Our son, Ryan, has arrived! He flew in late to Puerto Vallarta and we met him at the airport to Uber back to the boat. He had a pretty long day of traveling. He started off with a tram from his house in Dresden, Germany, a train to the Berlin airport, a flight to Amsterdam and then a flight to Mexico City and another to Puerto Vallarta, an Uber to La Cruz and finished it off with a midnight trip (in the dark) in a dinghy to Island Summers in the La Cruz anchorage.
From there we planned a loop around Banderas Bay but the wind pattern wasn’t entirely cooperative with our route planning. Instead we headed out Friday morning and made haste for San Blas, about 65NM North of La Cruz.
San Blas has an amazingly 4 mile long beach and super friendly people and… bugs. The guidebook has a warning about the bugs, friends had warned us, and we took precautions but it actually wasn’t as bad as we were worried it would be. We anchored about a 1/2 mile from shore in Bahia de Matanchan so the bugs couldn’t find us. We had plenty of spray for going into town and had a fun time walking around. There’s an old fort from the 1800’s that we visited on a hill and we worked on our Spanish. There isn’t any English spoken in San Blas but we manage to get by – at one point we got a cab to return us to the beach where we had left our dinghy but we were going in the wrong direction. Eventually, Ryan saved the day by dusting off his Spanish and realizing the cab driver didn’t really know where we needed to go. We were able to get it sorted out with Google maps.
Since we had to dingy in to shore and walk or take a taxi into town, we needed a place to safely store the dinghy. A family that runs the restaurant by that stretch of beach kindly watched the dinghy while we went into town. Families playing in the water thought it looked pretty funny coming out of the water onto the beach on it’s funny wheels.
When we returned from our first day in San Blas we sat at the beach and relaxed with some beers. As we were sitting there one of the beach vendors began pointing at the ground near our table and yelling something in Spanish. After a moment we realized he was pointing at a snake crawling under our table. We hastily moved away and the snake crawled onto Ryan’s chair as he passed by Riley who was laying in the sand. Kevin moved the chair to some bushes so we wouldn’t have to share our table. We later learned that it was a Mexican Vine Snake. As the day turned to afternoon the beach-goers started to disappear at the same time the bugs began to appear. Time to go.
The next day we took the La Tovara Jungle Tour. San Blas is near a large estuary called La Tovara populated by cocodrilos (crocodiles) tortugas (turtles) and aves (birds). We REALLY enjoyed zooming through the jungle on a panga and looking for crocs, birds and turtles and finished the day with some more beer on the beach before heading back on our half mile dinghy ride to our refuge from the evening bugs.
We’re working to give Ryan an honest feel for what our lifestyle is like. So far we’ve introduced him to bugs, snakes, beautiful beaches, sunny weather, and tasty Mexican cuisine. We made sure he realizes that even 14 or 15 miles from shore, the ocean seems like a big place. We left San Blas and sailed to Isla Isabela to hike on the island to see red, yellow and blue footed boobies and the abundant marine life.
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