An 8-hour flight and an exciting ride in this taxi with the cute flowers on the dash, we were deposited at Playa Los Muertos to hop aboard the water taxi to Yelapa. Exciting because there are no posted speed signs and the traffic seems to just whiz along. Our driver had some fairly creative maneuvers that had both my eyebrows jumping!
Puerto Vallarta Taxi
I brought  sandwiches and fruit for us to eat on the way which they promptly threw away upon arrival at customs! So we were hungry when we got to the beach. With an hour to wait for the water-taxi we parked in this cool little beach-side restaurant for a little refreshment.
Refreshment after our flight
Our waiter was really great and spoke english fairly well. He was excited about being put into my blog. Now I wish I’d written down his name. :/ He let us try out our very limited spanish on him and gave us some new words.
Our Waiter at a PV beachside restaurant
We ordered chips and salsa, expecting the americano-sized basket. What we got was this little dish with 15 or so chips, salsa and some burn-up-your-mouth red sauce! I happen to like hot but even I thought this was pretty spicy!
That red sauce really lit up my eyes!
Finally on the taxi, leaving PV behind. So excited to finally be on our way, I didn’t want to miss a thing so plopped down on the front of the boat on a hard bench seat. After 45-minute ride bumping up and down, I learned the FRONT of the boat is NOT where you want to be!
On the water taxi, leaving the big city behind!
Coming into Yelapa, it was a little overcast but the colors leapt out right away. This was the pier where we got off. From this point it was just a short walk up to our Casa. Fry, the caretaker’s son, met us and showed us the way.
Our first glimpse of Yelapa
We arrived about 4:30pm and were pretty exhausted so we to a short nap before we ventured out for dinner. This next picture was the little path that led to the bottom of the zillion-steps to our casa. There were a few lamp-light’s in town but I took a flashlight with me every night because there were plenty of unlit paths.
Being a small village, at no time did I ever feel unsafe. By the time we left, I had started to recognize faces around the village and they knew us back.
The path from our casa.
There is a space of time, when you first arrive at a new place like this, where everything is new, unfamiliar and seems a little overwhelming, especially with the language barrier. But by the 2nd day I knew my way around the village and had started naming streets! We used a little spanish phrasebook and learned lots of new words and were doing ok by the end of 8 days.
