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On the last day of school, I wrote my exams like a madman and hightailed it home to grab my backpack, said a quick goodbye to my host family and took off to catch a bus to Puerto Vallarta to meet up with my boy! Time couldn't pass fast enough!

Arriving in Puerto Vallarta, I amused myself with how cheap/ballsy I have become, especially considering the freaked out girl I was a month ago. Taxi drivers didn't seem interested in giving me a decent price to my hotel, so I'd tell them they were crazy and move on the the next. Kind of retarded on my part, seeing that they were all lined up and each one could hear the exchange I had with the last and would just tell me the same thing. But still. I didn't want to pay so much. Cheap Ballsy Girl had to have her say. In the end I paid 180 pesos; maybe a deal, maybe not, but I just wanted to see Trevor!!!

PV was absolutely awesome!! We ended up staying in Old Vallarta, in an ancient (and cheap!) little hotel that was about a 15 minute walk to the beach, and maybe a 25 minute walk to the Malecon (the famous boardwalk tourist central part of PV). We loved it!! It wasn't fancy by any means, just simple and clean and quaint!

First day in PV we just sorta wandered around, up and down the beach, sampled tequila after tequila (discovering CHOCOLATE tequila - fabulous on vanilla ice cream!) and did some shopping in the stores off the Malecon. In each country we visit, rather than loading up on tourist junk, we love to buy one nice piece of "art" - whether it's a carving or a painting or a sculpture we don't really care, what matters is just that it's authentic and that we're both really pulled to it. We hadn't planned to find anything in PV because of how touristy it is, but we came across these incredible sculptures called Catrinas, which are skeleton figures of elite men and women from the time of the revolution. They were created by a man named Posada who drew for the newspaper in the early 1900's. Seeing the extreme wealth variation in society, he wanted to make a social commentary - which was that the "elite" were just as human as everyone else and would one day die too. The whole idea of that, the message behind it, is what sold us and we bought two!

For day two, we made plans with my friend Ruth Ellen and her husband Jared from Canada. Ruth Ellen and I work together and it just worked out that they were going to be at an all-inclusive during the same week that we'd be in Puerto Vallarta. We cabbed it to their resort (200 pesos!! My god taxis in PV are expensive!) and the four of us walked about 9 km down the beach to a little town called Bucerias - which we were told was Puerto Vallarta "in the olden days." There wasn't much to see, but we had so much fun just hanging out and wandering around with them. Walking 9km down the beach sounds almost romantic (and kind of is), but the returning 9km back after a day in the sun was a bit like torture. We didn't quite plan that one out.

Day three ... horse back riding adventure!!! Neither of us are horseback riding junkies at home, but we've done it a few times in our travels (The Galapagos and Kenya) and really loved it. So instead of lounging around the beach, we signed ourselves up for 8 full fun filled hours of riding in the Sierra Madre Mountains. Not quite the brightest moment in Team Canada history. Two hours in, we knew were in trouble - neither of us knew our bums could feel like that!! The ride itself was wonderful though; it was just Trevor and I with our guide Tomas and three beautiful, healthy and well trained horses ... we rode first up a mountain for a lookout over Puerto Vallarta, then down the back to have lunch at a waterfall. We thought the ride would be on groomed trails, but yet again we missed the mark and found ourselves literally scaling down the mountain. My horse was quite timid and took his time, but Trevor's horse had no fear and would just charge right down the rocks and terrain, sometimes even bumping into my slow and cautious horsey (which would then create a little scuffle that had me certain I was going to be thrown down the mountain). At the bottom, we rode through a little river and then got to really gallop back to the ranch (the first time for both of us - so much fun!!) where we finished with dinner in a great little restaurant.

We also managed to squeeze in a night out, first hitting up a little local bar with live music, then moving onto Senor Frogs and finishing up at some unknown club that was awesome! In the spirit of all things Mexican, we did tequila shot after tequila shot in Bar Numero Uno, not really realizing that 15 shots will make you a little more than tipsy when you finally stand up 3 hours later! Perfect time for dancing!! Senor Frogs was a tacky waste of time: we got there right in time for a tourist bikini contest (gag), where we watched drunk girls embarrass themselves to a crowd of yucky men taking pictures. That didn't last long for us and we moved on to the mystery bar which was FUN ... good latino music, crazy strobe lights (think seizure), tons of class (haha, or maybe the tequila shots just made it seem that way) ... a good redemption from El Frog disaster.

Final verdict on Puerto Vallarta: We'd definitely return! The thing that stood out to us the most was the friendliness of the people. Everywhere we went, people just wanted to chat with us ... and with the experiences of all our other travel destinations in mind, we were always a bit on edge, waiting for the sales pitch or the swindle, but it wasn't like that there. People just wanted to say hi, to welcome us, to ask if we needed anything. We LOVED that!! We felt incredibly safe there; walking home from the club at 4:30am didn't faze us and we even stopped a few time to make buddies on the street and at OXXO.

That was it for PV - just four nights, then back to GDL for a few days of "This has been Kristena's fabulous life for the past 6 weeks" ... I really loved the city and wanted to share some of my favorite places and people with Trevor (including my ever feeding host family!) As for that list of "still need to do" ... the only one we managed to check off was the donkey - I finally saw my Mexican donkey, but he was mean and tried to charge us. Not cool Mexican donkey, not cool. What an ass! :P

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