My old buddy Shawn and I went to Puerto Vallarta for my weeklong birthday party. Vallarta was fun, but Yelapa was enchanting. It's a small village on the mainland 40 minutes by boat from PV but near-impassable mountains mean that there is no road access ... thus no cars. If you've never been to a town without cars, I highly recommend it. There's hardly any noise, toddlers wander around safely in the streets ... and so do the tourists. Todo tranquilo. You eat passion fruit from the tree next to your grass shack. If lying on the beach sipping Pacificos gets boring, you can jump on a horse and head out into the mountains to swim in the waterfalls.
Just two days there made me realize that deep down I'm still a country boy from my days growing up in rural Sonoma County. I made several friends while I was in Yelapa, and promised them I'd be back after I finish my degree and spend the holidays with the family. Not only would some time there be great for my mental and physical health, but the town is a fascinating model for economic development. Yelapa has a very attractive and sustainable rural economy, but with the addition of tourist dollars, electricity and the Internet that give the place much of the comforts of modern life. It's like the 18th century meeting the 21st, skipping all the nasty factories and internal combustion engines that make places like LA and Mexico City so unpleasant to live in.
More on all this later, now I've got to get to work on finishing that degree. But I've got the equivalent of 8,000 more words (1 picture=1,000 words) in the photo album over there on the left-hand column.
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