbles of crimson bougainvillea, with a yard containing a spotted pig nosing in the dirt, an elderly VW bug, and a 12-foot satellite dish. And of course you'll hear music.
Whereas rain forest and palms cover the hills to the south of town, the north is a surprising contrast: a flat, dry, lightly inhabited desert that turns green only during the June-to-October rainy season. Your first stop northward should be Bucerias, a refreshing resort village frequented more by Mexicans than foreigners.
Dogs doze across sidewalks, pelicans bob on the waves, and men wade out chest deep to toss butterfly nets. Bringing back silvery footlong fish one or two at a time that they drop into pails, the fishermen will carry on a friendly conversation in whatever combination of Spanish/English you can manage.
Along the northern route lie quiet beaches such as Las Destiladeras, about a dozen miles north of town. On Wednesdays, the village of La Cruz de Huanacaxtle holds an open market that seems to stock one of everything.
Most visitors follow the road northward to where it ends at Punta Mita, an isolated beach where it's possible to snorkel directly from shore. Rocky islands and tiny fishing boats give the place character, but the beach is messy and there is no place to change into swim wear or buy food or drink.
If you're without a rental car, make an arrangement with a taxi driver. A leisurely four-hour ride along the coast to Punta Mita costs $40 or so.
Several Puerto Vallarta hotels sponsor evening fiestas with regional singers and dancers. The Krystal Vallarta's costs about $32. The buffet meal is excellent, the performers talented, and the evening ends with fireworks. But be prepared to be part of the tourist herd.
Evenings, you'll find yourself returning often to the downtown, whose streets fill with musicians, artists, vendors and strollers. There are many noisy bars, busy restaurants and shops, and of course a Hard Rock Cafe. Guidebooks tiresomely lament the loss of old Puerto Vallarta, but old Puerto Vallarta could not have handled three-quarters of a million happy visitors a year.
And movie crews haven't been chased away either - in recent years they've filmed everything from "Herbie Goes Bananas" to Arnold Schwarzenegger's "Predator."
by CNB