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This is a travel blog after all! I haven’t posted about our two-week vacation back in January, in the hopes that Ian might post himself. As it seems that’s not happening, I thought I’d put up a quick summary and some photos.

We had a great time! It was our first time in Mexico and we stayed at the NH Krystal just outside Puerto Vallarta.

I hadn’t realized the official name of Mexico is Estados Unidos Mexicanos, and there are 31 states within it (our best guesses were between 12 and 18). Puerto Vallarta is in Jalisco, the birthplace of the mariachi and tequila. We experienced a bit of both!

People were incredibly hospitable, from the very helpful taxi drivers (it helped that taxi fares are a flat rate everywhere within P.V., so there was no need to haggle) to even the street sellers, who were friendly and funny and very chatty. Everyone seemed to appreciate my limited attempts at speaking Spanish.

I absolutely loved the food. P.V. has some great seafood restaurants, but my favourite dishes were the tamales and anything else with pork. The desserts were also yummy!

Next to the resort was a supermarket called Soriana, very well-stocked and with a nice bakery section (freshly-made tortillas and tortilla chips daily) and a great bulk section. We bought kilograms and kilograms of fresh guacamole (about $3/kg) and salsa, both tomato and verde. The queso fresco was to die for.

We also drank gallons of margaritas. My favourite was a banana concoction best enjoyed at a beach-side table. A few too many, and the palm trees started to look like this:

One of the weirdest parts of the trip was listening to the speeches at the formal dinner being held one night at the poolside restaurant at our hotel.

It quickly became clear that it was the annual meeting of AA and AlAnon! What a strange choice for a conference venue - the heart of overindulgence, cocktails and Corona! Fortunately, the speeches didn’t deter us from finishing 6 bottles of wine between 5 people that night.

We (partially) made up for the excessive eating and drinking by playing tennis almost every day. After a quick trip to the nearby Walmart, we had two tennis racquets and lots of tennis balls. Ian’s dad turned out to be a formidable opponent, Ian worked on his killer serve, and we all got our butts kicked by Erik.

During the second week, we signed up for a $28 all-day, all-you-can-drink and lunch included boat cruise (a special price just for us, negotiated by Gregg!). The boat was called the Vallarta Sol and it took us from the Puerto Vallarta marina, south across the Puerto Vallarta shores and down to Los Arcos for some snorkelling. The fish were well-trained to come up for bread crusts and their photo op:

After this quick stop, the boat continued south to Las Animas for lunch. The beach there was unbelievably gorgeous.

The boat accidentally left four people behind as we left for Quimixto, another 15 minutes south. Fortunately they caught up, just in time for the horseback riding up to the waterfall. Unfortunately I have no photos of this part of the trip, as I was too busy trying to get my almost-dead horse to keep up with the people who walked up on foot! Poor horsey. The waterfall was not bad, and some of the people from the boat jumped off the cliff into the water. One unfortunate girl hesitated, lost her footing, and fell, skimming the side of the cliff on her way down. Unbelievably, she was ok!

On the way back to the marina in P.V., the boat stopped so we could watch some huge manta rays and two whales in the water. Thank goodness we didn’t encounter them while snorkelling!

On a different night, we went to a Mexican fiesta called Fiesta La Iguana. It was so totally kitschy, but fun: again, all-you-can-eat, and all-you-can-drink, plus musical and dance performances, a cowboy on a horse, some cock fighting, some knife juggling, followed by lots of fireworks.

Can’t wait to go back!