Travel

Post Vallarta zen

June 22, 2009 by Lesley Tellez

We spent the weekend in Puerto Vallarta and didn’t travel much beyond our hotel complex. We had the ocean right at our front door, and an Oxxo convenience store just a few blocks away, which sold salty snacks and elusive-in-Mexico-City Coors Light. Sitting in our balcony jacuzzi and sipping a Coors… life was just about perfect at that moment.

We stayed at the Playa Hotel Conchas Chinas, an older, charming spot on the south side of PV. All the 19 rooms there have ocean views, and they’ve got two restaurants and a small beach area. On Saturday after breakfast, we plopped ourselves under a palapa, ordered a bucket of beers (it was two-for-one!) and read and listened to the waves. The only vendors were quiet men walking around with skewers of fish and shrimp, and they only stopped if you flagged them down. Of course I did — had to try the shrimp doused in lime and hot sauce.

Even though Mexico City is less than two hours away by plane, the place felt much closer to California. We heard a lot of California accents, saw lots of tanned college guys in Hollister T-shirts and flip-flops, and Audrina Patridge-y girls in huge sunglasses and smocked coverups. Flour tortillas, not corn, came with food, which I was lukewarm about. On Sunday we ate real nachos — also hard to find in Mexico City — at a bar called Andale, whose logo was a Mexican in a sombero sitting next to a donkey. The waiter kept asking random people who walked by, “Ready for lunch, amigos?”

Overall, what really struck me about Puerto Vallarta was the amount of money there — or at least in Nuevo Vallarta, the area near the airport. In the taxi heading to our hotel, American-style strip malls lined the avenue, and high-rise hotels and condo towers were grouped along the shore. One billboard advertised “the new luxury beachfront address” next to a photo of a new condo development. We also sped by the most gigantic Liverpools department store ever, at the Galerias Vallarta mall. It was practically the size of Dallas City Hall.

Of course, at my insistence, we did take advantage of the upper-class scene — all that money means PV has some fabulous restaurants. We went to a place called Trio on Saturday night for fresh Mediterranean food. Everything was delicious: homemade bread and garlic butter, sauteed calamari in a spicy tomato broth, homemade ricotta ravioli, the seafood couscous with chunks of marlin, octopus and shrimp…

I didn’t want to leave, but it was kind of nice to come back to cool, rainy weather in Mexico City. Puerto Vallarta felt like a sauna.

A few more pictures from our trip:

Under a palapa on Playa Conchas Chinas

Chilled Pacifico, anyone?

Fresh caught lobsters for sale on the beach.

The view while eating breakfast on Sunday morning. We saw sea lions.

Charming, rustic Patzcuaro

May 21, 2009 by Lesley Tellez

I didn’t know much about Patzcuaro, Michoacán until a few months ago, when I decided to pitch a story based here. So here I am this weekend, working on said story. Arrived at noon today and I’m already in love with this town.

It’s hilly, and walkable, and all the buildings are rustic and topped with red-tiled roofs. Cars bump along on cobblestone streets. Just a few minutes ago, I saw a group of girls, probably 10 years old, walking down the street clutching colorful poofs of foklorico dresses. They were gabbing and all of them wore lipstick and eyeshadow.

I’m staying at a rustic, quiet inn. All the rooms face this courtyard.

For lunch, I ate my weight in mercado food, including a 15-peso cocktel de pulpo and camarón, sprinkled with diced habanero. (And a tostada. And a corunda. And a corn-on-the-cob with lime and chile. And queso ice cream streaked with boysenberry marmelade.)

Stopped by the basilica, and saw this chapel….

I forgot how blue the sky could be. Which is kind of sad. Just went through my pictures and almost all of my pictures them are of plants, or the sky.

Exhausted from waking up at 5:45 this morning. Gonna have a glass of wine and go to bed. Tomorrow I’m off to a yoga class… in my pajama pants, since I didn’t bring any yoga clothes. Who knew they had yoga in Patzcuaro?

What it’s like to swim in a cenote

April 3, 2009 by Lesley Tellez

For some reason, I pictured cenotes to be kind of like sinkholes on the side of the road. I don’t know where I got this from, but I had this whole image of a highway worker picking up trash, seeing a cenote, stepping around it, and calling over his shoulder to the next guy, “Hey! Don’t step in that!”

Actually, cenotes — from what I’ve gathered anyway — are way too large for someone to accidentally dunk his foot. They’re natural, fresh-water pools, and some are in caves. The ones I visited on a hacienda outside Cuzama in the Yucatan were dark, serene, eerie, mystical things. Swimming in them was a brain trip. How does one swim in a cave? Aren’t caves for walking and peering at gnarly, witch-fingery rock formations?

