Packaged in Puerto
A maverick discovers the great equalizer—the swim-up bar.
It wasn’t the humidity that had crushed our spirits. It wasn’t the trendy juice bars, dodgy tattoo shops or trinket stores selling frayed ponchos and luchador masks. It was the men of Puerto Vallarta that had gotten us down. Their barrage of hoots, honks, hollers, kissing noises, and dramatic, teeth-sucking inhalations had sent us over the edge.
Melissa was the first to crack. “The next motherfucker to hassle us,” she declared, “is getting it right back.”
Sure enough, twenty seconds later, a car passed, its driver leaning half his torso out of the unrolled window in order to better look at us. Melissa made kissey noises and wiggled her fingers at him in a ball-fondling motion.
Confusion and disappointment quaked across the driver’s face as he sped away.
“You asshole,” Georgina said to Melissa. “That was a cab driver.”
Things were not going well for us in Puerto Vallarta. To be fair, we hadn’t done our research. My three girlfriends and I had just spent a week in the Michoacán town Pátzcuaro, home to one of the most traditional Dia de los Muertos celebrations in Mexico. We’d shopped the craft market for Catrina dolls, eaten cabeza tacos at street stalls, spent a night with local families in a candle-lit, altar-adorned cemetery. Amidst the celebrations, our tattoos, piercings and gender had gone largely unnoticed—who cares about a bunch of rock-and-roll white girls when there’s sugar skulls to be eaten?
Experiencing authentic, traditional culture with locals is great, but we were still in Mexico—it seemed a waste to come all that way and not get in a few good beach days. So we’d chosen the closest, most accessible sun-and-sand destination from land-locked Pátzcuaro; one day of dubbed movies on rattling buses and we arrived in Puerto Vallarta.
Had we done our homework, the sudden demographic shift wouldn’t have been such a shock. In contrast to Pátzcuaro—as difficult to reach as it was to pronounce—Puerto Vallarta was thoroughly on the tourist path. Direct flights from the U.S. soared in daily, and cruise ships docked regularly, spilling out hoards of people who weren’t seeking traditional culture with locals—they wanted a cheap, easy vacation. And maybe a smoothie.
We traversed sidewalks lined with English-language signs, swarmed with the running shoes, khaki shorts and baseball caps of Middle America, under a battery of verbal assault from what seemed every man in Mexico. Sometimes they opted to translate their solicitations: “Guapa, you want sex?” In Puerto Vallarta’s touristy center, not even the catcalls were 100 percent authentic.
We’d scoffed at the all-inclusive resorts we’d passed on the way from the bus station. We were independent travelers—private beaches, piped-in music, and watery margaritas weren’t our scene. But one day spent wandering Puerto Vallarta, and one unsuspecting cabbie harassed, and we wanted in.
Alicia scoured our Lonely Planet and found a resort that purportedly offered day passes. We piled in a cab and headed out of central Puerto Vallarta, through wide avenues lined with strip malls and corporate chains: Pizza Hut, Starbucks, OfficeMax, Outback Steakhouse. It felt more like an american suburb than a Mexican vacation paradise.
We stepped out of the cab onto a deserted, windy sidewalk, and scurried up the manicured walkway to the resort’s foyer. Our sneakers squeaked across the polished floor as we approached the reception desk.
A woman in an ill-fitting navy blazer looked out from under her crow’s feet at us. “Yessss,” she said slowly.
“Hola,” I began confidently. “Queremos comprar ….” I trailed off, my Spanish vocabulary extinguished. I hung my head and whispered: “day passes.”
“$25 each.” The receptionist answered in English. And in dollars.
“Dude,” Georgina hissed, “the guidebook said it was only ten bucks.”
I smiled an impotent smile, leaned in. “Y cuantos para cuatro?”—my Spanish reignited.
The receptionist blinked once, twice, then answered, “$100 for four. No discount.”
We held a hush-voiced meeting, in which it was agreed that a fee equal to a night in our hotel room was too high. We’d suck it up, pay for a taxi back into town, and suffer through the assault of catcalls on the city beach. Or stay in the hotel room with the shades drawn.
Defeated, sweaty, and a bit annoyed, we wandered towards the sidewalk. A groundskeeper in a little golf buggy slowed as he passed. “Hola!” he exclaimed merrily. “Perdidas? Are you lost?”
“Oh, we’re just trying to catch a cab,” Alicia explained.
