Paso Ancho Adventures

We arrived at the airport in PV after a long trip from Vancouver. The flight from Seattle was an hour late leaving, but through the magic of tail winds we arrived only a half hour late. Although for us it was an unusual event, we were looking forward to being picked up by Jose Luis for our foray into the hinterland of Paso Ancho, our first port of call on our three month odyssey in Mexico this winter.

Of course like all good plans, this one did not work to perfection. We waited hopefully for an hour and a half for some tall goodlooking man to arrive with a sign reading "Nigel and Geordie" in big block caps, but to no avail. We finally decided that we would risk it and took a taxi hoping to find the place using Geordie's memory of the picture from the internet.

The trip did not start auspiciously since our taxi driver was new to Vallarta and had never heard of Paso Ancho, but after some complex descriptions offered by the other taxi men, he set off. Geordie had a good idea of the route we needed too, so he was confident we would find the place. We did make it to Paso Ancho, but when we asked people in the area, they did not know the street name, Calle Cenzontle. One guy suggested it was up the nice steep cobbled street so we headed up only to be faced with a backhoe digging up the cross street cobbles, and although the workers were encouraging the driver to cross, he couldn't see the road because of the steep hill.

I got out to help direct the car, but also asked the backhoe operator if he knew our street and he just pointed to his ripped up cobblestones and said this was it! Well, that decided that. We got our bags out and left the taxi driver to back down the hill, and set off to walk west along the Calle and at the next cross street (Calle Faisan) found our apartment. Easy as pie. We also found someone to let us in who had a key, who also explained that Jose Luis had been called to a business meeting which explained his absence.

No matter, we settled in, unpacked a few things and waited around - it being 5:30 by then. Jose finally arrived, very apologetic, gave us a welcoming present of a bottle of Mexican white wine and paid us our taxi fare. Then he continued his apologies by inviting us to join him on his next tour to San Sebastan, a village way up in the hills, where Geordie has long wanted to go. Of course we accepted. Jose works for Vallarta Adventures which does lots of tours, and also operates a Canopy tour where one gets to swing through the trees like Tarzan. Geordie was thankful that that was not our recompense as he would have had to refuse. A flight to the 400 year old village of San Sebastian was much more to his liking.

I'll leave that tour to another entry. In any case we were happy to be in Paso Ancho and after checking our surroundings - roosters, chickens, donkeys, goats and sundry insects, we headed off to town via the rattletrap bus to have dinner in the more citified surroundings of Puerto Vallarta.

The bus trip to town takes about 20 minutes over cobbled roads which explains the rattletrap buses. They seem to have no suspension, and on one of our trips, the driver who was chatting with a friend, didn't notice one of the topes (rumble strips), went over it at speed, bouncing us all off the seats twice, throwing me against the seat ahead and giving my back a wrenching it certainly did not need. I've been hurting ever since. I bought some muscle relaxant drugs yesterday, finally, but I'm still waiting for them to kick in.

We have spent several days on the beach now, with friends from Palm Desert, Vancouver and sundry other places. The crowds are now arriving en masse. Today we expect several folk to descend upon the beach in the afternoon, Tom Bell arrived last night with friends from Vancouver in tow and the beach will be packed by Monday. We're moving into town that day, to stay at the Hotel Eloisa for six nights, before finally moving into our PV apartment.

Stay tuned for info about San Sebastian. It deserves it's own entry.

Hasta luego,
Nigel and Geordie