The Pier of the Dead in Puerto Vallarta.

With the sun rising up over the Sierra Madre, we drove into Puerto Vallarta to the Los Muertos Pier where the water taxis depart for Yelapa. I guess I don’t have to tell you what Los Muertos means. Calling it a pier is a bit of a stretch. Particularly at the moment when it is nothing more than a few ribs of concrete that are being jackhammered apart during reconstruction. As you walk towards the pier you are accosted by at least half a dozen locals wanting to sell you a ticket to Yelapa even before they know that’s where you’re going. They all assure you that it is not part of any time-share scheme, which is a bit confusing because I don’t know of any time-shares in Yelapa. Anyway, we waded through the salesman to the little stand next to a palapa restaurant and bought our tickets. A one-way ticket is 120 pesos and a round-trip ticket is 250. It could drive you nuts if you tried to figure out why they charge more for a round-trip ticket than for two one-way tickets. This is just the way it is in Mexico.

The water-taxi was nothing more than a large panga named Carey which we could see bobbing in the surf maybe ten yards beyond the end of the decrepit pier. The man selling the tickets told us that the boat would leave at 10 and then asked us what time we wanted to return. We told him 3 and he circled that time on the return ticket for which we’d paid an extra 10 pesos each. Paige wanted to walk up the street and get a jugo of fresh beet and orange juice but the boat was scheduled to leave in a few minutes so we just stood around watching three bare-chested young men hammer away at the concrete pier. Fifteen minutes went by and then half an hour and still we were waiting for the panga to come pick us up but it continued to bob in the surf while its pilot snoozed on the seat cushions. Finally around 10:30 it was brought up to the pier and there was much shouting of instructions and a certain chaos as three men tried to both keep the boat from smashing into the concrete pier and get passengers aboard the boat as it rose and fell several feet with the waves. There was one old woman carrying several large parcels who simply couldn’t navigate the distance between the pier and the bobbing boat so that eventually some other men were called forth and two men lifted her up in their arms and handed her down to two other men on the panga as if she were a large child.

Even after everyone had managed one way or the other to board the water taxi nothing much happened. We pushed off from the pier and stayed just off-shore, wretchedly lurching up and down in the unusually large swell. I asked one of the men on the boat, who was wearing a red scarf and a white cap, as if he’d just come from the running of the bulls in Pamplona, what we were waiting for and he shrugged and said, “Don’t worry. We are leaving soon.” After a few minutes we motored back to the pier and went through the lurching up and down against the concrete process all over again as three more passengers were loaded. Finally, we pushed off.

We had a two-man crew: a very young man bundled up in a fleece jacket buttoned up to the chin and the older man in white cap and red scarf. The young man started out as the captain but then got sick and the older man took over. I was sitting next to him and asked him what the problem was and he said the boy was sick. Probably with the flu. We slowly made our way down along the coast to Los Arcos, a Mexican marine park near Mismaloya where John Huston filmed Night of the Iguana, the 1964 movie that made Puerto Vallarta famous. The panga stopped and Ruso, the man with the white cap and red scarf, got a bag out from under his seat and started throwing handfuls of stale bread into the green waters. At first nothing happened and then there was a woosh! and a whole school of angel fish, moving as one, came up to the surface for the bread. Ruso tossed more and more bread into the water, luring them closer to the boat until you could reach out with your hand and touch the top of the fish. Nothing could be worse for these fish than eating stale bread, of course, but telling Ruso that would be pointless. This is the way they did it; they took the tourists to Los Arcos and they fed the fish stale bread. Meanwhile, the young man who had started out as the pilot on our panga was doing his own sort of chumming from the back end of the boat, wretching into the water.

The morning was cool and the wind was up and everyone on the boat either pulled on jackets or sweaters or wrapped beach towels around their bodies. The old woman had a blue wool blanket and wrapped it over her head and shoulders like the Virgin of Guadalupe. For half an hour we rode like this, bouncing over the waves, passing other pangas headed the other direction towards Puerto Vallarta, until the boat slowed and we turned into a misty cove with a curving beach at the end and brightly-colored buildings leaning out of the jungle that rose up from the water and into the hills. We’d reached Yelapa.

