on the edge

A Surfing Contest in Sayulita

In December our neighboring town to the north held one of a series of surfing contests. Sayulita is a beautiful little town that has a reputation for attracting young people and it's probably mostly due to the fact that there is an excellent break that produces some fairly reliable surfing conditions. One of the purposes of the contests is to select the best  surfers for the Mexican National team that will compete worldwide.

The surfing contests draw large crowds of spectators. The beach restaurants all have chairs set up on the beach with umbrellas or palapas so that their patrons can relax, drink, eat and watch the surfing. As long as you buy a few drinks you can take a chair and spend the day.

Getting back to our roots

As promised we revisited the new vegetarian restaurant in our little town of Bucerias and had another outstanding meal. The maestro behind these works of culinary art is Andrew and I don't use the words "culinary arts" lightly. My wife and I lived in the San Francisco/Berkeley area of California for over 12 years and great restaurants were plentiful. Roots in my opinion is right up there with the very best of the SF Bay area.

Last night I had the Black bean cakes. They were phenomenal! I can't wait to go back. My wife had the Sweet Soy Ginger Bowl and said that it was incredible, so much so that she refused to share a bite with anyone. The sandwiches brought raves from the crowd. They were served on home made whole grain buns. I watched the portobello sandwich being inhaled accompanied by moans of delight. My son raved about his roasted vegetable sandwich.

The fresh fruit and vegetable juices are also outstanding. My favorite is the Red Beet mixture. My wife favors the watermelon creation. Both are excellent.

On the next page I have put the menu. Unfortunately it does not contain the juice menu but I'll add it when I get a copy.

In summary I have to say that this is a world class restaurant. When we were eating we were debating whether they should even say that they were a vegetarian restaurant, just because many people would not come because the word vegetarian puts them off. I think as the word gets around, this will change because this is really great food, so great that you'll wonder why you thought meat was so great anyway....

Another vegetarian Restaurant this time in... Bucerias?

It's hard to believe, but we actually have a vegetarian restaurant in the little pueblito of Bucerias. Not only that, the chef worked for, I think it was, 4 years in a five star vegan restaurant in Toronto. So the food is not only healthy, but is a gourmet experience. The name of the place is "Roots". It is located on Lazaro Cardenas in the block before the foot bridge into El Centro. I've only been twice and can't wait to go back, but I'll update this with a more complete description of the really excellent menu.

A Vegetarian Restaurant in Puerto Vallarta

I know it's hard to believe but there really is a vegetarian restaurant in Puerto Vallarta, and not only that it's really good. It's called Planeta Vegetariano. It's located a half block north of the big church on a side street near the intersection of Hidalgo and Iturbe. They are open for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It's buffet style with several entrees, soup, rice (whole grain and white), at least 10-15 different salads. For 65 pesos it's a good deal and the food is healthy and excellent.

The Festival of Our Lady of Peace

Every year in January, in our little town of Bucerias there is a festival celebrating Our Lady of Peace (La Virgen de la Paz) who is the patron of our local Catholic church. The fiesta lasts for  ten days during which the streets fill up with vendors of everything under the sun as well as scores of carnival rides. On the last day of the festival, the festivities begin with the blessing of the boats. Bucerias and the town just north of us, La Cruz de Huanacaxtle are both fishing villages. At  around noon the boats congregate off shore and one by one they gun their motors and race at top speed for the beach. Just as they hit the sand everyone hops out of the boat and as a team they try to haul the boat up onto the beach as far as they can.

The Dance of the Garobos

Several day ago while staying at a friend's house, I walked into the guest bedroom to see this. Here in Mexico we have two common lizards, the green Iguanas and the gray/black Garobos. I'm not sure what their actual scientific name is but the locals call them Garobos. They typically inhabit roofs where they can be a pest because they love to burrow underneath the Spanish tiles, disloging them.

I was not sure what these two were doing, but when I went into the room the next day they were still there. They were hanging on the sliding screen door and the only way for me to get out there was by sliding the screen door. When I did that, they stayed exactly where they were and they let me take pictures of them without moving. As I was going back in, I noticed that there was a very tiny, inch long Garobo on the tile floor. Clearly the larger Garobo was giving birth. Was the other Garobo the father? What was his role in this. Do Garobos form matrimonial pairs? Just an interested friend? If anyone who reads this has any knowledge of tropical, coastal, Mexican lizards, I'd love to know more about what what really going on here.

The Spay/Neuter Clinic

The animal rescue group here in Bucerias has existed for a number of years. It was started by a group of women who saw that an excessive numbers of "street animals" needed help. The street animals are usually in pretty bad shape, riddled with worms and skin parasites. They often have skin diseases and are severely malnourished. To add to the problem, they are all un-neutered and the females have endless rounds of puppies and kittens when they themselves do not even have enough food to sustain them. The attempts to deal with them on a one by one basis fall short due to the large numbers of stray animals and the high cost of using local vets. The animal rescue group has been able to rescue some of the animals but the available level of funding has made the job difficult and the possibility of building an animal shelter is far beyond the reach of the available funds.

