Day Eleven

Puerta Vallarta - our first stop in Mexico! We were ready to get off the boat by that time. I can't imagine doing a cruise where you go more than the two days on the ship. So we get all ready and sunscreened up before we leave the boat. We had booked an excursion later in the day with the cruise, but we decided that we wanted to get out and see a little of the downtown where all the great shopping was supposed to be.

So we exit the ship and on our way out, we had to take like 5 different pictures with different dressed up people and one parrot. Of course, you can always buy these great pictures later! So we walk around for a minute, but there wasn't much to see where we were. We really needed to get in a cab to go to their downtown area. So we piled in a van with several other people from the cruise and when we got off, we found out we had only $3 in cash. We had totally forgotten to cash our traveler's check before we left the ship. Oops. So a nice lady had to pay for the other $5 we owed the cab driver and that was totally embarassing. We were just thankful she was there!


So we set out walking around, with the main goal of trying to find someone that could cash our traveler's check. Of course, we did find an american express place, but they were closed and said they had moved their new office to some address that we had no way of knowing where it was! We eventually found a money exchange place and got pesos. Whoosh. At least we could get back to the ship now! Which is basically what we did. We had already seen that the shops were nothing we wanted, so we just headed back to the boat. We had lunch and then went back out to go on our excursion!

Our excursion was the Tropical Jungle Paradise Tour. We boarded a bus that was supposedly air conditioned and headed up to the jungle. We made a stop along the way so everyone could take pictures of these little islands that looked like a turtle.
The jungle area we were in was within a mile or so of the place where they filmed Predator, so our guide had some stories about that and where the cast stayed, etc. So we get to our destination and it is a restaurant kind of in the middle of nowhere. We all could have a complimentary beverage (mat and I stuck with bottled water) and then we headed up on the tour. It was actually more of a hike than I had thought and I really don't think I've ever had that much sweat on myself! It was so humid and I think it looked like I had been swimming! Our guide was interesting and knew quite a bit about the plants in the area. He showed us the trees that made the original chiclet gum and different fruits in the area.
We did have to walk across part of a river, but it was only up to our knees, so we didn't have to swim across. Lucky for us because we had our camera! The tour overall was not the best, but the guide was funny and he had some good stories. It wasn't very expensive either, so I'm sure you get what you pay for with these tours!
After the tour, we did decide to have a beer at the restaurant across from our boat and then we went in to shower after our sweat baths. Overall, we did not love Puerta Vallarta very much. It was not near as nice as the Riviera Maya area we had been in last year for Joy's wedding. I'm sure there are some great places we didn't see though.

Click me for all the pictures in Puerta Vallarta!

That evening was the same for us - we had dinner and went to the show again. We did have a fun day, but weren't sad to be moving on to our next port of Mazatlan!