Mexico Bound

Early in January my wife, April, and I will leave for an extended stay in Yelapa, Mexico, once a "primitive," now a rapidly developing, coastal village just south of Puerto Vallarta. When we first encountered this idyllic place, during a one-day visit in March 2002 (our perk for suffering through a time-share sales pitch somewhere north of Vallarta), Yelapa was just getting electrical power. An indication of this was the new refrigerator, lashed across the bow of the open boat that was taking us there, being transported to a young gringo couple's palapa in the village. (Yelapa can only be reached by boat, unless you have a 4x4 vehicle and care to drive over a narrow, bulldozed road through the jungle to where it ends on a ridge above town.) The overall sense of the place, once our boat had put us ashore and we'd walked its cobbled streets, was that this was it. This was where we would stay the next time we went to Mexico.

In 2005 we spent a month in Yelapa; in 2006, two and a half months; and this winter we'll spend a full three months in this "paradise," as one year-round resident, a retired lawyer-turned- mystery novelist, has called it. After all, the sad feeling among its longtime North American residents is that Yelapa will be a "little Puerto Vallarta" in about five years, so we'd better enjoy it before that happens.

It's a village of some 1,000 inhabitants, of which maybe 100 are non-native, people mostly from the States and Canada, many of whom spend half the year in Yelapa and a few, like the novelist just mentioned, all year, enjoying both of its tropical seasons, dry and rainy, the one sunny and warm, the other cloudy, hot and humid, when all the little beasties come out of their holes and crawl through the streets and into the houses. Some of Yelapa's expats have lived there for 30 years or more. Needless to say, the old hands speak fluent Spanish, though it is possible, we've been told, to get by in Yelapa without knowing the language. Still, you're more accepted if you have at least a working knowledge of Spanish, and anyway, you feel better about being in their country. Of course the longer you stay there, the more you learn. And you honor the people, I think, when you can speak their language.

The town's gringo colony gives Yelapa the kind of mixed racial and cultural atmosphere that I suppose you can find in other expatriate strongholds in Mexico, San Miguel de Allende, say, or Chapala (neither of which I've visited). Some might wish for a place more purely Mexican, as the village of Animas Trujano, outside Oaxaca, was for us more than 30 years ago. We loved it there then, but we were awfully isolated, and our isolation took its toll. My wife and I broke up during that stay, ending our stay, and though we eventually got back together, it took a troubled year or so before we'd reconciled.

We both like the mix of gringo and Mexican in Yelapa, the mixed couples, the sight of kids of both races playing in the streets together, rattling off to each other in Spanish. The feel of Yelapa is both exotic and homey. We like that. We feel at home there.

Anyway, we'll soon be there again. Meanwhile, the pictures show what we're leaving and where we're going.