ROADTRIP / ISS:02:06.09

It was V’s birthday and to celebrate we were heading up to a small mountain town called San Sebastian del Oeste. The town was founded in the 1600’s and was at one time the capital of the state of Jalisco with a booming population and wealth to match from it’s numerous gold, silver and lead mines. As the mines dried up the town dwindled to it’s present population of 600, it’s hard to access mountain road making it even more discouraging to visitors. In the last few years the government has improved the roads and so San Sebastian del Oeste is once again rising in popularity with people drawn by the opportunity to spend a few days in an ‘authentic’ Mexican pueblo. I was extremely excited about the trip as I am a sucker for anything labeled ‘authentic’ and was still reeling in shock after discovering that with a 30% ex-pat population, Puerto Vallarta resembled more a North American retiree outpost than a thriving Mexican community.

The drive to San Sebastian is only about two hours north-east from Puerto Vallarta - up a winding one lane highway into the mountains, the vegetation changing slowly as you climb in altitude. We watched the jungle covered hills change to crisp pine forests and reveled in leaving the humidity behind, looking forward to cool nights with hot chocolates and thick sweaters. In the hot and humid Puerto Vallarta summer we had forgotten what it was like to feel cold.

The first sign of town is a subtle widening of the road, changing the feeling from a country back lane to a European boulevard, a sensation that is only increased with the addition of art nouveau metal benches placed at intervals along the side of the road. Large trees extend their boughs high into the air and create a natural arch overhead to complete the stately welcome. After a brief pit stop at a crumbling hacienda selling organic coffee we headed into the center of town, a small square surrounded by low rustic buildings with warm terracotta tiled roofs and white washed walls - the bottom third of which were painted a earthy red. Many towns in Mexico are painted in this uniform way, and in San Sebastian it created a feeling of being lost in time and place, landing you in a small mountain town in Italy or Austria in the 1600’s.

We drove through the square and after a few false turns found ourselves at our hotel – a slightly run down hacienda, the decades of quiet neglect in no way diminishing from its charm. Our rooms were outfitted with only the bare essentials - warm blankets on a large firm bed, two bedside tables and lamps, questionably hot water and a window overlooking the street - which to my intense pleasure closed with two thick wood shutters that blocked out both sound and light. Our solid wood door resembled something you would have entered in a medieval tavern and it’s old-fashioned key was bigger than my hand. There was a covered seating area surrounding the inner courtyard, perfect for waiting out the afternoon rains with a good book, and an old well sitting silently just inside the garden adding to the hotel’s tattered beauty.

We walked around in the setting sun, the mountains peaks above us cutting the day short, and fell in love with the quaint cobblestone streets, the dirt paths cutting between farmland and the warmth of the people, all of whom were happy to share their beautiful home with us. Ready for dinner we headed over to an Italian restaurant and sat overlooking its gorgeous courtyard garden, basking in our brilliant decision to take a break from life in this mountain town. On our way home we were joined by a little stray puppy who bit at our heels and convinced V to play with her until she grew tired of us and ambled off to find someone more interesting.

We spent the next day wandering the streets, taking photos of crumbling farm fences covered in soft mosses and brightly coloured bougainvillea, men drinking beers in the church steeple waiting out each hour ready to ring the heavy bell, the mist settling on the mountain peaks high above town. Often the little puppy would accompany us and we began to call her Piojito meaning ‘Little Louse’ in reference to both her mischievous character and the colony of fleas that had claimed her small body as their home. A woman working at one of the local shops told us that a few weeks before someone had abandoned five puppies in the woods outside of town. Over the past few weeks they had been slowly adopted and Piojito was the only one left with no home. Resisting the urge to claim her on the spot, knowing that she would soon become a very large dog and too big for our small house, I kept my eye on her for the rest of the trip. Piojito had nothing to worry about – she was fed every day by sympathetic townsfolk and included in all of the children’s games. While I still prayed she would find a home soon I felt confident that she was being looked after.

After a short rest at the hotel we decided to wander outside of town and see some of the mines whose wealth had so long ago built San Sebastian. We ambled through farmland and entered the jungle at the base of the mountains. After twenty minutes we found the first of several three-foot openings that miners had entered each day hoping to amass their fortunes. A local woman had been nice enough to lead us on our walk and told us that during various periods of political turmoil, the women and children of San Sebastian had used these mines to hide from the revolutionaries who rode into town with the intention to rape and pillage. She also mentioned that at night in the jungle there were mountain cats and large snakes, and with the last of the days light slipping behind the mountains, we decided to cut our mine tour short and briskly walk home. We followed the country roads back into town with only the soft light of the moon illuminating the path. Lightening bugs blinked on and off in the fields beside us and thousands of stars shimmered in the indigo sky above. That night we slept soundly, safe from imaginary jungle animals, dreaming behind our heavily bolted door.

The morning of our departure dawned bright and crisp and we explored the streets one last time looking for a place to have a cup of coffee. At the edge of town we found a cafe run by a man whose family had lived in San Sebastian for generations. We climbed up to his third storey balcony and found a seat, rewarded by a beautiful view of the sleepy town nestled in its mountain valley. After a watery cappuccino and some delicious complimentary cookies we headed back to our hotel, stumbling over large ripe oranges fallen from over laden fruit trees along the side of the road.

When I had imagined us living in small town Mexico months before this is exactly what I had pictured and I was sad to think that today we would be leaving it behind and returning home. Biting into our sun-warmed oranges, juice dripping down our chins, I knew we would be back.

CASITA CIELO / ISS:01:05.09

We had now been at the hotel for a month and it was time to start searching for a more permanent home base. We had been living out of suitcases for two months and while I fancied myself a nomadic traveler, transient and carefree, I was actually itching to unpack and get settled. V now worked full-time at his parent’s art gallery and this made it an easy choice to live right in Puerto Vallarta’s old town where we would be walking distance to almost everything.

We decided that the best way to find an apartment was to wander up and down the streets and holler at anyone that had a sign posted on the side of their building. V’s mom, Pati, recommended that V go on the search alone, as any building manager that got a look at me – a white tourist that had, ‘I have dollars and am a sucker’ stamped on my forehead - would bump the asking price up at least a third without a moments hesitation. This would have been a great strategy had I been someone that was a bit more laidback about living arrangements, but as it so happens I’m not. Before leaving Vancouver I had visited an astrologer who told me that because of some sort of planetary alignment at my birth I was a person that needed to love my home in order to feel happy and grounded. She had also told me in my last life I had been a samurai that had killed myself in the ritualistic suicide ceremony of seppuku, which had made me abruptly stop listening to her chart reading as if it were the undisputed truth and instead take the information, as one always should when receiving an astrology reading, with a grain of salt. Never the less the bit about the importance of home was true and V and I knew that it would be impossible to not have me included in the entire process. So off we went, gringo suckers walking hand in hand, eager to find our new home.

We spent the next few days traversing the city’s cobblestone streets stopping every so often to see an apartment. They began to all blur into one poorly furnished suite with questionable views and a monthly price tag the equivalent of $900 Canadian dollars. While I had sufficient money saved for the year I was not prepared to pay the same rent in Mexico as I had been in Canada and so we trudged on, sweating under the fiercely hot midday sun, becoming more and more disheartened with each new viewing.

Before we had made the decision to move down to Mexico I had been asked by a very lovely friend to be a part of her wedding. The celebration was scheduled for the end of June and to justify the cost of the ticket home I was heading back to Vancouver for almost a month. I would be leaving in two days and the pressure was on. After a fruitless search on foot we had decided to try another tactic and were now employing the aid of the ‘Mano a Mano’, literally ‘Hand to Hand’, which is Puerto Vallarta’s version of the classifieds. The apartment ads were small with no images, every one of them using the exact same language to list their suites. Pointing blindly, and for me illiterately, we called whatever our fingers landed on, assured only by the fact that the landlord could not see my ‘whiteness’ through the telephone line. We booked a few appointments and hoped for the best.

The day before I was to leave we had a morning appointment at a building just up the street from our hotel. Puerto Vallarta is wedged between the ocean and the mountains with the last few blocks of any east to west street climbing quickly up to the jungle covered hills above. The apartment building was at the very top of the street – the last 3 blocks of which seemed to be on a near vertical incline. This held promise of ocean views but left my heart pounding loudly in my throat and my thighs burning in protest.

We were greeted by a nice Mexican woman who took us up to look at a large two-bedroom apartment on the third floor. We entered through sliding glass doors and stepped onto a floor of large white tile. As I looked around hopefully I quickly realized that almost every surface in the room had dutifully been covered in the same white tile as the floor. To me the place screamed ‘bathroom stall’ and I zoned out of the tour leaving V to feign interest for the both of us.

Having spent the last few days with me while I passed disdainful judgment on every apartment we visited V had quickly become accustomed to my ‘NO’ face, and so it was a surprise when he lead me out the sliding doors and up the stairs telling me there was another suite for us to see. We climbed all the way to the roof, and there, sitting on the top of the building was a little house. It had a pitched roof of typical Mexican red tile and every one of its walls was made of sliding windows. Because the building was on the last residential street before the mountains turned into jungle the back half of the house looked on to lush tropical rainforest, beautiful and private, while the front had a gorgeous view of the city and ocean below. We peered in through one of the many windows and saw that while the space was small it had been laid out well with a half wall separating the sleeping area from the rest of the home and ample room allotted to the kitchen. The kitchen counters were tiled with the rest of the surfaces left white, it’s rounded rough walls reminiscent of classic Mexican adobe architecture. The little house only took up a quarter of the roof and the remaining space had the potential to become a large private patio if we didn’t mind sharing it with two in-residence iguanas. Sure there were some down-sides – a third of the roof was allocated to the buildings water and gas tanks which were less than attractive, there was no internet and the year before someone had built a large condo that now blocked half of the ocean view – but it was a glass house. More importantly, it was a glass house perched on the top of a building. The rent was more than affordable and we knew that nowhere but in Mexico would something like this exist. And so we took it.

We walked back to the hotel talking animatedly about our ‘Casita Cielo’, our little sky house, and the next day I got on a plane for Vancouver feeling excited about returning both to V and our new home one month later.

TO SURF / ISS:01:05.09

One of the reasons V and I were so excited to move to Mexico was the thought of being near waves large enough to surf and water warm enough to leave the wetsuits behind. V was especially excited about this perk of our new life as he had fallen in love with surfing in his early 20’s on previous trips to Mexico. His dream life for years had been to have a little surf school on the beach where he could share his love for the sport and ride everyday. While my dream life tended to be situated in an old Brooklyn brownstone, complete with built-in floor to ceiling bookshelves, I was happy enough to put cold winters and public radio on the back burner and give the ocean the chance it deserved.

We decided to purchase our surfboards in LA on our way down which is how we ended up at an old warehouse hidden in a sea of dilapidated buildings. We were searching for a guy named Mani who was selling his line wholesale if you were willing to risk life and limb trying to find him in the maze of old warehouses and littered streets that constituted LA’s downtown core. Much to our relief Mani turned out to be a great guy. He was from Chicago but had fallen in love with both surfing and a girl from LA and was happy to sell us two new boards for half the retail price. The day before he told us he had sold some boards to a couple of Norwegian guys who had just bought an old Volkswagen van from the drummer of Frank Zappa and were heading down to Mexico. The van was painted to resemble a shark complete with a huge mouth and sharp teeth illustrated on its front hood. Months later as we drove along the one-lane highway to Sayulita a shark’s mouth loomed in our rear view mirror and the van impatiently passed us, two Norwegians making our day without even knowing it.

It took us a few weeks to find the time to head to the beach and christen our new boards. The week before we had spent the day in Sayulita, a popular surf town about 40 minutes north of Puerto Vallarta, and the water had been a sea of heads bobbing on boards. I had no desire to learn how to surf in front of a crowd of strangers and so we decided to see if there was a beginner’s break at Punta de Mita, a little beach town just south of Sayulita.

I had only ever been surfing once before, off the coast of Vancouver Island, in the middle of February. In a full wetsuit I had waded into the ocean, confident that no sea life could flourish in such cold water, and spent the next four hours using my board more as a flotation device than a tool to gracefully slice through the water. This was before I had heard of cold-water sharks. It donned on me as we drew nearer to Punta de Mita that in Mexico I would be floating in a warm ocean that is teeming with life. I have always loved the water and had spent my youth swimming both on competitive teams and training to be a lifeguard. The one hitch in my aquatic pursuits was my intense fear of all things found lurking in lakes and seas. Just the day before we had been swimming in the Romantic Zone and a pelican had swooped down and scooped up a fish as large as a dinner plate. The fish had been swimming right beside me and I hadn’t even seen it. With sand still below my feet I felt awed by this brush with nature but the thought of being meters off the shore, floating on a small piece of foam oblivious of what lurked below, made my stomach churn with fear.

We found a nice quiet break just before the main point where the waves rolled in at a gentle pace. There were only five other people out in the water – three Mexican boys that were catching everything in sight and two gringos sitting on bright red and blue long boards. I decided that if a shark were to come in for a snack he would head for the brightest thing around and felt a little relief in the fact that our boards were plain white. We paddled out and as soon as we got into position the waves stopped. As we bobbed in the water waiting for a set to come in I started to look around. The sun was hot on our backs and the beach was a dusty cream colour, dotted with palapa restaurants and forgotten resorts. The pelicans soared in the sky, occasionally swooping to the sea below for a light snack. There were teenagers camped by a small river that fed into the ocean and every once in awhile a dog would race by trying to catch a seagull or plunge into the water lured by a fishes jump. It was beautiful, and I realized as I sat calmly in the water that I was a part of it. That is when I decided that no matter how scared I was of the darkness below I was going to learn how to surf - it was just too beautiful an experience to miss out on.

Deciding to do something and actually doing it are two very different things. When the waves started up again I proved to be a dismal surf student. No matter how strong a swimmer I had been in my youth I had just spent the last six years at a desk job and was no match for the arm strength required to both paddle into position AND push myself up to standing. My timing was off and I had a talent for always betting on the weakest wave. To get us excited about moving to Mexico V had spent the winter showing me surf videos. While they had moved and motivated him they had had the less than desired affect of putting me to sleep. Now that I was actually trying to catch a wave I could see how awe inspiring the professional surfers in those videos had really been. I vowed to re-watch ‘The Endless Summer’ with the respect it deserved.

I didn’t catch a single wave but it didn’t matter - four hours later I paddled in exhausted and content. V and I ate lunch on the beach, packed up and headed home.

It was a perfect day.

SPANISH / ISS:01:05.09

Before leaving for Mexico I did not speak a word of Spanish. In Canada French is our other national language and a common misconception is that all Canadians are reliably bi-lingual. This is decidedly untrue, with most French speaking citizens residing solely in Quebec, Canada’s only francophone province. Growing up in Vancouver, clear on the other side of the county, the only French I was exposed to on a regular basis was on the side of my cereal box and even though the Canadian government has made French mandatory curriculum, the course is taught with lackluster enthusiasm at best. After taking French for all five years of high school I somehow managed to only ever learn how to ask someone if I may use the toilet, a slightly less useful phrase than knowing how to ask where said toilet might actually be. My dismal grasp of another language has always plagued me and so as we prepared to move I became more and more excited about the opportunity to turn my attentions to Spanish.


Months before we left I purchased the first level of The Rosetta Stone, a computer program that claims to teach you any language through the beauty of immersion. I pictured myself sipping tequila on a patio in a hot and tropical Mexican town, dressed in long flowing Oaxacan skirts, a braid in my hair. I would be effortlessly carrying on a conversation with my new Mexican friends, a community of up and coming artists and revolutionaries, easily breezing through any existential topic that was tabled. Clearly I had seen ‘Frida’ one too many times. As I began my first lesson it became obvious that the only patio I would be welcomed on while speaking Spanish would be located a few doors down from Oscar’s garbage can on Sesame Street. I spent my days memorizing colours, numbers, and simple nouns – blue, morning, sky. This would come in handy when my new friends called upon me to protest against government corruption. Fists raised I would shout, ‘Today there is indeed a blue sky and on that table sits four apples!’ Still, in the privacy of my own home, safely situated in an English speaking country, I proudly repeated each new word, confident that in just a few weeks of living immersed in a Spanish speaking society I would be fluent.


I have always been a shy. When I was a small child I would hide behind my mother when asked to say hello and fought passionately to be able to play by myself instead of with the large band of kids that roamed my neighborhood. In high school I walked with my eyes to the ground and took elaborate alternate routes to avoid feeling too exposed in the large main hallways. As the years passed I grew more comfortable in my own skin and, more importantly, I began to cultivate the age-old defense mechanisms of cynicism and dry wit to shield myself whenever I started to feel too self-conscious. Unfortunately for me The Rosetta Stone had failed to include a lesson on cutting remarks and as we crossed into Mexico I felt a wave of panic hit and then settle as a heavy and oppressive weight in my stomach. I no longer had English to protect me, and until I could speak Spanish I would be forced to resort to complex and enthusiastically preformed charades guaranteed to create a scene wherever I went. I felt like my self-conscious sixteen-year-old self all over again and silently vowed to never do anything without V, my perfectly bi-lingual boyfriend, ever again.


We spent the first month living in an eccentric little hotel at the bottom of Honduras Street. Our home was one room with a kitchenette and a huge patio that overlooked the ocean. Every night the sun awed us with its pastel descent into the cool blue ocean below and we began to understand how lucky we were to have made this move. The proprietress of the hotel had given us an exceptional deal for the month and as such we put up with the little inconveniences I have now come to understand are just the way of life in Mexico. The most consistent quirk seemed to be our maid service, a team of women who never seemed to agree on our correct allotment of clean bathroom towels. Every new cleaning held a surprise - some days we were left with towels enough for a pool party and other days we were rationed just one. The maid’s decisions seemed to have no rhyme or reason and V and I made the best of it, only bothering the hotel staff when no towels were left at all. In the first few weeks of our arrival I had been using V to negotiate everything, from our rent to buying a pack of gum, but now he worked at his parent’s gallery which left me on my own for vast periods of time, exposing me to actual communication with our Mexican community.


One particularly hot and humid day, I came home desperately needing a shower and discovered, once again, an empty towel rack. My first tactic, as always, was to do nothing and hope that the universe would provide me with towels if I believed in them enough. This did not work. I soon realized that if a shower was to be in my near future I would have to take the matter into my own hands.


Nervously I descended the long flight of stairs, silently cursing myself for not having the foresight to look up ‘towel’ in my dictionary before leaving my room. I made determined eye contact with the woman at the front desk and then plunged forward eager to get this whole experience over with. I quickly realized that the unfortunate thing about a towel is that in terms of its mime-ability it has no real distinctive shape. Without any action attached to it, emphatically slicing the air to display a square could mean a multitude of things to the person trying to understand you. It turns out, in order to truly communicate ‘towel’ one must display both the act of showering and drying off. Sighing, I lifted my arms and fluttered my fingers in the hopes to convey water streaming down upon me and set about showering with air in the center of our hotel lobby. Just when I thought it could not get any worse, of course, it did. In an attempt to communicate with words instead of attention drawing gestures I started to speak in a foreign language. Unfortunately for all involved I was not spitting out words in Spanish but in French. My brain had registered that English was of no use here but when put on the spot had forgotten each carefully memorized Spanish noun and had left me madly grasping at any French word I could recall. This was an alphabet soup of the French I had learned over the years and absolutely none of it had anything to do with towels and my lack thereof – ‘Oui! Non! Bien. Ou est la chat?. Bonsoir. Je suis!’ I was now the undisputed center of attention in the lobby, even the hotel dog had stopped his incessant barking to stare at me in wonder. Clearly this was not working. I dropped my arms to my sides and quietly muttered in defeat, ‘I just need two…’ The woman working the front desk smiled in sympathy and said, in perfect English, ‘What, exactly, do you need two of?’


And that, as it turns out, is one of the benefits of living in such a large tourist town – almost everyone can speak some amount of English. While I still spend every other day with a tutor in the hopes to one day be able to ask for dos toallas in perfect Spanish I no longer require V to be glued to my side at all times. The fact that I now buy my own gum may seem far from my original dreams of challenging debates on sun soaked patios, but to me it is no less rewarding.