Archive for May, 2010
Puerto Vallarta
Saturday, May 15th, 2010
April 18 – 22 (Sunday – Thursday)
We visited Puerto Vallarta post-ski season to catch a little sun. Upon arrival in the airport we immediately got ushered to the side by what we thought were representatives of our hotel helping to make the process over smooth. I asked if the hotel bus was coming and the concierge told us that it would come in 10 minutes. They are so smooth… so of course we stood there and let the guy show us a map of all the things we could do with prices and then slash the prices and show us how we could experience the same for so much less. Needless to say we ended up agreeing to visit a timeshare the next morning for a free breakfast, tour, and the free gifts. At least they gave us a private car to our hotel.
Walking around Puerto Vallarta
We got to the hotel, the Crown Paradise Club, which I had picked because the water slides looked so cool. I was thinking like a German where they have really awesome water slides built for adults. Unfortunately these were strictly for kids and we were stuck in the family resort, right next door to the adult version of the same hotel. Oh well, my bad.
The next morning we took our tour for the time share. I was happy for the first hour but got frustrated after that and eventually they finally let us go with our discounted gifts. We got two tickets for Vallarta Adventures and two tickets for a full day of kayaking by some island for 80 bucks total.
Our Vallarta Adventures consisted of being picked up by a speed boat and taking a 40 minute boat ride south along the coast. Then we got into these old Mercedes trucks and sat in the back shoulder to shoulder along the bumpy, curvy and fast 30 minute trip up to the camp.
Stock Image from Vallarta Adventures
There we had to relinquish all our gear (I chowed down on my sandwich at this point), suit up in harnesses and have a quick debriefing of the trip ahead. We got moved to the pony area where we were put on ponies and I got to lead the way up the hill for another half hour.
Finish with a 10 minute walk up the rest of the mountain and adventure the adventure just begins!! At this point we were briefed on how to ride the zip-lines and proceeded to make it all the way back down the mountain via 8 zip-lines or repels (including down rock sides, into water pools and through waterfalls, and over canyons).
This was a seriously fun trip. My only downside was having to pay like $30 per person per CD for a disc of photos that their photographer took. I think it wouldn’t have been so bad if we had known about the price in advance but it was a shock considering that it was more expensive for the tour. Naturally we paid for it anyway!
The last half of the trip was fairly uneventful. I developed stomach cramps right in the upper abdominal region and was unhappy in bed for much of the rest of it. Good trip all in all and my Dad loved the Rey Misterio mask I bought for him.