My daughter, Paige, and her boyfriend, Carlos, are flying in from San Francisco today to visit me for a few days. Paige is a total foodie so naturally when the two of us are together, we spend a lot of time talking about what to eat and where to eat it. I told her about a taco cart near the plaza in Bucerias called Tacos de Cabeza that serves only meats from the head of the cow—tongue, lip, cheek, eye, and brain. Their specialty is supposed to be lengua, or tongue, tacos. Last Saturday I happened to be near the plaza so I searched out the tongue taco maker but it was New Years Day and the little stand under the purple umbrella was closed. But I think Paige and I will search him out again this weekend.

Having worked for the Slow Food Movement in San Francisco pretty much straight out of college, it’s not surprising that what Paige is most interested in is locally produced ingredients. She’s the only person I know who would actually walk into my kitchen and ask me where the chorizo came from. As if there might be a label on it stating the name of the pig and the farm he once lived on. And she hates prepared foods. You cannot buy packaged tortillas when you are with Paige; either you make them yourselves (we’re both pretty good at it although, truth be known, she’s better) or you go to some little tortilleria in town and buy a dozen or two fresh off the griddle.

It also drives her crazy that people buy canned beans. In this I am in complete agreement. You may say, Oh, come on now, beans are beans. But it’s not true. Canned beans are to homemade beans what canned corn is to fresh corn on the cob. There’s just no comparison. And the thing is it’s so incredibly easy to make a pot of beans. As I am writing this, in preparation for their arrival, I have a pot of frijoles bubbling on the stove in an olla or earthenware pot. They’ve been slowly cooking for about three hours, getting all nice and tender, and pretty soon I will take them off the heat and fry up a little chorizo and add it to them and then just let them sit on top of the stove until we are ready to eat them with our tacos de camarones al mojo de ajo, a favorite recipe of mine from the wonderful Bay Area restaurant Doña Tomás. It is such a simple but elegant dinner. Add some fresh-made pico de gallo and a margarita or two and you will have one of the finest Mexican meals you’ve ever had. Here are the recipes:

Frijoles Con Todo

–2 cups pinto beans, rinsed and drained

–About 3 tablespoons kosher salt

–1 or 2 links of fresh chorizo

–2 avocados, cut into small cubes

–2 tomatoes diced

–1/2 red oncion, diced

–shredded queso Oaxaca or other Mexican cheese

–2 serrano chiles, minced

–1/2 bunch cilantro, stemmed and chopped

Place the beans in a heavy-duty saucepan and cover with 3 inches of cold water. Bring to a boil over high heat, add the salt, and decrease heat to a simmer. Simmer for about 3 hours, stirring once in awhile to keep beans from sticking to the bottom, until beans are tender. Add more hot water from time to time to keep beans fully submerged. Stop adding water after 2 hours or so and let water reduce until it’s just covering the beans when they’re perfectly tender. Adjust the seasoning with salt. Remove the skins from the chorizo sausages and break them up as they are frying in a sauté pan. Drain the fat and add the chorizo to the beans. Ladle the beans and broth into bowls and top with healthy portions of avocado, tomatoes, onion, cheese, chiles, and cilantro. Bueno!

Tacos de Camarones al Mojo de Ajo

–1/4 cup canola oil

–1 white onion, sliced

–1 1/2 lbs. large shrimp, peeled and split lengthwise

–kosher salt

–3 tablespoons unsalted butter

–1 jalapeno chile, thinly sliced

–2 tablespoons chopped garlic

–1/2 bunch Italian parsley, stemmed and chopped

–best corn tortillas you can get (or make your own)

Heat a large skillet over high heat, add the oil and onion and quickly stir 2 or 3 times. Immediately add the shrimp and a few pinches of salt and sauté for 1 to 2 minutes, just until the shrimp begin to turn red. Add the butter, jalapeno, and garlic and sauté for 1 minute as the butter begins to melt and the garlic releases its aroma. Continue to stir for about 30 seconds; the whole cooking process for the shrimp should be no longer than 3 minutes. Stir in parsley and remove the pan from the heat.  Warm both sides of your tortillas on a skillet or comal, spoon in the shrimp mixture, and serve immediately.

Yesterday Chris Fletcher drove down from Custodio, about an hour and a half north of here, and I had lunch with his family and a few friends in Bucerias. Chris asked me to just pick some place so I made a reservation at a new restaurant called Bistrot O Delices, a little slip of a French café that just opened last month. I figured that after eating nothing but Mexican food for the past week, the Fletchers would be ready for something a little different (as his 80-something mother, Sally, said to me as we sat down, “You can only eat so many cold quesadillas for lunch every day if you get my drift.” I did.)

