We arrived in Puerto Val­larta, Mex­ico Jan­u­ary 1st, 2010. The first night was hard to find a place because almost all the hotels were booked so all five of us had to stay in one room in “La Rosita” hotel, which is where the movie The Night of the Iguana was filmed. The rest of the nights we stayed at the “Los Arcos” hotel in “Viejo” Val­larta. Old Val­larta seems to be a mix of mar­gar­i­taville and gay­bor­hood, it’s really cool. The crowd that hangs around this area tends to be much older (40+).

Dur­ing the morn­ing (wak­ing up at 7am) I would go scuba div­ing with PV Scuba. I did a total of a lit­tle under 6 hours of bot­tom time with the max depth at 105ft. The tem­per­a­ture was warm (70s F) and I only used a 5mm wet suit. The spots that I dive where:

• Los Arcos (twice in two days) — Named after its two arches Los Arcos is a pro­tected National Marine Park with crys­tal clear water and lots of trop­i­cal fish. The wall sec­tions are 5m (15 ft) in height and are cov­ered with hard corals, sponges and fan corals. On the sandy areas the diver can find tur­tles, groupers and stingrays. The arches shel­ter schools of fish, moray eels and many Crustaceans.Close to these rocks, by the rock that looks like a tur­tle, is a sub­ma­rine drop pop­u­larly known as The Devil’s Canyon (Cañon del Dia­blo) for the deep impres­sion of its silent abyss. I’m not sure, but one of the dive mas­ter said the abyss is a 1,5000 meter drop. That seemed like an exag­ger­a­tion so I did a lit­tle bit of research and found that it is about 500 meters (1,640 feet). How­ever, I also found that it can go as deep as 600 meters (1,968 feet) and then extend another 800 KILOMETERS (497 MILES) to the con­ti­nen­tal plate
• Majahuitas — Majahuitas is a coved area that can only be access by boat, with a grad­ual slope and is pop­u­lated by schools of trop­i­cal fish. The dive shop online dive site list says it’s pop­u­lated by schools of friendly trop­i­cal fish, but one lit­tle fish bit me after jump­ing in reverse from the boat so I’ll take that with a grain of salt . The site also says the max depth is 120 ft (36.7 meters), but I went down to 105 ft (32 m) to check to see if I could see the bot­tom and didn’t see the bot­tom and vis­i­bil­ity was more than 20 ft (6m) so I think it’s a lit­tle deeper than stated.On this dive site, the two lads from Mon­treal stated they saw a Manta Ray for a few sec­onds, but I didn’t get to see it since my face was 3 inches from the floor look­ing at the small fish. The dive mas­ter didn’t see it either.
• Las Mari­etas Islands — A group of islands that entry to the Bay of Ban­deras. With a steep rocky sur­face, nobody would guess these islands hide pre­cious under­wa­ter trea­sures – coral reefs, trop­i­cal fish, manta rays, dol­phins, tur­tles and octo­puses. I got to see very large schools of Yel­low Goat­fish (Mul­loidichthys mar­tini­cus) and also how they use their whiskers to look for food. I have never seen them before and their whiskers caught me off guard because they don’t look like a fish that would have whiskers.I also noticed that the island smelled like ammo­nia so I’m guess­ing is it due to all the bird feces on the island.On the way to the Mari­eta Islands we saw two Hump­back Whales. On the way back from the islands, we saw a few more Hump­back whales, baby hump­back whales, and dol­phins play­ing with the boat and also with the whales. I even got to see two dol­phins jump about 10 to 15 feet in the air next to a whale, one on either side of the whale. It looked like some water shown out in the ocean. I man­aged to take a pic­ture of it.

Dur­ing the night, we would go out to the clubs and bars. Night life in Puerto Val­larta ends at 7am, but we only stayed as late as 3am because I had to wake up early the fol­low­ing day to go div­ing. The places we went to where:

• La Vaquita
• Man­dala
• De San­tos
• Andale

Dur­ing our visit in Val­larta, we mainly met peo­ple from Guadala­jara, Mex­ico or from Canada. There were a few Mex­i­cans from D.F. and Amer­i­cans from Wis­con­sin and Seat­tle, but the major­ity were either from some­where in Canada (Toronto, Mon­treal, Que­bec, Alberta) or from Guadala­jara metro area.

Here are the pictures:

After 10 years, we cel­e­brated New Years’s Eve in Guadala­jara, Mex­ico with Jorge Luis’s rel­a­tives. It was fun, some wore yel­low under­wear to sym­bol­ize more money in 2010. Oth­ers wore red under­wear to sym­bol­ize love in 2010. Some threw out lug­gage out­side to rep­re­sent more trav­el­ing in 2010. Other swept the dirt with a broom out­side the door to sym­bol­ize good luck in 2010. For myself, I wore red under­wear not because of love since I’m not super­sti­tious, but because it was the last pair of clean under­wear that I had for that night. We were not wash­ing clothes until the next day when we got to Puerto Vallarta.

Here are the pics: