Kevin's Weblog

A very belated entry...

In January, we spent 10 days in Mexico, mostly in Puerto Vallarta. Actually, we were staying in Neuvo Vallarta, a few miles north, because my mom was able to trade for a time-share unit there. While our resort was very beautiful, I don’t really recommend this route if you plan to spend your vacation doing anything other than lounging around your resort. While the town sounds close by, the cost of getting back and forth is too high: either $20-30 each way for a taxi, or 90 minutes each way on two different buses.

The other sad thing is that I forgot my film camera, and we were soon to discover that our current digital camera does very poorly with low-light conditions. As a result, we have few decent pictures from the trip.

We spent one day on a cruise in the bay, sold to us as “whale watching”, but sadly wasn’t. (Lesson learned: stick with the major cruise companies, and distrust anything that comes free or discounted “if you come to our 90 minute presentation”.) We did get 10 minutes or so of decent snorkelling before a dozen other ships appeared at the same spot we were and dumped about 200 people into the water. On the way in and out of the harbor, we spotted Paul Allen’s yacht “Tatoosh”

You know your boat is big when you use it to carry around two other power boats, a 50’ sail boat, and a freaking helicopter! By the way, this is Allen’s “small” yacht.

Our first day spent in Puerto Vallarta itself was a bit of a mess. We got into town late, the restaurant we wanted to go to for lunch turned out to only serve dinner (contrary to our “2005” tour book), and we ended up settling for a place that could have been any enchiladas & margaritas joint in the US. Then we spent too much time chasing a good exchange rate and passing up purchases we would have made had we had any pesos. Dinner, however, was a real find at a place called Planeta Vegetariano. Even if you aren’t vegetarian, this place is totally worth it as they have tons of salads and other vegetable dishes which just aren’t on the menu anywhere else (and all but the hardest of hard-core carnivores are liable to be missing some vegetables after a week in this town). The also have this really amusing mural on the wall:

On a later trip in to town, we did have cash and time to do a little more sight-seeing as well as some shopping for local art. We brought home two pieces. The first is a Huichol yarn painting:

Like most of these paintings, this is a representation of a shamanistic vision. I haven’t yet gotten a really good translation of the descriptions by the artist on the back, but we got an explanation of the basic symbolism from the store where we bought it. In this vision, the shaman has taken the form of the deer on the right. The snake is a messenger that he uses to take a gift of feathers (the teardrop shapes) and peyote to the god, Grandfather Fire, in the upper left.

The other piece we got was this mask:

There are a lot of similar masks for sale around the town, but we spotted this one at a vendor stand the first day and really liked it. However, the seller was asking way more than we were willing to pay and we were in a rush at the time. Throughout the trip, we saw other masks, but this one stayed our favorite. On our last day in Puerto Vallarta, as we were rushing to get back to our hotel, we found the stand and this mask again. Armed with other prices we’d seen about town, we bargained pretty hard and got it for about 60% of the original price. Typical Americans that we are, we’d never done much of this sort of haggling, but it was a real rush. We were practically giddy heading home with our purchases.

The last couple days of our trip we spent about 25 miles up the coast in a small town called Sayulita. In some ways, this was a lot more “real Mexico”; on the other hand it seemed like almost half the population was American ex-pats. (Maybe just half the people walking around the streets and beaches.) Regardless, it was nice to relax and not worry about buses or taxis or schedules. My favorite photo from the town was taken by Suzanne and is the sort of shot of people that I wish I were better at taking.

Over the weekend I went and played with a friend’s Prius. As he doesn’t have a Bluetooth phone himself, I could pair up my phone and play and then just delete everything. We confirmed that the address book syncing does have the multiple phone number problem. Also, while the car sort of pretends to be a Bluetooth headset, it doesn’t quite. For example, you can’t use it to access the voice control features on the phone (which would have partially relieved the address book issues).

In the seeing-opportunities-not-problems department, I’m wondering if I could hack up an alternate address book exporter to run on the phone that would flatten the address book, and also deal with the fact that the Prius only shows you 8-10 characters of each name. I figure this should be within my abilities, but first I would need to actually get the SDK for my phone. Ericsson doesn’t seem to want to distribute it anymore, so I may have to start looking for some warez version. (The SDKs are free from Ericsson once you register for their developer community, so I won’t feel bad about it.)