Puerto Vallarta, Mexico

The next 2 days were spent exploring the city of Puerto Vallarta and enjoying finally being in the tropical weather. After constantly moving for the past 4 months we were keen to reduce the pace of our travel from here on. On the list of “Mexican must-do’s” was:
1. try street tacos,
2. drink tequila,
3. have a Margarita, and
4. Hit the beach!

So on day 1, we did just that. We walked from our apartment to Malecón, a large water-front promenade that is the main attraction for Puerto Vallarta. The promenade is lined with restaurants, bars and boutiques to cater to all the North American tourists. On our hunt for our first margarita in Mexico, we could only find well-overpriced, and ridiculously oversized, cocktail-sized options. We finally found a place on the sand that looked like it would do the job. Not quite but at least we knew it would be smarter just to keep making our own at home like we’d always done. (The troubles of living with a career hospitality professional and a lover of quality drinks 😜)
* have a Margarita ✅

Our tacos for dinner the night before would certainly have met the requirements to tick this one off the list. But it’s highly likely all of these are going to be repeated on a regular from here on. Street food stalls are almost on every corner and the tacos are all amazing! We didn’t realise how many different ways there were to prepare a taco until now. Seemingly every region of Mexico has a different way of preparing them and we are in heaven! Our lunch was at a colourful place called Pellizcadas, translated to The Pinched. A super authentic place that we loved so much that we came back the next day.
* try street tacos ✅

By chance, we found a nearby place offering Tequila tasting as a complete experience with an explanation of how it’s made. Being so close we dropped by to see if they had availability. We arrived at the bar hosting the experience just as the last session was finishing. However, they were happy to talk us through a private session right then. With an old Mexican guy as our host we soon realised that for every tasting he gave us, he would also pour himself a shot. And it was obvious that he had done the same for the previous 3 sessions of the day 😂. Despite his increasing intoxication, we had a lot of fun. We tried 5 different types of tequilas with some very generous pours (because our host told us it was happy hour 🤷‍♂️)
* drink tequila ✅

As for our final must-do… well basically everything else we did during our time in Puerto Vallarta was around our sessions kicking back at the beach. so Hit the beach! ✅
We found out in the coolest way that the area is known to have a lot of turtles nesting along the coast here. One afternoon a family next to us had a couple of baby turtles emerge out of the sand next to them. I’m assuming they weren’t meant to hatch at that time of the day however we did our best to get them to the sea.

So after our first couple of days in Mexico, we had happily adjusted to the warm weather and ticked off our short list of Mexican experiences. Puerto Vallarta had been a great starting point but it was much more touristy than we had expected and been looking for. Time to see what else it had to offer.Read more