When my alarm goes off at 5:30AM, I'm already behind. I've only had three hours of sleep and yet still have to finish packing. I ultimately leave my apartment half an hour later than I had planned and finally arrive at my parents' place at 7:15AM. Unable to convince any of my friends to get up at the crack of dawn to drive me to the airport so that I could fly to Mexico, I fall back to my parents. I was told in no uncertain terms to check in at the gate two hours before my flight time and naturally, I am about an hour later. I have a nine o’clock flight and I am arriving at the airport at 8:00AM. This is the least of my worries though because while trying to check in, nobody at the American Airlines desk can find my name on the 9:00AM flight. It turns out that I wrote my information down wrong; I don’t leave at 9:00AM, I leave at 1:30PM. There is a certain sick irony to the fact that this is the only time in my life that I’ve been at the airport at two hours prior to my departure and it is because I thought my flight left more than four hours earlier than it did.
I jump on an earlier flight to Dallas at 10:00AM and, arriving there, realize that I have more than six hours to kill before my flight to Puerto Vallarta takes off. Fortunately, I am very, very tired. Five episodes of The Family Guy on my laptop and a long nap later, I am waiting to board my plane. There are five women sitting near me in the waiting area who are all about 35. They are high-fiving each other and clapping every time any announcement is made about Puerto Vallarta. When boarding starts they cheer. Not fun. I am hoping that they don’t sit anywhere close to me on the plane because I know I’ll be in for lots of talk about how fun their week in the sun is going to be and how they are going to party hard. I get a sick sense of foreboding as I enter the plane when I realize that with the luck I've had today, the ladies will be seated in the row behind me, which they ultimately are. It’s nice to be able to count on your own bad luck at times.
Despite my long nap in the Dallas airport, I am still able to sleep on the plane. Normally, I don’t/can’t sleep on planes, but this time is different. Maybe there’s something about Mexican air space. When we begin our descent, my ears pop and I awaken to see two flight attendants passing out two kinds of customs forms. I can’t hear what they’re saying either because I have my headphones on. “What’s this?” I ask a flight attendant when she passes me. “Tourist card,” she explains. “Do I need one?” I ask. “We just explained the cards two times,” the flight attendant says exasperatedly. “I’m sorry,” I say, “I was asleep.” “I know,” she snaps at me. “So do I need one?” I question again. “It’s possible,” the flight attendant says and proceeds to ask me a host of questions that don’t really make it clear whether or not I need to fill out the card. Finally, the woman sitting next to me says, “You need the card. Everybody has to have one to enter Mexico.”
With this statement, the flight attendant thrusts the card toward me and leaves. The woman next to me smiles and says, “You’re going to need the other card too.”
I press the ‘call flight attendant’ button above my seat and her pace slows noticeably as she notices that it was me who rang the bell. “Yes?” she asks. “I need the other card too,” I smile. “It turns out everybody needs both.” The flight attendant looks at me and doesn’t say anything. She shoots a frustrated look at me. “I’m sorry, I was asleep,” I say for the second time. “I know,” the flight attendant says again. I get my cards and promptly screw up by writing my first name in the section marked “last name”. I ring the flight attendant again.
Throughout much of the last five minutes of the flight, the lovely ladies behind me are chanting, “PV! PV! PV!” until we touch down, an act which illicits a cackle of delighted glee from them.
Once in the airport, there is a mad rush for customs. I can’t understand why until I see the line… all 150 people on our plane have to go through one agent. There are three people behind me, one of whom is in a wheelchair. When I finally through customs some 45 minutes later, I realize for the first time that I have absolutely no idea how I am going to get to my hotel… or for that matter what my hotel is. This is the problem with having other people book your reservations and then tell you about them. I know I’m in a Sheraton, but Puerto Vallarta has two of these and they are on different sides of the city.
Mentioning this fact here doesn't make me look particularly good or smart (in addition to getting my flight time wrong, I'm not sure where I'm staying or how I'm going to get there... and I don't speak a lick of native language) and, for the life of me, I can't understand why I didn't try to figure this out earlier. It's not really like me to do this, but c'est la vie.
