Puerto Vallarta is Paradise Where Dreams Become Realities Angela Walker - Stuff Travel
go to original April 1, 2013

Deeply relaxing: Dreams Puerto Vallarta, where lush hills and a blue Pacific Ocean sandwich golden sands.

"Welcome home," says the man at reception. "You what?" I splutter in response. "Home" is roughly 10,000 kilometres from the front desk of Dreams Puerto Vallarta and, unless there have been some really big changes in the past four days, is nothing like this at all.

There is no place like home but there's no denying this is paradise. A lush, fecund jungle, scored with hibiscus, bougainvillea and orchids, cloaks the hillside right down to the beach, where the sand is suitably golden, the Pacific a perfect blue and butterflies of every colour dance overhead.

It's a paradise where a warm breeze washes in over the ocean day and night and where each and every sunset is a blaze of gold and red and orange. And it's a paradise where complimentary room service is available around the clock and your fridge is forever stocked with Corona. See what I mean?

We've taken a side-step from a family holiday in Los Angeles to spend five days at Puerto Vallarta, a three-hour direct flight from LA on Mexico's Pacific coast. We've come in search of a perfect beach, great Mexican food, the pocket-friendly joys of all-inclusive accommodation, a souvenir sombrero and the chance to say "hola" and "gracias amigo" with abandon. We're not left wanting.

Dreams Puerto Vallarta is on a quiet cove south of the town and its main hotel strip to the north. Latino singer Ricky Martin is one of the very few others to share this bay although his six-level cliffside holiday house is, we're told, used for only one week a year.

Our bay is just a tiny part of the vast Banderas Bay, one of Mexico's largest, which cuts a 100km swathe along its west coast and is home to sea life including whales, marlin, tuna, dolphins and turtles. Found in the hills above the bay, part of the 1500km long Sierra Madre Occidental, are white-tailed deer, ocelot badgers, raccoons and jaguars and a healthy population of snakes - thankfully not seen - and quite friendly iguanas.

Two accommodation towers bookend the resort and between lie the pools (there are three), a shop, the reception lobby, bars and seven restaurants and cafes. Along the beach are scores of sunloungers and shade umbrellas where a frozen daquiri is never more than a few steps away. All up it is smorgasbord of easy living.

We instantly gravitate towards the family pool, albeit one with a swim-up bar (another box on my bucket list ticked), where rows of sunbathers line one side and on the other, a pair of iguanas laze in the sun, slowly devouring hibiscus flowers thrown their way by the gardeners. Despite their languor, my youngest son, in an overheated snit one afternoon, declares he is jettisoning his surname and instead adopting "Iguana" as his last name, his mood as prickly as the lizards' spines. His ill temper quickly passes but the name sticks.

My eldest, meanwhile, unwittingly reveals a sign of what may be to come when one morning, I try to convince him to join me in a session of aqua aerobics taking place at the other end of the pool. "No thanks, mum," my lemonade-loving boy says. "I'd rather just stay at the bar."

Regardless, each day is as a holiday should be. Without forethought or intent, the natural order of things makes itself immediately apparent: eat, swim, eat, rest, play, read, swim, eat, rest, sleep. In the blazing heat of the early afternoon, we seek relief in our air-conditioned room and after an hour or so, normal play resumes. It's not the surroundings that feel foreign to me here - it's the outright sense of relaxation.

Puerto Vallarta first entered my consciousness years ago thanks to The Love Boat - it was one of its regular ports of call - but it was a somewhat more hot-blooded Hollywood connection that made it famous. As soon as director John Huston cast Richard Burton in his 1963 film The Night of the Iguana, to be filmed just outside Puerto Vallarta, media from around the world starting setting up camp - Burton was, at the time, involved in the world's most famous adulterous relationship with Elizabeth Taylor, who joined him for the duration of the filming.

The Mexican press decried their affair; the rest of the world lapped up every little detail, especially once Burton bought a house across the street from Taylor's and built a covered bridge to connect them. According to their biographers, Burton and Taylor adored the town as much as each other and continued to visit it until their romance/s finally burned out.

The much-photographed pink-stoned Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

One morning I fob off the boys to the kids club - the US$10 an hour babysitting fee is worth it to be able to shop in peace - and take a cab into town to visit the flea market. We bounce along the old town's narrow cobbled streets, snatch a view of the beautiful and much-photographed Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe, pass low-rent pharmacies (there are scores), souvenir shops, some decent-looking boutiques and lots of places to taste tequila.

The market is a rabbit warren of stalls, selling shoes, wrestlers' masks, handbags, tableware, jewelry, clothing, textiles, T-shirts, sombreros, toys, you name it. Haggling is expected, indeed vigorously encouraged, but in this heat it soon becomes too much like hard work. I'm happy with what I buy but still slightly haunted by what I left behind - a fuschia pink hand-tooled bag, an embroidered cotton dress, a length of woven fabric - after declaring defeat from the heat and constant hounding.

Food is a constant thread in the diaries - brief but well-intentioned - my boys keep of this trip. Accordingly, they write of ham and cheese sandwiches (for breakfast), ice creams (for lunch), burgers and brownies as a midnight treat on the one and only night they've ever been allowed to stay up that late. What they forget is dinner at El Patio, the riotously decorated Mexican restaurant that's always strangely empty; steak from the Seaside Grill, where we sit on a terrace right above the waves; the pastries worthy of a Parisian patisserie from Coco Cafe (the hot chocolates and espresso are also superb). World Cafe, where we turn up most days for breakfast and lunch, is a buffet of vast scope and opportunity. It's also where an expat Kiwi, who on spotting my oldest boy's Opotiki T-shirt, rushes over to say "kia ora".

Despite the lack of fellow diners, El Patio is brilliant, with not a soggy corn chip or dollop of sour cream in sight. This is traditional, not El Paso, Mexican. There's roast duck tacos, grouper veracruz, ceviche for me; quesadillas and chicken tacos for my boys, all served by staff dressed in the most glorious traditional costumes.

On the night I despatch my children to kids club for dinner and movies on the beach, I head for Oceana, an elegantly casual outdoor dining room on the beach. Again, the food is excellent and the service equally good - on seeing that I'm dining alone, a waitress arrives at my table with a couple of travel books on Mexico to keep me company between courses. Over the years I've become used to being a table for one but this gesture is a first.

When we leave Puerto Vallarta we're exceeding well-fed and well-rested, better tanned than when we arrived, and with a Mexican vocabulary that now includes words and a few phrases. This is all good. Which only leaves the matter of the blue sombrero that just refuses to fit into any of our suitcases.

Dreams Puerto Vallarta Resort & Spa, for families, couples and friends, sits in a secluded cove on one of the 40 beautiful beaches along Banderas Bay. Here you will find yourself in a sunny and private world of Unlimited-Luxury® — where everything is included. Also enjoy daily complimentary greens fees at nearby championship golf courses. Just 15 minutes away, world famous fishing, antique browsing, dining and nightlife are all yours as well.