This morning I took a shuttle into the town of Puerto Vallarta. The touristy attractions of the bustling streets and beaches were enthralling. For about ten minutes. I then decided to take a water taxi to the more peaceful shores of Yelapa, a remote fishing village in the southernmost cove of the bay.

 

The hourlong ride lifted my spirits. There’s an elemental charm to being on the ocean that one easily forgets. The deep blueness of the sea and the vastness of the rolling waves, scattering rays of sun in all directions like a liquid prism. The distance from shore creating a tranquility unattainable on land.

All the better, we came across a humpback whale and lingered to watch its graceful motions. It became clear that whales regard whale watchers as their own private fan clubs, because the whale really hammed it up. It put on a tremendous show, slapping the water with its huge flukes, leaping and splashing onto its back and exhaling mighty blasts of air from its blowhole. “That’ll be twenty dollars extra,” our captain said.

I chatted fleetingly with my neighbors. The young couple next to me was from Idaho. I asked if I should visit Idaho. “Yes,” they said, with no apparent hint of irony. (Northern Idaho is more charming than Southern Idaho, I learned.)

At last Yelapa came into view. Its idyllic charms were apparent on first sight. The yellow crescent beach was carved out of steep mountains on either side. The village that surrounded the beach looked more like a painting than a three-dimensional town, dominated by thatch-roofed restaurants and rental cottages. Boats bobbed cheerfully in the bay.

I settled into a reclining lawn chair in front of Koko’s beach bar, thereby ruining the kickback scheme entailed by our captain leading us to Tino’s beach bar next door. The afternoon passed in something akin to a Corona commercial, except I was drinking Pacifico and thumbing the pages of an existential Southern gothic novel, The Moviegoer.

Between page flips and beer sips, I observed the mini-character dramas that unfold on an afternoon at the beach:

Beach merchants came by to offer jewelry and, when that failed to entice, weed. “Want to fly…or get high?” said a man offering parasailing tours.

A dog chased a tennis ball hurled by his owner into the waves. Again and again, he timed the ball perfectly as it rose and fell on the swells and came bounding out of the water with an air of triumph. He laid his prize at his owner’s feet and rested his chin on the sand, a dauntless knight kneeling before his king.

Two girls in their early teens mugged and flirted with the waves, evincing one last summer of innocence, unaware of the complications life would bring to their friendship.

An old man lost his balance in the surf and fell. He struggled to his knees and fell again as another wave crashed over him. A younger man with silver hair but a toned torso ran to his aid, pulling him to his feet but turning quickly away so as to leave his dignity in tact.

 

Waiting to catch the last boat home, I met a slightly tipsy Thai firecracker and her levelheaded friend, both from Spokane. Our boat was full so we caught a larger party boat operated by an adventure tour company. On the way home, they served us margaritas and tequila sunrises and we danced to La Bamba. We arrived in the wrong port, miles from the center of town. We didn’t care.