A Wild Side of Puerto Vallarta

As my cruise ship moored, the forays of the flycatchers in the park beyond my stateroom balcony should have been a hint that I was in store for something completely different in Puerto Vallarta. And the hooded oriole poking through a tree's pink blossoms as I walked to my tour's excursion boat on the next pier was yet another clue. A short time later, the brown boobies diving in the motorized catamaran's wake confirmed that this visit to the Mexican Riviera's most popular vacation spot was going to be unlike any other before.

I've been to Puerto Vallarta at least a dozen times, staying in guest houses, hotels, and stopping for day-long visits off of cruise ships. The city is most famous for its Zona Romantica, a charming neighborhood of bridges, trees, and red tile-roofed adobe buildings that house art galleries, bars, and restaurants close to the shore. Sprawling north is the long Malecón leading to mega resorts, while south lies vacation homes nestled in verdant hills. Tourists swarm by the thousands for the shopping, beaching, dining, and drinking.

But on this visit I wanted to do something completely different: explore another side of Puerto Vallarta, a wild side that didn't center around tequila and salsa dancing. The bird sightings promised me I was on the right path when I booked my seven-hour boat tour that bypassed the crowded port city a mile to portside and instead journeyed across the wide expanse of Banderas Bay, one of Mexico's largest. We were headed to Majahuitas and Yelapa, two sites only reachable by water craft.

The landscape south of the city looked tropical with verdant mountains hugging a rugged shoreline. Majahuitas, our first stop, was one of several pristine beaches hidden along the coastline. Since roads don't reach this end of the bay, most facilities are primitive, surrounded by wild jungle. However our first steps off the catamaran were into the water for a snorkel a short distance down the coast from the beachside camp.

The water was green and choppy, with terrible visibility. My mask kept fogging until another snorkeler let me apply some of the baby shampoo he carried in a small bottle for just such emergencies. Unfortunately the algae in the water was most of the problem, not the cloudy glass.

I stuck by the side of Pablo, our day's tour guide, hanging on to every encouraging word. "The algae is good for the fish, nourishing the sea life." He might not have been wrong as I did identify a school of quite large king angelfish.

Pablo made several dives, surfacing with a starfish and soon thereafter a sea urchin, letting us gape and grab at the creatures. He even brought up a spider starfish whose legs slithered as they wrapped around Pablo's fingers. He thanked me when I pointed out a puffer swimming a couple of feet under me, and then he quickly dived below to capture it with his bare hands.

"Everyone, listen, I'm going to release a puffer and you can watch him deflate," Pablo shouted on returning to the surface, mercifully keeping the terrified fish underwater. While I didn't see the puffer return to its normal diminutive size, I enjoyed watching its beach ball-shaped form drift away from us flailing snorkelers.

We swam closer to the beach, looking for stingrays that supposedly frequented the area. Alas, even in much clearer water, there were no more wildlife sightings except for an eel and a number of inquisitive sergeant majors and chubs. I surrendered my mask, fins, and mandatory life vest to one of the guides and beached myself on dry land.

Our tour boat, with our backpacks, cellphones, sunglasses, and towels, was more than fifty feet off shore in over a dozen feet of water. We of course could swim back to retrieve anything we needed, but we'd have to haul it back through saltwater if we wanted to use it on the beach. Even though tamarind punches and cervezas, along with hammocks and fresh water toilets, were all at our disposal, we were castaways for a little while on the most isolated beach in Puerto Vallarta.

Without a telephoto lens or binoculars - they were safe and dry on the boat - I didn't investigate too closely the canopy of palm trees overhead in Majahuitas. I did hear birds, but I focused my attention on the beautiful beach and what looked like a bonafide galleon. Apparently children dressed as pirates were just as interested in this side of Banderas Bay as wildlife lovers.

Back on my catamaran and wrapped in a towel to dry off and warm up, I dined on a buffet lunch of sandwiches and salads. Soon Yelapa came into view, along with the community's wide sandy beach to its east. Above the town was a waterfall, the next point of interest for most of the guests on the tour. A small boat towed behind our catamaran was able to tender us, in two separate groups, to Yelapa's tiny dock.

I admired a Heermann's gull hunting in the surf near the small boats delivering crates to the town. Yelapa itself was miniscule, a few plastered brick homes built along narrow roads that hugged the cliffside on Banderas Bay's southernmost cove. The only signs of traffic were the horses and their manure, along with several ATV's claiming the right of way on the cobblestone streets. Souvenir stands with carved ironwood whales, shawls printed with the image of Frida Kahlo, and cobalt-blue ceramic plates lined every passageway.

A pair of orange-fronted parakeets high in a tree reminded me I was indeed in the tropics of Mexico. In addition, a variety of colorful butterflies, including a white species as large as my hand, flitted along the humid path that led through a canyon to the waterfall. Evidently there's a dry season when the falls don't run, however on my late February visit there was plenty of cascading water for tourists to use as a freshwater shower and photo op.

Walking back through town on the way to Yelapa's beach, where we'd rendezvous with our catamaran, I heard a familiar squawk. It didn't take me long to located what looked and sounded like a Gila woodpecker, the most common woodpecker in my Phoenix neighborhood. It was busily tending to a nest hole in a dead tree. While the bird's ladderback stripes indeed looked like the Gila's, a more careful examination showed a much more colorful head, with both yellow and red feathers. It was a male golden-cheeked woodpecker, an endemic species to the area.

The walk to Yelapa's beautiful beach was about a quarter mile and our stop there gave the tour group a chance to relax on chaise lounges under umbrellas with a cold drink. Our catamaran awaited us at a much larger dock nearby.

Back on board, the bar was open, serving margaritas, Mai Tais, or whatever drink fancied you. With the afternoon sun behind us, the coastline shone emerald green and the water deep turquoise as we sped toward Puerto Vallarta. Anticipation of whale sightings fueled our giddiness as much as the alcohol.

When the boat slowed and the pilot pointed starboard, many of the passengers rushed forward to the catamaran's open deck as if on queue. "Nine o'clock, nine o'clock," someone shouted. Sure enough, a humpback whale breached several hundred feet starboard. Whoops and awws filled the air. At least four times the massive creature exploded out of the sea, sometimes spiraling almost 360 degrees before crashing in a mighty splash.

The sightings were breathtaking, and timed so perfectly as to be seemingly choreographed as tightly as the crew's lip-synched Rolling Stones concert that immediately followed when our boat was underway again. Unsurprisingly a tip jar appeared soon thereafter.

On the pier, as I walked back to the Majestic Princess, I noticed an iguana high in a tree close to where I had seen the oriole many hours earlier. Lucky for me, Puerto Vallarta wasn't finished showing its wild side.