on the edge

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A Visit to the Car Wash

One of the side effects of living in Bucerias during the dry season is that there is a lot of dust from the many dirt roads. If you wash your car, it lasts about 2-3 days, after that your car looks like a roaming dirt machine. If you are lucky, a young guy will come by your house and offer to wash it for you for 30 pesos or so (about $3). Failing that, there's the local car wash. It was started by a local young guy and his wife who have a cute little boy.


Starting from a trashed property with one half falling down roofless structure, in two years they have built it up to a car wash with a roof and a totally new building which houses a small restaurant serving mostly tortas (Mexican toasted sandwiches on a roll) and liquados (milk shakes). So the clientelle can drive in have their car washed for 55 pesos ($5.50) (inside and out) and have lunch in their pleasant little restaurant. The entrepreneurial spirt still lives here.

Welcome to Bucerias

4 years ago this July, my wife Mary and I finished building a house in Bucerias. Our intention was to have a place to go near the sea shore with good beaches. As time progressed we found that life events were pushing us and we weren't exactly resisting, to spend more of our time here for reasons of health and sanity. As of November of the past year we now have no other place to live and this is home. We are not so sure this was a good idea, but sometimes, external events conspire to push you in directions you secretly want to go but which your collected wisdom and programmed fears of the strange and unknown are saying: "wait, let's think about this, shouldn't we do a study, maybe a consumer survey, isn't there a statistical report on happiness in Mexico?". We don't need no flarkin surveys! We are the survey.


Bucerias is a small town north of Puerto Vallarta on the Bay of Banderas which is on the Pacific coast of Mexico. It is about 6 hours south of Mazatlan and enjoys rain free and temperate winters with hot and wet summers. This year was unusual, or usual if you talk to the old Mexicans, in that it rained in January for almost 3 weeks. For the past 10 years or so winters have been totally rain free from November through June. Depending on who you talk to, Bucerias was named from the Spanish verb buscar which means to search, but also is used to describe the process of diving to retrieve shellfish from the ocean. In a less populated time Bucerias had large oyster beds and this is what people were diving for. There are still oysters here, but with inadequate sewage treatment and a larger population, eating them is a bit risky.

Our population is around 10,000, or so I've heard. Not very big, but big enough. The best beaches are farther north in the Bay where there are no towns and the beaches are pristine. We have a small population of "snow birds" who live here in the winter but fly north in April. The northerners are mostly Canadians and United Statesers (Never call yourself an American here, in reply you'll get, "We are all Americans"). Since it's hard to socialize with people whose language which you only have a pre-school comprehension of, the English speakers stick with the other English speakers and the Spanish speakers stick with the Spanish speakers. There are also French speakers from Canada and they stick together too. This makes the non-Spanish speaking communities very small and life here has that very small town feeling. In a real sense, everybody knows everybody else here and news travels fast. It also makes for a good social scene unlike most places we've lived in the US. It is the only place I've lived where the people you meet and socialize with cut across all social, political, sexual preference and economic styles. As one wag put it: "Everybody here has a screw loose or they would still be up 'there'".