We traveled to these cenotes by horse-drawn buggy, because there’s no other way to reach them unless you want to walk for 8 kilometers in the blistering sun. At the first cenote, we climbed down a set of rickety wooden stairs and found a calm, blue sheet of glass. It didn’t even look like water. I was kind of scared. Maybe Nessie at Loch Ness had a Yucatecan cousin?

Our guide was amused. “They’re completely safe,” he said.

So we started swimming, which is really the only way to see everything. Tree roots hung down from the ceiling like Rapunzel hair. It was amazingly quiet, as if the mouth of the cave had suddenly inhaled and was now waiting while we finished our frolicking. Before the loud American teenagers got there, the only sounds were of Joy and I pushing and pulling the water, and the occasional bat making a weird, high-pitched noise. (And then me saying, “Oh god, are there bats here?”)

The Yucatan has more than 5,000 cenotes, about 3,000 of which are “registered,” meaning the state knows generally where they are. Our guide laughed when I asked if they had healing powers.

I really can’t wait to swim in them again. It was among the weirdest, coolest experiences ever. Next time I’m bringing proper shoes and a towel though. My cute little Privo flats were pretty much ruined after this trip.

The journey to Uxmal

March 30, 2009 by Lesley Tellez

We got to Campeche on Saturday night, and for a few minutes there, we didn’t know how we were going to get to Uxmal, the next leg of our journey. A tourist official told us no buses went from Campeche to Uxmal. Employees at the Best Western concurred. I thought: Should we hire a driver? Attempt to bus it to Merida first? Uxmal was only an hour-and-a-half away by car, for gosh’s sakes. There had to be a public transportation route somewhere.

Luckily Joy ducked into a hostel in Campeche’s Centro Historico, and a nice worker told her that a second-class bus left for Uxmal the next morning at 9 a.m. So, bright and early the next day, we found the bus terminal and off we went, through rural Campeche and rural Yucatán, Michael Jackson and early 90s grunge blasting on the bus’s speakers. (Yay for drivers with good taste.)

Women with babies and old ladies in bright, embroidered huipiles got on and off; so did men with loose, unbuttoned shirts and backpacks. People rode bikes on the side of the road. Quaint, chubby little Mayan homes with thatched roofs lay here and there.

At 12:30, the bus pulled over and opened its doors.

“Is this the Uxmal stop?” I asked the bus driver. He nodded and looked bored.

There wasn’t much to see; just the road and a few buildings. Also, I really had to go to the bathroom. I had been dreaming of using the restroom at our very nice hacienda hotel for the past hour. And now this music dude was dropping us off on dirt — it was almost too much to bear. I tried calm myself using my yoga breathing.

Joy went to ask where the hell we were, and thankfully we happened to be at the hotel itself, in the back. I’d never been so happy to see a bathroom. Next time I’m not drinking two cups of coffee and half a bottle of water before getting on a three-hour bus.

The view at our hotel:

Scenes from Campeche

March 28, 2009 by Lesley Tellez

View from our hotel room

Flan and cake from a dessert cart on the square. You buy a slice and walk around and eat it.

Off to Uxmal tomorrow!

Pachucans love their pasties

March 13, 2009 by Lesley Tellez

I’m sorry I haven’t blogged as much lately. I’ve been working on a few freelance stories, one of which has taken me to Pachuca, an industrial town about one-and-a-half hours from Mexico City.

In the 19th century, Cornish miners came here to work the silver mines. They brought the savory beef pies known as pasties with them. (Not the other pasties, ahem.)

Pasties are everywhere here. Except they spell them “pastes.” There are even pastie chains, including Pastes Kiko’s, where I grabbed a quick, crispy mess of a pastie yesterday, filled with chicken in green mole sauce. I left with crumbs all over my lap. They also had pasties filled with rice pudding there.

Last night I went to Restaurante Mina La Blanca, a place near my hotel, and the waitress brought a plate of pasties to the table. She looked at me like I was a complete idiot when I asked, “What are these?”

I dug into the red mole version — that’s the half-eaten one above. It tasted like an empanada, but with a crisper, buttery crust. And it didn’t shatter or fall apart like the one at Kiko’s. I don’t even want to think about the amount of butter in that thing.

Might try to make pasties at home someday. Maybe I could find some Cornish mining songs to play while I work. Or the theme song from Pastes Kiko’s.

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