The West Commences: Viva Mexico!

I’m back in Puerto Vallarta and have just returned from a great evening with Ellen and Dick. As usual it began with Dick’s excellent margaritas and Ellen’s impeccable choice of appetizers, blue cheese and crackers with mixed nuts . Then we took a taxi to a restaurant I’d been to once before with them where we had fillet of red snapper, muy rico. They are so full of life and know and like, or at least have such astute and well-expressed opinions about, so many people that it’s never dull in their company. Now I’m back in my rooms enjoying the glow that comes after a few drinks and a good meal. The sliding door is open to reveal the vast black of the Bahia des Banderas surrounded on three sides by the bright lights of Vallarta and also to let in the warm evening breeze and the incessant whirring of somebody’s car alarm. It’s been going since I got home, but I feel so wonderful it only bothers me a bit.

I’ll jump back in time to my visit with Barb in La Penita. It was good to see her. She’s coping amazingly well; I think the complete break of a week with Faye in an all-inclusive gave her some much-needed change and rest that has enabled her to handle the details of the house that had to be looked into before the renters arrive very well. We had some good chats and swims and were invited for drinks and dinners by many of her friends, so we were well entertained. One of our swims was really amazing for me. We swam with pelicans. I’ve loved those birds since I first saw them; they seem to be the working- man’s bird. They’re big and ungainly looking; they fly low over the waves like cargo carriers deadheading home with no worries, and when they rise up, sweep back their wings and dive deep for a fish, it’s breathtaking how svelte they are and how arrow-like they cut through the water. And we were surrounded by them as well as by smaller terns, all plunging after a huge school of small fish that were everywhere, bumping into us and jumping out of the water around us. I’ve thought for quite a while lately that the idea of making a bucket list was a recent fad and a mug’s game, but if I’d ever joined the ‘listers’ and made one, I should have put near the top, ‘swimming with the pelicans.’ I had another encounter with a bird while I was in La Penita, a blue-footed booby flew so close to me as I walked the beach that I felt either his wing or the air close to his wing touch my hair as he passed. He settled on a rock nearby, which is how I was able to know that it was indeed a blue-footed booby.

The car alarm is still disturbing the calm of the evening, which reminds me of another loud and crazy aspect of life in ‘el cento’ de Vallarta, the buses. The taxi driver we had tonight said that the bus drivers here are the best in the world. I don’t know what standard he was using to judge them by, but if it has anything to do with wheeling the most baffed-out, shockless vehicles at the highest speed possible around the most pothole-ridden streets imaginable, then I guess I concur. They continue to rank among the world’s best. Today I sat in the front seat of one of them for the drive from the main Vallarta bus terminal to the bottom of my street. It was about a twenty-minute ride that at any amusement park would have cost much more than the 6.5 peso fare that I paid. As we careened from passing lanes to turning lanes to stopping zones, the knuckles of both my hands turned white from gripping my suitcase with one and the chrome bar around the driver’s seat with the other. But I arrived safely, even after the driver’s last passenger challenge, which was to carry on full tilt as if he was going to pass my stop, even though I was precariously perched by the door, until just beyond it when he braked hard and practically propelled me onto the road.

Viva Mexico!!!!!!