I had walked into town the day before and introduced myself to the chef’s wife who looks remarkably like a young Juliette Binoche with those same dark melancholy eyes. It was a little after noon but there was no one in the bistro except her husband, the chef, who was sitting at a table placed on the cobblestone street outside the restaurant smoking a cigarette.

I explained to her that I wanted to make a reservation for eight or nine people for the following day. It wasn’t that I was afraid there wouldn’t be room for us in the small patio, though there are only four or five tables; I just wanted to make sure that the chef knew we were coming so he would be prepared and not run out of food. This is something you can’t imagine in the States, but this is the way it is in Bucerias. Most of these restaurants are very small and they get used to having only a few customers every day and so when a large party walks in, you are taking your chances.

The young woman, whose name I can’t recall, was quite charming. She showed me the menu, which is mostly quiches and various French sandwiches, and told me that her husband could make us whatever we wanted. If we wanted some fish or perhaps chicken, he would do it. Just tell her how many orders he would need to prepare. Since I didn’t know if people were going to be particularly hungry or not, I told her we would just take our chances and the chef should just make his normal special of the day. She said he would be sure to make enough for us.

When we arrived promptly at 1:30, everything was all arranged. They’d put several small tables together in the garden and covered them with white table cloths and we sat in the shade of the trees and some garden umbrellas just as if we were in the south of France. After we settled in, the chef’s wife told us that her husband had made a wonderful special, rôti de porc with carmelized onions and roasted new potatoes. Had we been in France, no doubt everyone would have ordered the rôti de porc and a couple of bottles of slightly chilled Rhone wine, but we were in Mexico and no one was actually starving to death so just about everyone ordered either a croque monsieur or the quiche Lorraine along with sparkling water or ice tea. By the time the chef’s wife got to me, I was feeling a bit badly that nobody had ordered up the chef’s special of the day, so of course I went for it and also asked for a glass of wine. Eight adults eating a late lunch at a small French bistro and I’m the only one drinking wine. Oh well.

The food was spectacular. The quiche Lorraine was classic as were the croque monsieurs with their thick slabs of artisan bread covered in Gruyère cheese but the best thing was the rôti de porc. It was so moist and flavorful that I started handing out medallions of pork for everyone to taste along with a roasted potato or two. The chef here obviously knows his stuff. But I worry about him and his Juliette Binoche look-alike wife. I have known other couples like them that started up little eateries around here only to quickly go bust. Several years ago there was a little Italian café in San Pancho run by an Italian pastry chef and his wife. They made the most amazing breads and little pizzas and had some old-fashioned espresso machine and you could get a cannoli or a slice of cheesecake and a cappuccino and sit at a little table on the street and just be in heaven. But the next year, when I went back, they were gone.

I fear the same thing will happen with this ersatz Juliette Binoche and her talented chef husband. Most likely, Bistrot O Delices will not be around next year. But for as long as they continue to grace the little town of Bucerias, I will stop by for a croque monsieur or two and a glass of wine.

There is a beach, a few miles up the coast, past La Cruz, called Playa Destiladeras. The name means the Distiller’s Beach. The guide books say it got this name because there is a natural fresh water spring in the rocks above the beach but I don’t believe that. The beach is wide and sandy and usually the surf is mild—a perfect spot for launching a small panga loaded with homemade mezcal or tequila.

Tequila, or some sort of agave distillation, has been around for well over 200 years but Mexico’s regulation of tequila is relatively recent. It wasn’t until 1994 that the Tequila Regulatory Board was established. Before that, just about anybody could—and did—make a distilled spirit called tequila, no matter how foul.

Anyway, this is a story for another day. What I want to tell you about is my day at Playa Destiladeras. Because I arrived early, I was able to park along the side of the road. Usually there is no room and you have to pay to park in the dusty lot next to a palapa restaurant. I don’t mind paying the two bucks to park in the lot but the problem is that they stack everyone’s car back to back and it can be difficult if not impossible to get out if you want to leave early.

I walked up the beach, away from the palapa restaurants and the families already spread out with their blankets and barbecues and plastic ice chests full of liter bottles of Coke. I spread my towel out on the warm sand and then went for a swim. When I came back, a family had settled in just a few feet away from me. It was the typical situation of the abuela, wearing a long white dress, propped up in a chair beneath the shade of a blue nylon umbrella while around her spread the rest of the family: four or five children digging holes and covering each other in sand, their parents—no doubt brothers and sisters—sitting on beach towels and playing some card game, and a couple of small dogs running around yapping at each other and anyone passing by.

