Puerta Vallarta is a resort town in Mexico. I am in Mexico for the 2015 Wikimania conference. Fabian is joining me for the travel. We left early for tourism and From Friday 10 July – Tuesday 14 we are in Puerta Vallarta.
I knew some about the place before arriving but there was not much of the information I wanted to see available online or in Wikipedia. I knew it was cheap among the resort towns, and that the beaches were nice, and that it is known for being a destination in Mexico hosting both a gay tourism industry and a gay expatriate community. I expected that the tourism industry was underdeveloped in the sense that it would be mostly one-sided – locals wish to provide to tourists, but there is not cultural exchange such that locals understand what tourists want. All of these things are true.
Fabian and I are staying on Amapas Street in an apartment. The place is nice and the rent is cheap, and it is across the street from the beach and in a city block with two vegan restaurants. Eating out here is significantly less expensive than buying groceries in New York, so it is comfortable here on our budget.
One of the vegetarian restaurants, Salud, is owned and managed by someone from Seattle. Willy, the owner, told me that many Seattle people have settled here, which is not surprising to me. He gave us travel suggestions and we planned our days. Our first day we stayed on the beach; the second day we played on the beach and went to some nightclubs; the third day we went to the botanical garden; today we will go to Las Marietas; and tomorrow we will be back on the beach.
The beach is nice. The water is warm. We are here in the off-season, with winter being high season, and there are hardly people anywhere.
We are staying in the gay district, which is near Los Muertos Playa (Dead Man’s Beach). Within a 10 minute walk there are maybe 15 stores selling tiny swimsuits and underwear, with about half of those also selling bongs and lube and a few also selling meth and crack pipes. There are pharmacies around the neighborhood advertising to tourists that they sell, without a prescription, xanax, anabolic steroids, viagra, and amoxicilin. Girls swimsuits are available on the otherside of a river into downtown, which also marks the boundary of the gay/straight area. We went to a couple of nightclubs. One had gogo boys and at the other there was a drag performance. During the drag performance there was a call for birthdays and everyone with a birthday came on stage at the bar. The hostess asked everyone who had a birthday (about 10 people) to announce to the bar their preference for being activo or passivo, the Spanish terms for top or bottom, then sent them back to the crowd. We met a guy at the bar who was at the end of his career in business in the United States and had just a few days before purchased a condo near the club. He was going to rent it to tourists for a few years until he retired, then he planned to live here. He told us he paid USD 250,000 for a nice 2-bedroom condo, and said that this was a typical price for a nice enough place with a beach view in the gay neighborhood in a condo with reliable services.
Near the bars there is a bathhouse and a place called Pinata PV. I did not notice Pinata the night we went out, but the next morning, Fabian and I were at a coffeehouse on the way to catch a bus to the botanical garden and we met this couple, Ron and David, who operate Pinata. Pinata is a building with a juice bar on the ground floor, a gym and yoga studio on the next level, then some apartments in the rest of the building. Ron and David were Americans who are here long term supporting the gay community. They provide apartments only to gay guys, and especially guys who are here providing gay services like tourism, yoga, or performance at the clubs. They also talked about real estate and a trend for gay guys to live in Puerta Vallarta and suggested that it could be a nice place to live for anyone who could work remotely. I thought that sounded like a nice idea for me.
Fabian and I took a local bus to the Vallarta Botanical Gardens. The bus leaves just a few blocks from the gay nightclubs. The road is bumpy and the bus bounces a lot anyway by design. When we got to the garden we found that it seemed more like a jungle with hiking trials. We went to the river which is narrow and shallow but has a fast enough current to be too much to swim in the middle, and is filled with rocks and little waterfalls. We were told that it was a good place to swim naked so we played like Mowgli in the jungle for most of the day, then hiked in the shade of the jungle seeing big lizards and hearing birds everywhere and seeing strange plants and flowers. We had to climb a bit in some places even on the trails. It seemed like rain so we started walking back to the visitor center and restaurant. On our way back the rain cam suddenly and hard so we were completely wet and though we had been sweating from heat now we were shivering in the cold.
The director of the garden was there and I mentioned to him that I wanted to talk about Wikipedia with him. He was an American from Georgia named Bob Pierce and was friendly, but then as we were eating he came to Fabian and me with his business manager Neil, an American from Pennsylvania. Neil was a casual Wikipedian who already had edited multiple articles and understood Creative Commons licenses, which meant that he understood the most difficult parts of what I routinely teach in my Wikipedia job. He and I talked for a while about the garden collaborating with the Wikipedia community and he proposed multiple options which all demonstrated his understanding of how Wikipedia and online collaboration work. In my opinion, it would be beneficial for the Wikimedia community, the garden, and Puerta Vallarta’s tourism industry if the garden were to contribute to Wikimedia projects. Neil brought his employee, a graphic design intern, to me and said that he also would like to learn Wikipedia. This person, Gerardo, was nice and also asked questions. I will be in touch because I never expect to meet people who are already well placed in an institution like this with such opportunity and who have strong interest in Wikipedia. It was fortunate that we met each other.
We took the bus back to town on the way back and the bus driver neglected to stop for one of the huge speed bumps. We were sitting in the back where it was the bumpiest and were thrown especially high. The locals did not think this was as funny as we did. I felt a little out of place – for me these things are fun because I can leave at any time.
Today we go to the islands! Right now Wikipedia has none of the strange pictures of this place that I have seen elsewhere on the Internet. I am trying to take more photos and will bring my camera there.
It has been nice to travel with Fabian. Travel introduces stress into any relationship. Fabian and I both travel well but it has been interesting for me to see how he handles stress. In New York I rarely see him out of balance unless we are debating social issues. He has the disposition of a night club host who brings contentment into any situation. In New York he was a bit worried about getting to the airport on time, when I was much later than he wished to be. He worried about the connecting flight from Mexico City to Puerta Vallarta, because I booked the flights through different services to be perhaps closer together than any one service would recommend. In Puerta Vallarta he is not quick to calculate exchange rates to think about the prices of things, and wonders about money on the principle of the issue. I am more comfortable with this. Fabian knows every street in Manhattan well and the location of every subway, but he gets lost around the little gay district here and does not recognize street names or landmarks. Part of the reason for these things is that Fabian in his past has traveled in the manner of a different social class, and especially in a place like Puerta Vallarta, might without me have had a more guided experience. I enjoy a cheaper sort of living and have enjoyed seeing how he reacts to things being a little dirty here. It has been fun.