Las Varas

As I have mentioned before, Chacala is a tiny beach town. If we need to use the bank or a pharmacy, or want to buy something more than basic, we need to go into the bigger town of Las Varas. Chris and I decided to take a combi, van, into Las Varas to see what it had to offer.

The town is less than 12 km from Chacala. Las Varas was originally a hacienda (estate) and only formally became a pueblo in 1935. Sometime, we would like to find the hacienda house, if it still exists.

Las Varas is located on the main highway between Puerto Vallarta and Mazatlan and where many different roads that lead to the various beaches of Riviera Nayarit meet. So it is a pretty busy place.

Primarily dedicated to agriculture, the town is surrounded by fields of beans and tobacco as well as fruit orchards - banana, guayabana, avocado, pineapple, lime, orange, noni, papaya, star fruit.

We really didn’t do a lot in town but enjoyed walking around. The town square is nice but there isn’t really any shade which is too bad. In more towns, the town square is a great place to people watch under big old trees. The palm trees here were pretty small so the square was hot.

I had read about a museum, but no one knew about it. Finally we asked at the library and we were told that they used to have one but a museum in Tepic had taken all of their artifacts and put them on display there.

Someone has recommended a good, clean restaurant called Angelita’s so we headed there for lunch. It lived up to its reputation. We had a delicious beef taco lunch with giant limonadas.

Roast chicken bbqed over charcoal was being cooked so we bought a chicken, rice, onions, hot peppers and salsa to take home for dinner with Pat and Gail. We couldn’t resist, it smelled so good. (It tasted good too.)

Then, we visited an ATM and went back to the corner to pick up a combi home.

Even though Las Varas is a busy economic centre, it has a nice Mexican feel with very few gringos. Many of the people we talked to were missing teeth and were genuinely curious about us and interested in talking to us or helping us out. It was a pleasant outing.

Note: more photos of Las Varas to come later...Read more