The Yelapa waterfall

Bars flanking the waterfall at Yelapa.

It wasn’t that the last time I’d gone to Yelapa everything was ideal. That was in November, a little over a year ago, and I’d taken a party boat out of the Puerto Vallarta Marina not realizing that I would end up spending five hours of the seven hour excursion on the boat with a bunch of drunken tourists and only two hours on the beach. Still, those two hours seemed magical—the golden sand, the warm, calm blue waters, the friendly locals. So this time I thought I’d get smart and take the water taxi from the Los Muertos Pier but it didn’t work out the way I expected. But then again, it never does in Mexico.

Rather than landing on the beach, the panga headed for a pier on the other side of the cove and Ruso announced that he would lead us on a short hike to a waterfall. Which was fine because we’d planned on doing that anyway. I’d heard that the waterfall was a 20 to 30 minute hike through the jungle. And it was. But it wasn’t like hiking to a waterfall in Yosemite. Instead, the path out of town passed by a motley collection of little shacks and makeshift abodes where vendors hustled everything from rosewood dolphins to homemade raicilla. At the waterfall itself were a couple of simple little bars, just plastic chairs nestled in the rocks and wooden tables where you could get raicilla or beer, though we didn’t see any customers, perhaps because it was too early in the day.

We’d pretty much had enough of Ruso by now so we slipped away from the group and headed back down the path, trying to figure out how to get to the other side of the bay to the playa. We passed by a couple of sad-looking horses carrying kids on their backs up the hill and by any number of little tiendas selling Chiclets or Doritos or finger bananas. The path kept going up and down the hillside and sometimes we’d get lost and end up in someone’s backyard and we’d excuse ourselves to the tired looking residents who’d say nothing as they watched us slip down another path or through a gate trying to find the logical way out. Eventually we made it down to the estuary only to discover that we were still on the wrong side and the water was too deep to cross.

We asked a local how to get down to the playa and he told us to go back up the way we’d come, past the clinic, and then look for a little path to the right. Even then we got lost. And we weren’t the only ones. A young couple that had passed us in the opposite direction earlier came back our way and asked us if we knew how to get down to the beach and we told them we thought so and they followed us as we went through little alleys and down hillside paths until we finally found a shallow spot in the estuary where we could get across to the beach.

We walked across the heavy sand past most of the palapa restaurants until we got to Oasis which is where Ruso had told us to go. I don’t know why we actually went there. No doubt Ruso had a deal with the restaurant to bring his water taxi clients there as there didn’t seem to be any difference between Oasis and the other half-a-dozen beach restaurants. One had blue umbrellas and another white and another red, but that was about all that seemed to differentiate them. We put our stuff down on the lounge chairs in front of the restaurant but the tide was high and the surf big and it wasn’t five minutes before waves had climbed all the way up the beach and was washing over our chairs so we retreated to a table under the palapa and ordered beers and looked at the menu. None of us were really starving but it was a cool day and the surf was high so we sat there and drank our beers and after awhile we ordered fish tacos and arrachera. The food wasn’t bad; it just wasn’t good.  It was like almost all the food you order at any beach restaurant in Mexico. We finished our lunch and ordered more beers and then I went for a walk along the beach but there really wasn’t much to see and the sand, which was coarse and large, hurt my feet so I went back to the restaurant and sat in a chaise and watched the pangas that waited for the surge of the waves to gun their engines and motor as fast as they could straight for the beach where they would then empty their boats of passengers. I did this for quite awhile; we still had several hours to wait until the water taxi came to pick us up. In the morning I had wondered if four hours in Yelapa would be enough time; now I was thinking about trying to get an earlier boat back.