The Panama Canal Epic # 6: The Pacific Resort Metropolis

Our final port of call for the cruise was at Puerto Vallarta -- a combination of major city and resort area which is home to a substantial population, and a resort destination for many thousands more from North America and numerous other corners of the globe.

The highlights tour which I took was a combination of coach tour and walking, and gave a quick "greatest hits" survey of what this vibrant city of nearly 300,000 people has to offer.

Our tour began at the 3-berth cruise ship terminal towards the northern end of the city, and just south of the international airport. Not surprisingly, this sector of the city, known as the Marina area, houses some upmarket stores and restaurants as well as a number of modern, high-rise hotels representing major international brands. Here's a view of the Marina district waterfront from my balcony as the Island Princess sailed out at the end of our visit. The massive and wildly coloured Westin hotel is a real eye-catcher, both for its main building and for its equally colourful waterfront facilities.

It took us about 25 minutes to drive into the centre of the city, the Old Town district. Here you can find several of Puerto Vallarta's most famous attractions. However, my first sight in the Old Town was of a decidedly quirky character, a rooftop statue of a dancing cow.

From the point where the bus dropped us off, we walked down one short block to the waterfront, and the world-famous oceanside promenade, the Malecon. 

 

 

Here, there is a fascinating collection of public art works of varying character -- from graceful to grotesque, from comical to serious.

Of course, it's a huge challenge trying to photograph these artworks when so many members of the tour party must have their picture taken in front of every single sculpture! But I did my best. It took me two pictures to grasp the entirety of this piece.

 

 

Nor does it help matters at all when the guide, Rosalia, urges you to take a seat on the sculpture's lap and have your picture taken there. Oops! My bad!

 

This figure, very different in texture and colour, represents an indigenous medicine woman, although to my eye she has also a strong air of the Mother Goddess -- and that may well have been the intention.

 

 

One of the best known is the boy on the seahorse. From its reputation, I expected it to dwarf all comers but in fact it is just one among many and by no means the biggest.

This Neptune is my personal favourite.

 

 

Almost as exciting for me were the daring aerobatic manoeuvres of the Pelican Air Force.

 

 

We then walked up into the town again to visit the central Plaza, where the open-air bandstand hosts popular concerts and shows on weekends. 

 

 

Beyond the Plaza, we walked to the Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe, a building which is by no means as grandly-sized as its reputation might have you expect. It is in fact rather compact, except for its height.

 

 

Life on the Plaza: I was tickled by the exact wording of the tour agency's sign, and laughed heartily at the pair of t-shirts in the store window. 

One of the real annoyances of these organized tours is the inevitable stop in a large and boring store. In the case of this tour's big jewellery store, I suspect most of us hit the boredom mark after about 15 minutes of a 35-minute stop -- and that was in spite of the small bar offering free margaritas to all comers, at 9:45 in the morning. This day drinking is crazy!

 

After that stop, we drove south through the city and out onto the narrow, twisting highway climbing up into the coastal Sierra Madre on the way to the scenic bay of Mismaloya. This coastline is peppered with numerous hotels and condominiums, perched high up on the steep slopes above the Pacific or, in rarer cases, down by the shore.. 

 

 

There  aren't actually many places where you can see any kind of view from the road, just a quick snatched glimpse if your timing is good and you aren't driving.

 

There is one small roadside pullout with a good scenic point which gives a clear view of the famous offshore rocks known as Los Arcos de Mismaloya, presumably because they were once connected by a natural arch.

 

 

On the drive back into town, we had to detour up and down a couple of streets of the neighbourhood between the Rio Cuale and the mountains, an area known as the "zona romantica" or "zona rosa." The streets here are filled with shops, restaurants, bars, hotels, and other businesses catering primarily to gay travellers. Puerto Vallarta has for years been one of the principal LGBTQ destinations in the Americas.

 

The bus then stopped on a bridge over the Isla Cuale in the river, and we walked down a flight of steps to a small souvenir and gift market and a large restaurant. We were offered a free drink again, and a chance to enjoy a light meal in the sizable outdoor covered dining area. I was not yet hungry, and was more attracted by the chance to get some photos of the gardens and flowers on the island.

 

 

 

That lunch stop went on quite a bit longer than planned, and was primarily responsible for making the tour arrive back at the pier nearly an hour after the scheduled time.

 

This was an intriguing "quick look" at Puerto Vallarta. Contrary to what many people might think (especially many of my gay friends). the idea of spending any amount of time here doesn't appeal to me. The streets are narrow and crowded, many of the shops and restaurants likewise (not surprising, given the age of many of the buildings in the older areas of town), while the lavish hotels of the Marina district are cut off from the rest of the city by the waters of the Marina, and cut off from me by their hefty room rates.  

However, for those who are intrigued -- and not just LGBTQ travellers, either! -- Puerto Vallarta offers some lovely seaside settings, beautiful beaches on Banderas Bay, intriguing places to discover on foot, and generally more congenial weather than areas farther south (apart from the rainy summer months). 

The morning after we sailed from Puerto Vallarta, I was having early breakfast in the buffet. I knew it was early on a sea day because most of the passengers weren't up and doing yet, and I actually nailed a rare table-for-two, facing the windows on the starboard side. One look outside was enough to tell me that we were out of the tropics. The sky looked different. The clouds looked different. Even the wide open ocean water was behaving very differently from the way it had acted for most of the last two weeks.

And then, so suddenly that it startled me a little, there were the rugged mountains of Baja California looming up out of the sea mist. 

And with that, I knew that we had passed Cabo San Lucas and were on our way back north, next destination the Port of San Pedro at Los Angeles in two days time. I found out just how true that was when I set out onto the promenade deck for my morning walk, and found the ship sailing directly into the teeth of a stiff, chilly northwesterly breeze which blew at full throttle down both sides of the ship. The captain's noon report quoted an air temperature of 16 degrees Celsius, quite a shock to the system after nearly two weeks of nonstop temperatures in the 30s!

Lest this whole voyage begin to seem unlikely to any skeptical readers, I attach this photo. This certificate was dropped off in my cabin on the night of May 8, 2023, the day we visited Puerto Vallarta.

 

Way back in 2000, I got a similar certificate for crossing the Arctic Circle and voyaging all the way to Spitsbergen, one of the two or three land masses on the entire planet closest to the North Pole. What I did with that certificate, I don't remember. In fact, I think it may even have been a certificate for surviving a Polar Bear Swim (in the ship's pool, ha ha!) at 6:30 am on a July morning when we were at our closest approach to the North Pole.

 

 

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This entire set of blog posts about the Panama Canal voyage is dedicated with much love and sadness to the memory of my niece, Jennifer. Jenn died suddenly and unexpectedly on the day after we set sail from Florida, and this sudden loss, at the early age of 44, truly coloured and shaped my entire experience during this cruise. Jenn and I never had an opportunity to travel together, but we did swap travellers' tales from time to time, and I would have loved to have her along on this voyage, sharing her own insights and reactions to all the varied experiences that this trip has brought me. I'll never have that opportunity now, but her joyful smiles and hearty laughter are mine forever, in my memories, and never to be forgotten. Rest in Peace, Jenn.

 

 

 

The Panama Canal Epic # 2: The Queen of the Spanish Main

After two sea days of sailing south from Florida, our first port call of this cruise was the port city of Cartagena, on the northern (Caribbean) coast of Colombia. On the way south, we spent hours sailing through endless rows of sargassum weed, more or less parallel, their direction marking out the direction of the ocean current slowly sweeping these colonial organisms towards land.

 

 

This is expected to be a bumper crop year for sargassum washing up on beaches. It's already begun coming ashore in vast, smelly mats on the Florida Keys. These strips which I've seen down in the Caribbean Sea are likely to wind up on the shores of Yucatan, Cancun, Cozumel, and Belize.

 

While I studied the sargassum from my balcony, I was also studying (as I always do) what first appears to be another colonial organism, albeit a much more orderly one.

 

 

That's the drainable matting which Princess puts on the private balconies of all its ships. The geometric order and complexity of the pattern always fascinates me.

 

For me, this visit to Cartagena marked not only a new port and a new country but my first-ever landing on the continent of South America. Actually, this was my first landing on the mainland of the Americas south of Mexico.

I take the trouble to refer to it in that detail for an interesting reason. From its use in fiction and films, I had always thought that the phrase "the Spanish Main" referred to the oceans controlled by Spain around its colonies in the Americas. Just to prove that even lifelong teachers of history are always learning new lessons, I have now learned that the term refers to the "mainland" areas of Spanish America as opposed to the islands, called the "Spanish West Indies." 

If you already knew that before I did, you are now allowed to look smug, at least until the next test!

 

The city of Cartagena was founded in 1533 to take advantage of a strategically placed harbour, and grew slowly under successive Spanish governors. Eventually, it became the key port for the export of the silver from the Royal Mint in Potosí (Bolivia), and for other valuable products of the Spanish Main (like coffee and chocolate), to be shipped to Spain. This made it a desirable target for pirates and corsairs funded by various other European powers, especially France and England, and the city fell prey to a number of raids through the years -- raids which ended, not in occupation by other colonial powers, but in the payment of substantial ransoms.

