PUERTA VALLARTA, MEXICO (2020)

She brewed the coffee in a large metal bucket, which she then served to us in tiny Styrofoam cups. (It was weirdly delicious, though you could definitely taste the metal bucket.)

I stayed in a hostel my first week in Puerta Vallarta. My hope was to meet some other travelers, before I secluded myself at an AirBnb. This worked out well. At the hostel I met a young South American musician who practiced his saxophone at night in the courtyard and on weekends played in a popular band at a nightclub in PV.  This person was the star of the hostel.  All the girls were in love with him. And yet he was very nice and humble and on one day was showing his mother around, who had come to visit him.

I also met an attractive Australian woman.  She was sort of a Mexican travel guru and explained to me about renting apartments directly from Mexicans, (“just go to a neighborhood you want to live in and look for an EN RENTA sign.  Then call the number and negotiate a deal.”).  This method would result in paying $150 to $200 a month, to grateful Mexicans, who were glad to have you.  I didn’t do this but I liked this woman’s style and got her number and called her several times—in affect asking her out—but to no avail.  She was a person who was constantly on the move. 

Meanwhile, I found an English Speaking AA meeting in the center of town.  This meeting was located in a small “club house” on a strip in old town known for its sensual massage.  Most of the people at the meetings were elderly gay men from Canada.  (PV is known for its gay scene).  Apparently during non-COVID times, the meeting had other contingents as well:  mainly a feisty bunch of middle-aged female ex-pats (also mostly from Canada).

As it turned out a rift had formed between these two groups and now the women had their own AA meetings on Zoom, and seemed to prefer to avoid the older gay men, who tended to be crotchety, highly irreverent and casual about mask requirements and other restrictions.  They also enjoyed making fun of the women, I noticed.    

There were actually several rifts going at this meeting.  There was also an anti-mask contingent who would show up and make a fuss by not leaving, but also not wearing masks. 

The elderly gay Canadians would sometimes follow the rules and sometimes not.  The women would occasionally show up in small groups and seemed determined to impose their will on the elderly gay men.  These women would then freak out about the masks and storm out.  Other people would storm in, then storm out.  Some of these people had lived in PV for decades.  Everyone seemed to be from mid- or western- Canada.  So these feuds had extended history. 

Meanwhile there was a friendly Mexican woman who was the caretaker of the clubhouse.  It was her job to brew the coffee, which she did, in a large metal bucket, which she then served to us in tiny Styrofoam cups.  (The coffee was weirdly delicious, though you could definitely taste the metal bucket).  She also was in charge of the body temperature gun and each person who entered was required to record their name, age, and their current body temperature into the official log.

Seeing that the elderly gay Canadian men were mostly in charge of things I made sure to stay on their side during the various arguments and tiffs.  But even among these men long-running disputes existed.  This dampened my hope that living into your 80s would somehow free you from petty human conflicts.

Still, I loved this group and never missed a meeting.  The stories the men told were very entertaining and instructive.  These men had lived their lives in places like Saskatchewan or Northern Alberta, and yet their misadventures as active alcoholics where as colorful, disastrous and complicated as the wildest stories I’ve heard in the biggest cities in the world.  Also, they were very funny.  

What else did I do in Puerta Vallarta?  Not much.  There was nothing to do.  Just a warning if you go there.  A lot of people seemed to be honeymooning there.  A lot of couples and tourists took their picture next to one particular statue of a dolphin.  There were sunsets every night since PV is on the west coast.  But I never found a good place to enjoy them.

The best thing that happened to me in Puerta Vallarta was a relatively expensive AirBnB, ($350/wk) I splurged on during my second week.  Here I had a very nice bed, a decent kitchen and bath, unlimited use of ALEXA (which spoke English and was surprisingly good with requests like: “play some mid-period Rolling Stones”.)

Outside my apartment was an extravagant terrace which was probably intended for large group entertaining.  It had multiple couches, chairs, a barbeque, a metal roof, with lights strung around.  The surrounding vegetation—giant green leaves everywhere—made you feel like you were deep in the Amazon jungle.

While sitting on this terrace, which I did every morning, you could interact with exotic birds, chickens, cats, the two dogs of the host. Most interesting of all: directly across a narrow ravine, on a separate property, lived a donkey who was tied to a tree.  The donkey woke you up every morning with its braying. This had been noted by previous guests on the AirBnb website.  The donkey was as loud as a foghorn and shook the walls of my bedroom at dawn every morning.  For some reason I didn’t mind this.  Nor did I mind the chickens who were always walking around on the railing of the terrace, squawking at ear level.  Nor did I mind the dogs who tried to steal my food, or the cats who were always underfoot.  The donkey tied to a tree, was the most fascinating and heartbreaking entity to contemplate.  It looked like a cruel way to treat a donkey: leaving him tied to a tree by a three foot rope, all day every day.

The one respite the donkey had was that the chickens would sometimes climb the ravine on his side, to eat the little bits of straw left over from his feeding.  The donkey seemed to enjoy the visits of the chickens.  He would flick his ears and shift his weight.  But mostly he just stood there.  All day.  Every day.  As the Buddhists would say:  this was his one precious sentient life.  And there he was:  tied to a tree by a three foot rope.  And occasionally visited by chickens.  And I suppose, occasionally put to work by his owner, carrying a refrigerator or some other heavy object up or down a hill ….