The Sunday Market

The first time I heard about the weekly Sunday Market in Bucerias, I asked where it was and how to get there. I was told, "Oh, you just drive up the river and you'll see it." I thought that those were pretty strange directions. We have a river that runs through Bucerias, bisecting it into north-south areas. The river is invariably dry with maybe a small rivulet of dirty water running down from the Colonias which have inadequate sewage. So the drill is to get off the highway and drive up the river until you see the tianguis (Market). This Sunday, it wasn't dry; there was a flood of water coming down, so finding a dry parking spot was a little difficult.

The tianguis is on a side street that branches off from the river bed and on most days is indistinguishable from any other street, but on Sunday it's crammed with impromptu booths set up just for the day. The roofs are invariably plastic drop cloths, either the blue or the red kind, set up to give relief from the sun and a shady place to examine the variety of goods offered for sale.

Dinner in the clouds

A brief 15 minute ride from downtown Puerto Vallarta will take you several thousand feet up into the hills to an eagles perch in the clouds over looking the bay and the old town. The name of the place is Las Carmelitas and it is a palapa (palm thatched roof) restaurant with no electricity (only generators here) and a killer view. The road up is straight up, well not exactly straight, but it's a tough climb in any car. At the entrance at the bottom of the hill were you turn off the main road, they hit you up for 50 pesos a head and give you a receipt which you can apply to your bill at the end of the night. This keeps people from coming up who just want to go for the view and skip the restaurant. A two wheel drive car will make it up, but more than a few loose their nerve on the numerous high climb angle switch-backs. Some sections of the road are paved in concrete because of the problems with erosion in the rainy season. But perseverance is rewarded.

A Short Trip to D.F. (Mexico City)

Here in Mexico, Mexico City is not referred to as such by the local Mexicans. They refer to the city as D.F. (pronounced: Day Effay). It stands for Distrito Federal the same way our capital is referred to as D.C. So my wife, my son and I headed off from the Puerto Vallarta area to D.F. for some business, but for me mostly an opportunity to see the capital city which I had never been to and do the usual touristy things. Before leaving I had had my proper measure of frightful stories about people being abducted by cabs and being robbed or held for ransom. I had been particularly warned about the dreaded green and white taxis, usually VW bugs. I did follow the warnings and stayed with the unmarked hotel summoned taxis and the ones marked "Sitio" which congregate at marked taxi stands and are usually yellow and white, that is when I was not strap hanging with the locals on the Metro subway system.

Little Camarino's 5th Birthday

My friend Camarino who runs a building crew in the local area building houses, invited my wife, my son and I to attend his youngest son's fifth birthday party. His name is Camarino just like his dad so we all call him little Camarino. The age five is not a special year so it's just the normal five year old kid party. Some years are special like the 3rd year, a year of much celebration. The 15th year for girls is also very important.

A visit to Chacala

Chacala is a little beach town about an hour and a half north of Puerto Vallarta. Four years ago it took a half an hour to get from the main highway to Chacala because there was only a dirt road that was all but impassable to anything but a 4 x 4. Now with a new paved road Chacala is 5 minutes from the highway.

Wedding in the mountains

In Mexico it is traditional for everyone to pitch in when there is a wedding in the family. Once a few years back my brother-in-law got married and we had a "pot luck" wedding. It was one of the greatest weddings we've been to. Here it's the norm. So when my friend Camarino asked me to come up into the hills to photograph a wedding of some family friends, I immediately accepted. I didn't know what I was getting into but that was the fun of it.

The wedding was in a town named Las LLanitos (pronounced Las Yanitos) which was an hour+ into the hills east of Puerto Vallarta. Camarino headed up on Friday because as a part of his contribution to the festivities, he would procure a steer and butcher it to feed all of the wedding guests. I headed up on Saturday a few hours before the wedding. The road into the mountains becomes a dirt road before it leaves Puerto Vallarta. It starts out following the Rio Cuale (the Cuale River) which runs through Puerto Vallarta. After 10 minutes or so the road leaves the Rio Cuale and heads straight up into the mountains. It's a steady climb all the way. About 5 minutes into the climb I noticed that my oil light was coming on. I stopped and checked my oil only to discover that I didn't have very much. I said my prayers and headed back down to Puerto Vallarta and got an oil fill but was unable to discover why the oil was so low. I bought an extra 4 liters of oil as insurance and headed back up because I didn't want to miss the wedding.

