Advertisement
Published: March 13th 2011
Edit Blog Post
Just finished up a week in Puerto Vallarta. We took advantage of great weather throughout the week to find a pleasant balance of seeing the local sights, laying in the sun, swimming, and general relaxing.
We stayed in a condo owned by a family member about 4 km South of old town PV the whole week. It was a wonderful place, with an absolutely beautiful view of the bay and a large balcony, open living space and kitchen that always kept the water in view with ongoing waves softly crashing to the beach below to serve as a pleasant reminder of where we were.
During the course of the week we made day trips nearly every day North into Puerto Vallarta or South to Boca or the Zoo. Besides sitting on the balcony with a book, crossword, or beer (or any happy combination of them) or sitting by the pool with the same, I think our favorite activity may have been the trip to the PV zoo.
We primarily used local buses to get around. These generally run up and down the highway every fifteen minutes or so (7 pesos/person), with buses going South from town and buses going North
from town. It was a little tricky transferring when going from the condo to Bucerias or the airport, but all it takes is once to figure it out and bus drivers are generally cool answering questions. The bus stops are pretty tough to spot in town (on a corner, but the mystery is which one) but seemed to pick people up wherever. This was largely true outside of town on the highway, as there were clearly marked stops here and there but people who knew what they were doing could get on in between. A clearly marked stop, however, may consist of a sign on the side of the road with the waiting area or platform optional. Notice the photo of the crawlspace next to the highway at our bus stop. This was particularly exciting when semis or large buses came by. The buses themselves were pretty uniform, unlike the chicken buses we saw in Guatemala, and were frequently 50-50 tourists and locals.
Puerto Vallarta Zoo The zoo was about a 15 minute bus ride South from where we were staying, then a 20-30 minute walk from the highway through a neighborhood to the complex. There were touring
vans taking people but we just walked. Once inside the zoo we bought little food bags that turned out to have carrots, bread, seeds, and a variety of other menu items before making our way down the path among the animals.
The Zoo has a little bit of everything, sometimes all within a single enclosure. We saw a cage of
"domestic house cats" and there was one area with goats, a donkey, chickens, and I think some geese. On the other side of the path might be a camel, with leopards a little ahead in the cage next to the monkeys and flamingos. Those are just around the corner from the zebras and the enclosure of rabbits. (Fortunately, rabbits I'm familiar with and not ones
like this.) A really cool thing that set this zoo apart from others I've been to is that most of the animals are just on the other side of a chain-link fence. I think the leopards had a double chain link fence, but all of the animals were right there in front of you.
At the very end of the zoo tour path was a canopy area with a girl sitting next to a
4 month-old tiger and a leopard cub only a couple weeks old. For a small fee Lauryn and I each spent five minutes with one of them. I was thinking of stories about stupid tourists who get themselves eaten by tigers in foreign countries so I was very cautious with the tiger, though the leopard was crawling all over Lauryn with an ongoing series of grunts and squeaks. Very cool experience, and one we would definitely recommend to others.
Boca and Yelapa One day we caught the local bus down to Boca and took a water taxi to Yelapa, a town only accessible by boat that had a great reputation. We had heard about possibly seeing whales (we didn't see any) but there were some interesting birds and the shorelines were neat to see as we went around the edge of the bay.
Yelapa itself is essentially a beach with a couple cafes on the sand and a lot of chairs to lounge in. There is a little village on the hill next to it (which you walk over to see the waterfall - main non-beach attraction there but not a very big waterfall, though we might
be spoiled by our local waterfalls in the Gorge.) We walked to the falls, headed back to the beach to read for a while, then got some snacks and a beer while we waited for our boat to come pick us up and take us back.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.156s; Tpl: 0.019s; cc: 8; qc: 45; dbt: 0.0965s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb