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MEXICO: LOST & FOUND
Can Daniel Sanger get real in plastic Puerto Vallarta?

Text: DANIEL SANGER

The first fact that any visitor learns about Puerto Vallarta is that the then-tiny fishing village was put on the map by the merry-making of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Ever since Burton filmed The Night of the Iguana there in 1963, the story has figured in all the guidebooks.

The affair itself has always overshadowed a remarkable movie. Ava Gardner plays a woman ahead of her time, talking openly about her "physical needs" and advocating "pot" as a means of unwinding. Richard Burton, meanwhile, is a fallen priest-turned-tour guide. A crucial point in the film occurs when Burton roars his bus full of Baptist teachers past the all mod-cons hotel where they're booked and heads instead to Gardner's hideaway. Even if the only Mexicans we meet in the film are Ava's boy toys - who never stop playing the maracas, even in a fabulously campy fight sequence - Burton's choice is clear. He's taking the "real" Mexico over a scrubbed tourist-friendly version.

In the years since, with the explosion of mass tourism, the gulf between the two Mexicos has only grown. Nowadays, there are few places where the "real" Mexico has been so pushed aside as in Vallarta. With its strip malls, gated condo communities and franchise operations - Hooters is the latest arrival, just across from the lone cathedral - Puerto Vallarta has more in common with South Florida than with its neighbours down the carretera.

Another scene in The Night of the Iguana: Burton stops his bus to look at women and children laughing while washing clothes in a river. "The lost world of innocence," he offers dreamily. His Baptists aren't so moved; they chatter on about washing machines. This irritates one young romantic in the group. "If they want all the comforts of home, why don't they stay at home?" she asks. The question would never need to be asked in Vallarta these days. It's already a tropical facsimile of a North American suburb. It is home.

And like any home, there are those who would like to renovate. They find it too gaudy, too cheap. After all, if The Night of the Iguana put Vallarta on the map in the 1960s, The Love Boat, with its trailer-trash fantasies and low-rent glamour, kept it there in the 1970s and 1980s. And there's still room for renovating. A blessing and a curse for Vallarta has been its 150 kilometres of magnificent white beaches, which means unlimited room for expansion.

The first time I flew into Vallarta was a decade ago. Since then, tourism has increased by about 50 percent to almost 3 million visitors per year - 50,000 on any given day. Even 10 years ago, it was already too overrun for my taste, so I was on my way to a nearby village that a bohemian archeologist friend had described in rapturous terms. I ended up at the village's only hotel. I recall looking out the window thinking, Such a small village, so many disposable diapers. The next day, a local was incredulous when he learned that no, I hadn't come across any scorpions in my room. On that trip I was after what Burton was looking for: a place unspoiled by the likes of ourselves. It's the main reason many of us travel, to experience what academics might call "the other" but which the rest of us call "different" or "new."

During my most recent trip to Vallarta, the Four Seasons Resort in nearby Punta Mita did offer new if not entirely Mexican experiences, such as square toilet seats and plunge pools for cooling off on the private terraces. The Four Seasons is in the vanguard of the drive to bring a new exoticism to the area and figures the way to achieve this is with over-the-top luxury. The resort certainly has a sweet setting. Punta Mita is the peninsula that forms the northern tip of the Bahía de Banderas, the huge bay on which Vallarta sits. Forty-five minutes or so from the city, Punta Mita was peasant farmland until the Mexican government realized its coastal beauty meant tourist gold. The land was ultimately sold to Grupo Dine, one of Mexico's most powerful corporations. Several gated resort communities - with homes running at $1.5-million and up - have already been built. Others are planned. But the centrepiece is the Four Seasons and the adjoining Jack Nicklaus-designed golf course.

My suite at the Four Seasons had two bathrooms. One of them was the size of most hotel rooms. There was a staff to take care of such onerous tasks as turning down my bed, spritzing me with Evian while I baked by the pool and massaging me with tequila in the spa. No wonder Hollywood stars routinely visit. Still, the hotel and its comforts are just the sideshow. The marquee attraction is Mexico's west coast - all beaches and rocky outcroppings, the lush Sierra Madre chain behind and the Pacific crashing in front. It's a landscape that for many people has become the archetype of natural beauty. The Four Seasons has 700 hectares of it, including some of the choicest landscape around. Chains of pelicans fly by, whales calve just offshore, iguanas slumber in the sun.

But beyond a couple of beaches to stroll on and the manicured golf course, nature is curiously off limits. Trails through the jungle either don't exist or aren't pointed out. After so much catatonic sun lounging, a variation of cabin fever sets in. I wanted more Mexico, less generic luxury. I also wanted to go surfing.

A half-hour up the coast, Sayulita is probably not unlike the Puerto Vallarta that bewitched The Night of the Iguana director, John Huston. Set between mango orchards and the ocean, it's a charming little fishing village recently discovered by the gringo hordes. Internet cafés have moved in but dogs still sleep on cobblestone streets, and men on horseback still chat under a shade tree in the town square.

Sayulita is something of a mecca for neophyte surfers. Its steady, smallish break means that getting pounded or otherwise manhandled by a wave is not a crippling prospect. As such, it's the base for a popular surf school for women. Which, of course, makes it that much more attractive to other surfers. But Sayulita is no party town, so once evening arrives, Vallarta exerts its pull.

Like so many resort towns, Vallarta lives and dies on its reputation as a spring-break-party-all-year-round kind of place. Just as a visit to the Louvre is required for visitors to Paris, pilgrimages to places like Señor Frog's are imperative for visitors to Vallarta. And not just the 18-to-35 crowd. A curvy, green-eyed Dutch girl I met on a diving expedition thought hard when I asked her what her favourite nightspot in Vallarta was. "Carlos O'Brian's," she answered after a pause so long I could have fought my way to an open bar, downed a margarita and returned safely. "It's so full of crazy old Americans acting like they are 18." I later learned that the boardwalk in front of this bar is almost as crowded as the bar itself on certain nights because of the prized view it affords of the deranged spectacle unfolding within. But on the two nights I went looking for boisterous fun the town was St. Petersburg-calm.

Even the seamier side of the city was locked up tight. Enrique, who began his working life as a shoeshine boy outside a Mexico City brothel hiding the hookers' earnings in his empty cans of polish, seemed the right person to consult. But he must have been protecting my virtue or the good name of his town, or perhaps he just wasn't up to speed anymore. The establishments he directed me to either weren't there or looked like they hadn't opened their doors since before The Love Boat went into reruns.

Still, he got me strolling off the beaten track. If you walk far enough away from the beach, past the pharmacies with the words "Paxil," "Zoloft" and "Viagra" in big letters and "Prescriptions Not Necessary" in even bigger letters, gradually the blinking lights and time-share touts grow fewer and farther between. Once past Calle Aguacate - Avocado Street - you're in a completely different town, one all the more tranquil for the hubbub a stone's throw away. It's darker and quieter, and from the shadows the other side of Mexico emerges. Kids play soccer in the street. Families gather around TVs they've hauled out onto the sidewalk. Adolescents canoodle in the corners. It's the Mexico Huston came for. The Mexico you can still find, though in some places it takes a bit of looking.