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Disembarking from the Carnival Splendour, our arrival into Puerto Vallarta was as confused as our arrivals have been anywhere else. We did know which bus to catch and we found the bus stop after only 5 or so minutes walking, however the fact that we were now in Spanish speaking territory came as a bit of an unexpected shock to us (albeit totally expected!). We hadn't really prepared for this moment and it definitely showed. Our attempts at rudimentary communication consisted of simple words (some in French with an O added at the end) and international hand signals which were received by either laughing or blank faces.
Our first and simple task in Puerta Vallarta was to find the hostel. This was less easy that it should have been as it was located on Calle Brasil which doesn't have a sign. Every time we asked the locals where it was they pointed in a different direction! Trudy snapped as we walked past the right street for the third time (having asked Tom on the second pass "This one doesn't have a sign, is this Calle Brasil?") and the quiet streets of PV witnessed an angry Trudy demanding that Tom explain what on earth he was playing at. Tom's holiday age had evidently taken a battering from his heavy bag and the stifling Mexican heat!
When we finally found the hostel it was closed with a note on the door saying that the manager was out and would be back in an hour. At this point the bar next door looked extremely enticing and we were only too happy to exchange our massive bags for ice cold bottles of Corona with slices of lime! In the words of Ron Burgundy: "When in Rome".
In Puerta Vallarta we were duped into the great grandmother of all tourist traps when we were mis-sold a horse-riding excursion in the jungle which included swimming with the horses. Oh what fun we thought, let's do that! The difference between what we'd bought and what we actually received would be similar to ordering a Sunday roast and instead receiving a cold piece of roadkill. Replace the hip, youthful and multi-lingual guides with an old man who couldn't speak a word of English. Get a pair of dead horses and then "back it up a little" to, say, two weeks prior to death. Replace the jungle with a single-track tarmac road. Oh but what about the lovely river swim, you ask? Replace it with the old man's house and garden which was filled with multiple mental barking dogs (bearing in mind that Trudy was attacked by a pack of Andrex puppies as a girl). Why he felt it was appropriate to take us to his house will forever remain a mystery, but he did so with the enthusiasm that a newly potty-trained toddler would display his 'wares' to mummy and daddy! This was the point at which we took our lovely photo, the one where Trudy looks like she's about to murder Tom.
There was a slight change from our usual pattern of sharing dorms with naked, snoring men. Our room-mate here was really nice and had lots of amusing anecdotes to tell us from his days of travelling. He was also 71, and when we discovered this we insisted that he take Tom's bottom bunk. He refused and instead flew into the top bunk as easily as d*** Van Dyke as Mark Sloan in Diagnosis Murder. Tom would have done well to have climbed up as well as he did!
We were told by the hostel manager that there was a festival on the sea front so we walked there and arrived several hours late. On the way home we stopped for the ever-elusive single beer and ended up drinking about 10 Coronas each, the total bill came to five quid (thank God for the British Pound!). It was also on the same sea front that saw Tom comment to Trudy "I've just seen the worst pseudo-tache in my entire life, obviously apart from that woman's, last week".
The rest of the time in PV was spent on the beach and not a lot happened there apart from Trudy refusing to get in the water for fear of her handbag being stolen and both of us being accosted every minute of every day to buy handmade arts and crafts from the locals. At one point a man even asked us, in all seriousness, if we were in the market for a baby's mobile: Trudy's response, "Absolutely NOT". She then added to Tom sarcastically "Oh yeah, that's exactly what I wanted on the beach, a baby's mobile…how stupid of me not to realise!".
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