Exiting the baggage area, I walk through a line of drivers who are waiting for people whose names they have written on index cards (or torn off pieces of pizza boxes). I’m not expecting a driver, but see a guy standing in line with something that vaguely resembles my name on a piece of paper: NEWMAR. Below this name are the words “Puerto Vallarta Film Festival”. I figure that there can’t be two people with names like mine who are covering the festival on my flight and approach the driver. Festival volunteer Carl, a native of British Columbia, is excited to meet me and will drive me to my hotel. We hop in his Ford Escape and, exiting the parking lot, watch as the Americans in the rental car ahead of us rear end the car ahead of them.
It’s a tough break to be sure. Carl begins to chuckle about it. “Poor gringo,” he laughs. “He’s not on the ground in Mexico more than fifteen minutes and he has gotten screwed.” More laughter. I actually feel bad for the gringos ahead of us because, much like them, I have absolutely no idea what I would have done, had I been put in that the situation. I do however think I would have moved my car out of the exit ramp so that a line of cars didn’t begin forming in the parking lot. Soon the situation sorts itself out though and we go barreling into traffic.
Traffic in Puerto Vallarta, which the new transplants refer to as PV and the old transplants simply refer to as ‘Vallarta’, is like Manhattan traffic at rush hour involving much, much cheaper, beat up cars, going at significantly faster speeds without lane lines. The cars in the fender bender in front of Carl and me are a Nissan Platina (the rental) and a Geo Tracker. The Nissan logo is even slightly different than the one I am used to. “Oh sure,” Carl says in way of explanation, “If the cars can’t crack the US market they come down here.”
The excitement on the ride comes when Carl slams on the brakes of his Escape while going 45 and comes skidding to a stop inches from the bumper of the car in front of him. “Whoa,” Carl says, pointing at the now red light. “Looks like they fixed the light. It hasn’t worked for the last two weeks.” I try to ignore the fact that the light went directly from green to red and take solace in the fact that the light is working, at least by local standards. Sort of.
Carl pulls up in front of the Sheraton Buganvilias and asks me if I have any questions. “I’m hungry as hell,” I tell him. “Where can I get some food?” “There’s a restaurant inside,” Carl says and is off. Like almost every other ‘fact’ Carl gives me, this one is wrong (“PV has 30,000 year round residents,” Carl says. Or rather, guesses. The actual number is closer to 150,000).
I check into the Sheraton and learn that I am staying in room 2234. “It’s on the 22nd floor, the desk clerk tells me. But it’s not really on the 22nd floor. The building is, by my count, 12 stories tall. The second floor is labeled 13 and the top floor is 23.
Even though I have been napping throughout the day, I am positively exhausted when I enter my room. I collapse on the bed and begin flipping channels. I see Mel Gibson in Ransom dubbed in Spanish with English subtitles on TNT. It's weird to see Gibson talking in some one else's voice, so I change the channel. Most of the stations are in Spanish, which definitely puts a damper on my viewing choices. I finally settle on a Mexican league baseball game and watch in a weary silence. Hermosaville is doing particularly well. The game is a much faster pace than I am used to and there aren’t a plethora of commercials. Even though I can’t understand anything the announcers are saying, and the uniforms are all peppered with advertisements, I much prefer this style of play. The game itself is even speedier than our American counterpart (which probably holds a veiled Steve Trachsel joke of some sort).
My prone state is broken when I hear a soft tapping at the door. So soft a tapping that I’ve turned down the TV twice before to see if I could hear something before deciding that no one was there. The third time, I peek through the peephole and see a hotel employee with two glasses of champagne. It’s my butler for the week, Arnulfo. Arnulfo seems genuinely disappointed that I don’t drink when I invite him into the room. I’m guessing if I don’t accept the champagne he doesn’t get a tip, but I tip him anyway. Way too much. “Gracias, amigo!” Arnulfo exclaims as I drop a five dollar bill on his plate. He then asks if I need him to shine my shoes or to do anything. I don’t.
After ordering room service—nothing else is open unless I need tequila or beer or want to walk down to the downtown area—I eat and then collapse. Fortunately, I have set the alarm on my cell phone so I can wake up the next morning. It’s the only part of my phone that seems to be working in Mexico.
