If you’re interested in going to Mexico and never actually interacting with any of the local Mexicans, Nuevo Vallarta is a great way to go (we pass through five check points, four of them guarded, to get to my hotel on the way from the airport). Since I get to interact with middle-aged white people from California and Illinois every day of my life, I am coming to things from the completely opposite pole: I only want to interact with Mexicans. When my time at the Hotel Riu Vallarta ends, I make a beeline for Old Vallarta and promptly check into one of the city’s three star hotels, Hotel Encino.
Though there are apparently one and two-star hotels in Puerto Vallarta, the term "three-star hotel" seems to be, as far as I can tell, code for a non-resort hotel in which few Americans will ever stay. Naturally, I love the Hotel Encino. My shower is the western half of my bathroom–someone just put a shower door in the middle of the room–my room has one main light, a bare bulb inside a glass shade and the furniture is a combination of plastic lawn chairs and weather beaten leather chairs that have definitely seen better days, but the vibe is absolutely scintillating. And, able to talk the desk clerk down to $30 a night, there doesn’t seem to be a better bargain in town. The joke turns out to be on me because, during my second night in the Hotel Encino I see (more disturbingly, actually, I feel) that my room has bed bugs. It isn’t until sometime later that I realize that I could easily shrug off the Hotel Encino’s bed bugs because it didn’t advertise itself as a five-star resort. With the amount of effort the Hotel Riu Vallarta put into labeling itself a five-star resort, I definitely should not have had to deal with many of the things I did.
Interested in combining touristy visits to spas with some non-touristy activities, I spend as much time as I can at the Hotel Riu Vallarta talking to the staff, none of whom has anywhere near the level of English fluency one might expect for people in a customer service position dealing with a clientele who mostly speaks English. When a waiter comes to my table at the buffet and asks me if he can get me anything to drink I tell him that I would like some bottled water. He brings back a pitcher of water. I stop him from pouring the water and specify "bottled water". Like trying to describe the color of red to a blind person, trying to describe the concept of a bottle to someone who doesn’t understand it is really frustrating. Really the onus of the situation is on me though, because I don’t speak any Spanish and I genuinely wish I was able to do better that picking up a nearby bottle of Tabasco sauce, pointing at it and saying, "bottle".
Finally, it becomes apparent that, besides in my room’s minibar, the only place one can find bottled water at the resort is at the front desk. It’s not at any of the restaurants, it’s not at any of the bars or in the lobby stores, it’s at the front desk. And it’s at the front desk in one size: 2 liter bottles. And in case you’re not familiar with Mexican 2 liter bottles, they’re significantly taller and thinner than their stateside counterparts. Just imagine carrying water in something the size of your arm… only wider (my estimate is 20 inches tall and four inches in diameter). I later learn that you also have to make sure that the front desk understands that you want unopened bottles of water too as two of the first three bottles I receive have already been opened. This is something that I’d never previously even considered as an option.
Heather and I eat our dinner, talk about the underwhelming nature of the hotel thus far. This moves on to race relations, the racist nature of Hollywood and how to level the playing field for minorities. After several watered down drinks–I’m up to ten on the day, more than the rest of the year combined–I head upstairs to my room, tired from a long day of worrying that I was going to die and hearing different parts of the plane fall off while in flight. I have absolutely no problem falling asleep.
