When You Get to Puerto Vallarta, Keep Going Until You Reach Yelapa

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Yelapa is only reachable by boat, which is just the start of its appeal.

Puerto Vallarta, Jal.- I’m a fan of tourist spots. I even like those roadside world’s-biggest things that exist for no reason whatsoever. Disneyland? Why not? Eiffel Tower? Go for it. But Puerto Vallarta? Yeesh. I’ll write about Puerto Vallarta someday, about how very, very awful it is. But today is not that day. Today, we will talk about the place that rescued me from my first and last trip to Puerto Vallarta. It’s a 25-minute boat ride south along the coast, a tiny place I’d never heard of called Yelapa.

The beach in front of what I was told was old Yelapa looked nice enough. Sandy, anyways, but it was only when the eight-seater motorboat, called a panga, pulled up in front of my hotel about a kilometre farther along the coast that I figured the end of my trip might just redeem the rest of it — or at least, like a good bottle of wormy mezcal, help me forget.

Casa Perico is a four-level, three-room, open-air, lobby-less hotel built onto the side of a cliff that drops right into the water. It’s owned, and was built, by Blair Shurteff, the sort of guy you’d get if you taught a cowboy how to relax and make a cocktail, and his boyfriend Shane Hayward, a former physiotherapist with the U.S. Navy.

It took them three years and what Shurteff estimates to have been 3,500 pango boat-loads of materials to build it. The steep outdoor stone stairs make it impossible for anyone with significant mobility problems. And if you’re a private sort, the open front and the occasional unfortunate sight lines from lounge area to toilet, for instance, might upset you. But if you’re staying with friends or family, this might just be the best deal on the west coast of Mexico. The views are gorgeous and unimpeded even by windows. Water access is immediate, snorkelling gear is free, the fish are plentiful and colourful, and due to the quick drop-off of the ocean floor, Shurteff tells me humpback whales come within a couple of hundred yards of the rooms during the winter.

But the deal part comes in when you check out: High-season rates range from $150 a night for the two-bed, 500 square foot first level, to $295 for the four bed, two-level penthouse, all of which come with full kitchens and four-poster, solid wood beds imported, like the rest of the solid furniture, from Bali.

The views are gorgeous and unimpeded even by windows.

But what really makes Yelapa a place you might want to spend a week is Yelapa itself, which you get to from Casa Perico, and many of the other hotels and inns along the coast, by a narrow but perfectly navigable dirt path, populated by crabs, geckos, the occasional black iguana and burros delivering supplies to the hoteliers and guests from the shops in town. Though there are 15 hotels, as well as about 35 restaurants in this tiny place, as I walked around Yelapa at 8 on my only morning there, I saw mostly locals hanging out in front of the grocery store, walking by the hardware store, and gossiping about the several small construction sites scattered about the place. This isn’t a resort town so much as a village with visitors.

Yelapa, which had been there for centuries before its now overgrown neighbour, and is even mentioned by name — and protected — in Mexico’s constitution, was put on a quite different sort of tourist’s radar after Bob Dylan, Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson and a few friends rented a house there in the mid-’60s. The result, whether it was the cause behind their choosing Yelapa in the first place, or the effect of their having done so, is a laid-back, up-beat, drop-out kind of a vibe that suits the climate and topography of this rightfully famous stretch of coastline far better than its frenetic, ziplining, I-heart-PV-T-shirt-vending neighbour.

Just before I caught my pango back to PV to catch my flight out, I had breakfast at Cafe Bahia, a few yards from the pango pier. It’s run by chef Susan Pasko, formerly of Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse, who dropped out and opened her café in 2007. It was opening day of her six-month season, and the tamarind Margarita, the Bloody Mary, the eggs Florentine and Benedict, as well as the stuffed French toast with banana and three-berry sauce (I was hungry) all bore the marks of a genuine talent applied to perfecting the crowd-pleasing basics. Even the coffee, grown in the nearby province of Nayarit and roasted in PV, showed the sort of un-flashy care and pride that permeates this town, founded by the Yelapa people, who remain the only ones able to own land here. Everyone else is a tenant, just passing through, and apparently happy to co-exist with
Yelapa on its own terms.

Follow Bert Archer on Twitter @BertArcher and subscribe to his travel newsletter at mindmarket.com.