This went on for a couple of hours until an ice cream vendor came by. He was pushing a homemade wheelbarrow with a box on the front carrying paper cones and plastic spoons and some sort of a little stainless steel tub, like a pressure cooker, with the ice cream inside. The family bought cups of ice cream, chocolate I think, and sat in a loose circle slowly eating them. And then the abuela got up from her chair and, without saying a word, unrolled a straw mat on the sand under the shade. Everyone else finished up their ice cream and did the same, and then, just like it was late afternoon in kindergarten, the entire family took a siesta on the beach. For an hour, no one stirred. Not the beefy adult men who looked very uncomfortable lying on their sides on the ground, not the little children who were wet and dirty with sand, and not the yappy dogs who were silent even though they closely watched me, their eyes wide open.

And then the abuela abruptly got up, rolled up her straw mat, and sat back down in her beach chair. Within minutes everyone else was up as well. The kids resumed digging deep holes in the sand, the adults went back to their card game, and the dogs ran up and down the beach barking at the sandpipers. It all seemed so mystical to me. Why does everyone take a nap at the same time? Who determines how long they will sleep? Why does everyone get up at once? There is, of course, no explanation for it. This is just the way it is in Mexico.

As I was drinking my coffee this morning and using the binoculars to scan the Bay of Banderas for whales, there was a knock on my door. This is quite rare. No one ever visits me before noon. It was Bulmaro, Ramon’s handyman. I like Bulmaro very much. He is young and enthusiastic and always anxious to try out his English on me.

“Hola , Señor David,” he said when I waved him in. “Your good year night  fine?”

Yes, I told him, I’d had a fine New Year’s Eve.”

Bulmaro was here to fix a number of things. There were the broken blinds in the guest room and the bathroom water faucet that would not work and a leak I was having under the kitchen sink (all things Ramon should have had fixed before I arrived but didn’t because he didn’t want to upset me). But before he started on all that, I asked him to help me roll up the large sisal rug in the living room which was fatally covered with black mold and get rid of it.

“For you this is not so good?” he asked looking at the rug which looked like the hairy back of a very large man.

“No bueno.”

Could he have it? he asked.

I was hesitant to give it to him. It wasn’t just that the rug was damaged; it was a health hazard. The only reason I hadn’t rolled it up and removed it myself yesterday was because I was afraid of unleashing a million lung-destroying spores into the air. I’d gotten a big piece of plastic from my bodega and put that on top of the moldy rug and figured if Bulmaro and I rolled it up very, very carefully over the plastic we might both avoid getting some nasty lung disease. Now here was Bulmaro wanting to take it home where, no doubt, his two kids could play on it. I tried to explain to Bulmaro that I really thought the carpet was beyond redemption but he was not to be deterred. Besides, I knew that even if I insisted on it being thrown out, he would only throw it in the back of his green pickup and take it home anyway. So, god forgive me, I gave Bulmaro my moldy rug.

Anyway, while Bulmaro was repurposing some kite string to repair my blinds, there was another knock on the door. It was Carlos, the plumber from Sayulita, along with his little brother, Manuel who is learning the fine art of hot water heater repair. Before I could even show Carlos and Manuel where the tank was, there was another knock on the door. It was Cecilia, the maid, here to oil the outdoor teak furniture that had been ruined from the monsoons. Suddenly, my small condo was buzzing with activity. Bulmaro was yelling at Carlos from the guest room, trying to borrow some tool, and Carlos was flirting with Cecilia as she bent over my chaise lounge, oiled rag in hand, and Cecilia was cursing at Carlos, telling him in Spanish that she had a son almost as old as Manuel (which I find hard to believe) and, anyway, her husband takes care of her just fine.

With all the commotion going on, I realized I wasn’t going to get any writing done, so I grabbed my swimsuit and a towel and headed for the beach after telling Bulmaro where I was going and asking him to lock up behind him.

“The very bad rug I thank you for and my esposa thank you please,” he said, shaking my hand.

I doubt very much that Bulmaro’s wife will thank me for the moldy rug. In fact, I’m rather anxious to hear what sort of reception Bulmaro got when he brought the filthy thing home. I’ll have to ask him. I just hope his wife doesn’t blame me.