“You’re not going to the pools?” he asked incredulously, raising eyebrows that looked like spider’s legs. “Perfect day.”
“No,” we chorused sadly.
“But you are from the cruise ship, yeees?” he nodded to the gray monstrosity docked in the distance, visible between the cement towers of oceanfront hotels. The way he elongated the “yes” inspired me to nod vaguely.
“And you lost your wrist bands. Is O.K. Get on, I will take you to the pools.”
We didn’t wait for further explanation or invitation. We leapt on the little white go-cart.
As we toddled through the generic shrubbery and 70s block buildings of the resort, we pieced it together: a cruise ship had docked for the day and its guests were given complimentary day passes to the resort. Our driver, pausing now to beep and wave at a fellow employee, had for some reason decided to “confuse” us with cruisers.
We didn’t care what had inspired him, or how much the surroundings looked like a cross between a retirement community and a failed attempt at a Club Med commercial. It was peaceful, free of honks and whistles. We chatted idly with our benefactor-cum-smuggler about California and where his relatives lived as we made our way through the complex.
We pulled up behind a cluster of thatched umbrellas. “The pools are there,” he pointed. Then, with an assuring nod, “Is O.K. you lost your wrist bands.”
We hopped off the buggy, exchanging back-pats and high-fives; forever the waitress, I slipped the driver a sizable peso note as I shook his hand. He waved, and trundled off into the landscaped distance.
I felt a twist in my stomach as we surveyed the pools. I was afraid of being caught—bum-rushed, I imagined, by a SWAT team of hotel management. With our sleeves of tattoos, dyed hair and septum piercings, we’d surely stand out among the suburban-American resort-goers.
But I was equally afraid of being mistaken for one of them.
I led the way through a maze of lounge chairs, arm floaties and sunburns. Women in one-pieces, hats over their faces, lay napping in the sun. A balding man with a potbelly splashed with a child, wearing those silly, reptilian swim shoes. Two boys with spiky, frost-tipped hair flexed their adolescent pecs at eyelash-batting female counterparts.
No one paid us any mind.
We plopped our bags down next to a couple of weathered chairs and began rubbing white sunscreen into multi-colored skin. Instead of a chorus of whistles and honks, Top 20 hits from the last twenty years pumped out of stereo speakers hung from poles and fashioned to resemble coconuts. It was the same basic soundtrack of every middle school dance I’d gone to, and I felt, in that moment, just about as awkward.
Ace of Base blared out suddenly over the speakers. “Ooh, this is my song!” Melissa cried sarcastically. She began lip-synching and shaking her tiny hips in a Macarena-style fashion to “I Saw The Sign.”
We entered the pool—either by gingerly sliding (me) or cannon-balling (Melissa)—and began wading through the bath-water-warm construction of bridges, slides and fountains that dripped with children’s limbs.
And then we saw it.
Or Alicia saw it. Her neck did a whip-lash double-take and she blurted out a pointed, “Oh hell no.”
We followed her stare. There, like a yeti espied in its native habitat, was a swim-up bar.
“I didn’t know those actually existed!” I cried.
We floated up to the thatched roof and blinking lights of the bar, half-giggly, half-amazed. We soon had a row of tall, neon margarita slushies adorned with twisty straws and paper umbrellas before us.
“Nice tattoo,” a sun-spotted woman beside us said. She pointed to the laughing skeleton across my chest. “It’s a Posada calavera?”
I grinned. “Yes!” Then, with a sly smile, “A lot of people think it’s a Grateful Dead tattoo. In the States, at least.”
The woman laughed and shook her Golden-Girls ‘fro. “Well, we are in Mexico.”
She was right. It may have been the Chevy’s of beach resorts, but we were still in Mexico.
She offered to take our picture—four girls embracing, holding out Slurpie-colored drinks in waist-deep pool water. It was a simple gesture between tourists, and in that moment, I didn’t feel Other Than. I didn’t feel like The Intrepid Independent Traveler, not The Ugly American, nor The Feminist Gringa Being Harassed. I had nothing to prove and no one else to be.
Who cares about being the rock n roll white girl when there’s a swimming pool and cheap drinks to be had?
And then a Mariah Carey Christmas song came on.
Lauren Quinn is a writer from Oakland, California. Her work has appeared in 7x7, the San Francisco Chronicle, and on websites such as World Hum, Matador, and the Huffington Post. She writes the blog Lonely Girl Travels and is currently living in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.