Mexico Pacific coast - off season

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The tourist seasons in Mexico are set not by the weather, but when the Americans and Canadians deign to head south. Christmas, Easter and Spring Break are therefore the high seasons and the rest of the time is the low season.

Apart from the Christian holidays the Mexican holiday season starts in July, just as the weather starts to deteriorate.

This year the weather on the Pacific coast was consistently fantastic in May and June and the low tourist numbers meant that there were bargains to be had.



Puerto Vallarta is the premier spot on this stretch of Mexico’s Pacific. It even has its own Lonely Planet guide.

The lively centrepiece of the town is a 2km malecon (promenade) along the sea front, bestowed with top notch statuary along its length.

This faces directly westward out to sea, showcasing the sunset every night and is definitely the place to be in the early evening.

Most nights we would treat ourselves to a 7-11 cappuccino and park ourselves on a handy bench to watch the sunset and strollers.

A couple of teams produced sand sculptures above the tide line. One life-sized reproduction of the last supper had to be seen to be believed.



We knew that we were going to stay here for a month, so we hunted around the back streets and found a hotel with apartments on the top floor for less than a tenner a night if we paid the lot upfront.

We found the beach to be adequate, if a little ordinary.

The whole stretch has been appropriated by hotels and restaurants so there were no sunbed renters.

We got around this by bribing on of the sunbed blokes at a nice hotel to let us have a pair.

This worked well for a couple of weeks until his bosses got wise to him. As a compromise we were allowed to stay there as long as we bought something from the bar, which actually worked out cheaper than the bribe if we waited until happy hour.



Thus we spent a most pleasant month in our apartment in Puerto Vallarta, with our days on the beach, our evenings on the malecon and our nights disturbed by the unmuffled exhausts and blaring radios of boy racers leaving the clubs at around 2am.





The little town of Melaque is situated on a sandy bay with the other little town of Bahia de Navidad about 2km further along the beach.

We thought it would be fun to walk between the two, which took about an hour along the soft sands. It was closer to two hours walking back as a gale force wind had blown up to blind us with sand and salt for the return journey.

Melaque would be a pleasant place in season, but this was one place where the lack of tourists was really apparent as the atmosphere was flat with many shops and restaurants closed.



Next stop around the coast was Manzanillo, a decent sized town with a promising wide arc of beach apparent as the bus entered the outskirts.

Unfortunately the budget hotels here were far below our acceptability threshold.

We spent a night in a courtyard style mid-range place but there was nothing about the town to encourage me to hang around for longer, so we moved on straightaway.



Zihuatanejo is a pleasant town with an unmemorisable name.

We stayed in a most welcoming backpackers hostel run by a Mexican lady and her Canadian husband.

There are a handful of excellent beaches. The one we spent most time on had waves breaking quite far out and rolling in at pace, ideal for boogie boarding. If I had known that we were going to stay there for a week I might have bought one.

There was also a good length malecon around the headland towards the marina, which sported a couple of nice places to have a beer as the sun went down.



Acapulco might well be the most famous place in Mexico.

An image of 50’s chic persists in the mind of many travellers. Unfortunately the chic remains in the 50’s and the remnants of a hotel boom lie derelict in prime positions atop the hills and around the bay.

This is a shame because the location should be perfect.

Acapulco boasts a beautiful bay surrounded by world class beaches with architecturally interesting hotels rising from the shoreline in the posh tourist area.

On arrival we spent a sweaty afternoon looking for bargains around here. Nothing doing. On the edge of the town itself we found a nice place willing to give us a 60% discount where we stayed for four weeks, often as the only guests.



As a city of a half million people, Acapulco is well blessed with shops and supermarkets giving us somewhere to mooch around when we were not on the beach.

The best discovery was the Woolworths restaurants which did a three course set meal with a drink and coffee for only £3. This was a hit as the main course was different every day and covered a much wider range of dishes than those available on a typical Mexican menu.



As the end of the trip approached we had to turn towards the capital for the flight home.

On the way we stopped twice, firstly in the town of Taxco, a colonial silver mining town clinging to the edge of a mountainside.

The town is dominated by its church, built in the 1750’s, visible from the surrounding hillsides and our hotel room.

As we were now into July we were joined by some heavy rainstorms which sent water gushing down the steeply cobbled streets.



We took a public bus to the Cacahuailpa caverns.

It is compulsory to follow a guide through the cave complex who operates the lights to show off a variety of impressive stalagmites and stalactites and kooky rock formations.

There is one huge cavern after another and it took about 2 hours to complete the length of the path into the heart of the mountain and another half an hour to walk back in the darkness to the cave entrance. A bit much for kids and pensioners.



Cuernavaca is a big city only an hour from Mexico City. We were surprised how much we liked it. There was a pleasant zocalo, an old cathedral complex and a decent museum based in the palace occupied by Hernan Cortes in the 1530’s.



Back in Mexico City we moved straight in to the Washington Hotel, where we had stayed previously, although this time the room had paper-thin walls and boisterous neighbours.

Central Mexico City remains a jewel on second viewing and we covered a good few miles wandering around the streets shooting off from the zocalo (looking for shoes).

In one area there were a couple of hundred girls standing along the sidewalk near the “hourly rate” hotels. Around the world I have never seen such an agglomeration of prostitution. It was a chilly morning and mainly they looked glum and goosepimply. (I got the shoes).



We flew with Continental back to the UK. Cost cutting was clearly in evidence as the nice meal on the outward flight was replaced with something pallid and uninteresting, but at least our bags arrived on the same plane as us this time.

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Photos

Puerto Vallarta
Our Apartment