How to Make a Real Margarita

If you live in Mexico, sooner or later you are going to have to learn how to make a real Margarita. Forget  Jose Cuervo Margarita Mix. All those Mexican restaurants manage to make Margaritas without it. Very seriously, it is not possible to make a great Margarita with Margarita mix. So put that mix away and follow the simple instructions. Our first experience with real Margaritas happened on a visit to Puerto Vallarta a number of years ago when we wound up in a little palapa restaurant on the beach in Mismaloya. We both had one of those very large goblets. We each had one and then we split another one. In the process my wife went into the kitchen area where they were making these things and got the recipe. They were killer, literally. As we were walking back to our hotel for dinner, my wife said to me, "Those things were hallucinogenic!". We don't remember much about the rest of the evening, it's all sort of a blur.

Lobo

Meet Lobo, one of the more memorable citizens of Bucerias. Lobo passed away over a year ago now, but his spirit lives on. The newly reorganized dog protection group has taken the name "the Lobo Society". Lobo was really a human in dog form. He was completely independent and would stay for a while if you fed him properly and didn't try to place too many restrictions on him. We first met him at Mark's Restaurant (which BTW has the best food not only in Bucerias but in the whole area) where he would wait outside until someone who looked friendly came out and he would follow them home and hopefully they would take pity on him and feed him well with some of the left-overs. Not that he was one of those eager beggars, he had a very non-chalant laid back attitude as if to say, "It's alright if you feed me, I might eat if I feel like it". In the morning he would say good-bye and head off for his daily activities. Lobo was never thin so his strategy seemed to work. Everyone in Bucerias knew him and had stories to tell about his exploits. He even had several names. We knew him as Dolce (which we mis-pronounced as dul-che meaning sweet) for several years until we were told his real name was Lobo.

His favorite activity was playing in the water and he would adopt any family with young children who would play with him in the surf. But his favorite sport was body surfing. He would spend hours in the surf, swimming out to where the waves broke and body surfing a wave into shore. He would then turn around and swim back out to catch another wave. He would do this for hours. Somewhere in dog heaven there is an independent little dog teaching all the other dogs how to surf and really enjoy heaven.

Mexico Photos

I have just put up on my photo web site a number of photos of this area of Mexico. There are some there from one of my neighbors that were taken over 30 years ago and for those who know the area will be very interesting. Other are just my attempt to capture the feeling of the Bay of Banderas area and what life is like here. enjoy! Here is the link:

Mexico photos

The link is now on the sidebar under "Bahia Banderas web sites".

The Sunset Last Night

The picture pretty much speaks for itself. In the summer there are days with large numbers of high cumulus clouds that look like giant brilliant white cauliflower shaped heads. When the evening sunlight hits them, they create an impressive show in the evening.

The Bug with Head Lights

Last night I found my small kitten out by the pool playing with a strange bug that had two luminescent "eyes", at least from a distance they looked like eyes. I think most people who grew up in the states are familiar with lightning bugs which have a luminescent tail area that flashes on and off as they fly. The light from this bug looked much the same, having that blue-greenish color (it doesn't show well in the picture). A few nights previously, I had seen one in the tall grass in a dark area but I couldn't see what it looked like because it was too dark and I didn't have a flash light with me. This time I caught it and it jumped out of my hand a few times because it has some good jumping legs like a grasshopper or a cricket. I eventually calmed it down enough to get it to sit still for some photos. The problem was that when it calmed down the lights would slowly dim until they couldn't be seen so I had to nudge him a few times to get him to light up for me. After taking a number of photos I set him on his way in some tall bushes where he wouldn't encounter my kitten again.

If anyone reading this has any information on this creature e-mail me or put in a comment on this page.

A Day in Puerto Vallarta

Saturday I took a bus to Puerto Vallarta and spent the day exploring parts of Vallarta that I hadn't been to before. I walked down through town past the old soccer field which is now a track field and a skate park. I took this picture across the field, catching the mountains that surround Vallarta in the background. Summer here on the coast is hot and wet. As you can see from the picture, the mountains are very green and filled with storm clouds.

Fish Tacos

A few blocks from home on Benito Juarez between Fco. I Madero and Lazaro Cardenas is a favorite lunch spot known as "Rinconcita de Ensenada". Rincon means a nook or corner. Rinconcita means a little nook or corner, in this case of Ensenada. Often Mexicans when they leave their home area, incorporate it into their restaurant name. Probably to tip off the discerning consumer that this is the cuisine of Ensenada or maybe it's just to honor their roots, some regional pride.

The tacos here are really delicious. They have a few different things on the menu, but I can't seem to get past the fish tacos. I'm not the only who feels this way, there is a definite fan club. I realized this when a lady called my wife from the US to ask her how they made their chilli sauce and said that she dreams about the fish tacos. I wonder what Carl Jung would say? Anyway... you have battered, deep fried fish with several delicious sauces and hand made tortillas just a few minutes old. Mmmmmmmm....

And of course the family lives just upsatirs so they have a very short commute. Look at the smiles!