 

Base map attribution:     https://freevectormaps.com/colombia/CO-EPS-02-0001?ref=atr

As time went by, the fortifications in and around the bay grew larger, more massive, and more daunting. Today, Cartagena boasts a modern city with the expected amenities, surrounding the walled, historic, old town district which is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

 

With that, let's get to looking into Cartagena in detail. 

At first light on April 30, we glided slowly into the bay of Cartagena, and docked at 7:00 am. The first tours left the ship at 7:30. Thus, the buffet was already packed with the early breakfast shift by 6:15. This might seem like a barbaric hour, but we are fully into the tropics. Here, it pays to be early and try to beat both the heat and the likelihood of rain coming on later in the day because of daytime heating.

We did neither.

On a steamy, cloudy morning, we boarded buses to be driven off and around the town. Our first stop was at a small theatre where we saw a 40-minute folkloric dance show. My efforts to photograph the performance failed due to the extensive use of black light (ultraviolet) which highlighted the colourful, swirling costumes, but didn't do much for the remainder. No matter. The energy of the performers was especially notable at 8:30 in the morning, and the applause from the audience was well-earned.

Across the street from the show venue was the massive hilltop fortress of San Felipe, the largest such fortification in all of Spanish America and the West Indies. I was just as glad I didn't visit it, as the ramp up the hill looked like it would reduce me to a melted puddle on the ground in 3 minutes. ("I'm melting, melting.... Ohhh, what a world, what a world....")

From there, we drove into the Old Town district, a walled city which is designated in its entirety as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, primarily for its fortifications. 

 

 

But the government has gone further, protecting all buildings in the district as heritage buildings, whose exteriors cannot be altered. The result, as we saw on our walking tour, is a fascinating time capsule of various periods of Iberian and colonial architecture, leavened with a generous dose of vibrant Caribbean colour. Imagine how much more spectacular it would look on a sunny day!

This house especially caught my attention, not only for the vivid blue colour, but also for the inset shrine to the Virgin Mary, similar to ones I saw in Genoa (Italy) and which doubtless can be found in other Mediterranean countries.

Many street corners display these lovely old tiled street signs, inlaid into the walls of houses.

Just down the street from here, we came to a square where we again could see the city walls, and where this ornate lamp standard caught my eye. I'm pretty sure it dates back to the age of the gas lamp because it's been brought into the electrical age by a wire strung through the air!

 

Another short walk brought us to a monastery church which we might possibly be allowed to enter (since it was Sunday, we'd have to dodge in between the numerous scheduled services).  And just then, while our guide was inside checking to see if a visit was possible, the heavens opened. 

Eventually, we were allowed to enter, but we all got thoroughly soaked just crossing that narrow street. Inside, we met an interior which was cooler and far less ornate than I expected. An unusual touch was the row of stained glass windows around the interior of the dome which is a smaller version modelled on Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome.

We also visited a small museum attached to the monastery, where I was taken with this little shrine or reliquary. I think the figures inside were portraying a Nativity scene. The whole thing would sit neatly on my laptop with room to spare all around.

Eventually we staggered back to our bus and crawled aboard, thoroughly wet and bedraggled. The rain had eased off a bit during that last leg, but then it poured down full force again as we arrived at an emerald "museum" -- really, a kitschy little dioramic recreation of traditional emerald mining, followed by a large jewellery store (surprise, surprise). Thank goodness we were only stuck there for half an hour. By this time I was thoroughly done with standing, with sightseeing, with humidity, with heat, with rain, you name it. At last we got on the bus and made our way back to the pier. That gave us a chance to view at first hand the results of this torrential monsoon downpour.

Great fun for our bus driver! Here, as we crossed a bridge over the river channel from the island holding the old city to the mainland, we could see the hope of drier skies ahead.

By the time we got back to the cruise pier, the rain had stopped, and the air was a good deal cooler and not nearly as crushingly humid. The expected dockside souvenir store was a good deal more imaginative than many of its kind, being approached through a tropical jungle and aviary.

The five-minute walk down the pier from there gave me a chance to see the Island Princess from a different angle.

And a chance to pose with the ship -- still soaked to the skin, but at least my hair was starting to dry out!

As we sailed out of Cartagena Bay after 3:00 pm, I had a chance from my balcony to photograph one of the two fortresses which guard either side of the entrance to the bay (there are half a dozen more on various islands inside the bay).

And with that, off we sailed to the west, heading for our next destination where we are expected to arrive at the crack of dawn tomorrow. Another early morning get-up-and-go!