The back road to Sayulita

The church in Sayulita. Photo by David Lansing.

We had the day to kill before the Fletchers arrived in Puerto Vallarta so I took Mechas and Signe on a little tour of the area beginning with a drive to Sayulita. I myself haven’t been there since the floods last fall. I’d heard that the bridge into town had been washed out but if you just kept going straight on the road to Punta Mita, there was a back way into town. There was a little hand-lettered sign along the road pointing in the direction of the back road which took us through a part of town I’d never seen before. The cobblestone road with pitted with potholes and there were some heavily damaged vehicles, some covered in mud, that had obviously gone through the flood in September.

Mechas and Signe kept asking me questions about what we were seeing and I felt like a bit of an idiot because I couldn’t tell them much. As I said, I’d never been through this part of Sayulita. When you are a gringo and you regularly visit a place like Sayulita, you get used to seeing it one way. You drive over the little bridge and there is the fish store on the left and Burrito Revolution next to the paleta stand and you park somewhere around Gypsy Galeria because you will stop in here before going home to buy some little trinket like a milagro or a beer tray and then you walk a block to the beach and rent a couple of chairs and order a Negro Modelo from one of the waiters at Don Pedro’s because that’s just what you do. And after awhile you think that this is the town and this is where all the people live although if you really thought about it you’d realize it couldn’t possibly be true, that surely the waiters from Don Pedro’s and the woman pushing the cart down the street selling balloons are not living in the nice houses a block from the beach. They are living in the barrio, which you have never seen and, until the road washed out, didn’t even know existed. And now you are driving through the barrio and it is fascinating and full of life and very different from the tourist areas in Sayulita that you are used to.

So we came the back way and parked near the plaza and the old church, which I had never even been in, and both Signe and Mechas wanted to go inside so we did. There was really not much to it. It was just a simple little church, the sort you’d find in almost any little town in Mexico, but Signe and Mechas were quite taken with it. “Isn’t this wonderful?” Signe said, taking in the modest altar with the crucifix and the wooden pews and the wrought-iron standing holding prayer candles. And it was. It really was wonderful.