A friend sent this to me and I want to share it with you. Visiting Yelapa June- Sept can be a bit extreme for some and here is what is needed to make your vacation shine.

Club Mex - Vacationing in Rural Mexico

By Jeremy Solomons (July 2006)

“Be aware, this is not Club Med!”

Little did we realize the import of these seven words of warning from our hosts before we embarked on our recent adventure to the rural fishing village of Yelapa, just South of Puerto Vallarta on Mexico’s Central Pacific coast. After all, the stark colors and simple beauty of the Casa, surrounded by lush, jungle vegetation and sparkling, dolphin-infested waters, looked so inviting on the interactive web tour. Such a refreshing contrast from the usual business travel fare of large, sterile hotels with walnut-lined, hyper-functional prison cells, sorry, bedrooms. And who cares about the intense heat, coming from the burning Summer temperatures of Central Texas, right? Rising mercury we could take but 100 percent humidity without air conditioning anywhere in the village was another matter! True, we did have strong electric fans in each bedroom, which did a decent job of keeping the sweat and bugs away during the night. But this relief only came if the daily power cut was over by the time we crawled under our mosquito netting and tried to sleep away the weird sounds inside and outside our completely open house. And who was the skunk who strolled past every morning at 3.00 am? As well as the crushing humidity, which drenches your clothes just going downstairs to the bathroom, we were also confronted at first with: a house with grubby floors and surfaces, no towels, belligerent flies, fleas in the sofa bed and intermittent water; fresh, steaming burro droppings and large, scurrying crabs on the broken street paving; many shuttered bars and restaurants at the end of the season; and surly, ungrateful waiters at the ones that were open!

By the end of the second or third day of literal blood, sweat and tears, we were seriously contemplating escaping to the comforting luxury of one of the countless air-conditioned resorts in nearby Puerto Vallarta. Thanks be that we did not succumb to that temptation. If we had, we would have just had another Club Med experience that could have happened anywhere in the world. Instead, we got to have a true Club Mex experience that could have only happened in Yelapa. The turning point came when we finally realized that there was nothing “wrong” with Yelapa (pronounced DJEH-LAH-PAH). The only thing that needed changing was us and our haughty, condescending attitude of superiority and entitlement. We had to get away from our “us” versus “them” mentality and find a way to “we”. Instead of gossiping and ranting about the “unfriendly” locals from the safety of our lofty balcony, we began to get to know them as people, using a mixture of slow English, broken Spanish and international sign language.

Our daughter befriended a local girl her age and we started up conversations with local people on the beach and with long-term foreign residents on boats and elsewhere. What we found were people, who were extremely warm, kind, funny and helpful. Even though Mexico had unfortunately been eliminated from the World Cup finals in Germany, there was always a good-sized crowd around the TV at Chico’s Bar on the beach for every subsequent game. The power was always “out” before the game but “miraculously” came back on as the game was beginning. We realized that Mexicans like to tease a lot. Whichever team we were rooting for, the locals rooted for their opponents, mercilessly insulting our players if they made a mistake or - worst of all - began crying when they were forced to leave the field with an injury. It was all good-natured fun and even the three pet iguanas watched too. (If we had been part of the regular day tripper crowd, who swarm the beaches around lunchtime, it would have been a different story though. They are the clearly the “lowest of the low” and “deserve” to be treated as such!)

On the advice of locals, seven of us decided to go on a little jaunt up to the large waterfall, which we were told was only an “hour’s easy horseback ride” away. It was an accident waiting to happen. It was the hottest part of the day; we did not have much water and even less food; the three young girls in our group had not ridden adult horses before, they did not have helmets and they could not even reach the stirrups; and I immediately sensed that my horse - whom I called Felipe after the presumed new president of Mexico - was somewhat on the temperamental side. But we were not complainers or victims anymore and so we grinned and bore it. Two hours of bumpy, up and down pathways and stunning jungle vistas later, we all arrived at the waterfall in one piece - Felipe did drag me onto a barbed wire fence but the oozing blood on my right leg only masked a superficial wound - and then we gratefully dove into the refreshing waters. On the way back down, Felipe completely flipped out and no one could ride him any more. He started lashing out and just wanted to be following behind the horse carrying two of the girls. We had no choice but to let him have his wish. The four adults were very nervous that Felipe might make the other horse bolt but the two girls were not in the slightest bit afraid and they just giggled the whole way down. We were all still in one piece when we got back to the beach an hour and a half later. We were all sore, all tired but all giggling too. What a wild, wacky and wonderful ride we had just been on. And what a great metaphor this was for the whole crazy, beautiful trip to the tropical paradise of Yelapa (and our “normal” lives beyond). We could either gnash our teeth and get tangled up in knots of our own making as we did in the first few days. Or we could just giggle and go with the flow. In the end, “giggling” was much more enjoyable, enriching and restorative than “gnashing”. Tee hee  (… how do you say that in Spanish?)

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