You can say THAT again
A warm gray morning on the green Mexican coast. A fringe of rain lies over the bay — this should be the last, the rainy season overdue to be over.
The air is damp. Paper slides into the typewriter lightly water soaked. Even the keys have a wet sound. They don’t hit with that dry pop.
“Dear Moppets: How are you? How is the cat, Captain Bligh?”
A letter home. in the caviar class.
In every bar you hear the “if only I had bought that land 10 years ago” game.
“Right where the Posada Vallarta is now, out by the airport. I could have had it for a peso a meter. Maybe less.”
The second-guessers are full of Bohemia beer and gloomy memories.
The rich life: The aquamarine swimming pool at El Camino Real is set in a garden of flaming bougainvilleas. Coco palms nod drowsily over the drowsy guests. Sun tanning on luxurious beach chairs.
At one end of the pool is the bar. Set under a thatched roof. Seats underwater in the pool at the edge.
Swim over to the bar and sit down. The bartender hands you a big coco loco. A green coconut with the top chopped off. Into the coconut milk they toss a lot of ice and gin and vodka — and heaven knows what else.
The guest swims away from the bar with a stagger kick.
The sunsets are magnificent. Gold and red flood the sky.
A high-priced town these days. A shopkeeper in town told me: “We have a new road now to Guadalajara. But if you want to be SURE of getting anything, you have to have it flown in.
“Even some of the restaurants have food put down here by plane.”
The winter season is beginning. Hotels filling up. But even after the season the planes have no problem getting passengers.
Summer is hot as a Sheriff’s pistol on the coast. Still tourists come in.
“Soon there will be no season,” said the shopkeeper. “Tourists will come all year. So we will all make more money. And prices will go up so we will spend more money.
“The government says it is good for the economy. They say they will make it work. Maybe they know how. But I think only God knows. And in Puerto Vallarta we are far from heaven.”
AThis column originally appeared in The Chronicle Nov. 27, 1972.