Canadian World Traveller Summer 2019 Issue

12
Puerto Vallarta’s Got it All!
Article and photography by Steve Gillick
Puerto Vallarta’s Malecon is a gathering
place from dawn to dusk. As the
sun starts to rise, joggers and walkers
accompany the noisy Brown Pelicans
and swooping Magnificent Frigatebirds
along the oceanfront boardwalk. At dusk the
crowds converge on the food stalls and
gather in clusters around vendors selling
snacks, souvenirs and colorful balloons,
often to the accompaniment of pick-up
musicians playing everything from traditional
Mariachi to contemporary International.
Statues come to life as buskers entertain
locals and visitors who are searching for that
perfect selfie: duelling with a Pancho Villa
look-alike, sharing a glass of sand wine with
the Sand People, or trying to escape the
clutches of the creature from the movie
‘Alien’.
But the Malecon is also where visitors pose
alongside the letters of the vibrant Puerto
Vallarta sign and interact with the Malecon
sculptures. On the Vallarta Art Walk, which
covers the art scene from the celebrated art
galleries, to street murals, to the intricate
Huichol drawings embedded in the pavement
on the Malecon, our guide Kevin
Simpson, who also owns the art gallery
Colectika, spoke about ‘Nostalgia’. The
bronze sculpture by Ramiz Barquet features
a man and a woman, sitting together, obviously
in love, and looking out to the sea, the
mountains and the city. However, unlike
some of the fantasy sculptures, such as “The
Boy on the Seahorse’ or “The Good Fortune
Unicorn’, ‘Nostalgia’ is a true story!
Ramiz met Nelly when they were both in
their teens. They wanted to marry each other
but as the expression goes, “it was not
meant to be”. Each went their own way, got
married and had children. Twenty-seven
years later, they re-met by chance, and rekindled
their love. Ramiz declared that if
Nelly would marry him, he would build a
monument to ‘what it would have been like
living together for all those lost years’.
‘Nostalgia’ is located on the actual spot
where Ramiz and Nelly used to sit together
and gaze out at Banderas Bay.
Puerto Vallarta is one of those destinations
where age is a state of mind. While there
are 45,000 American and Canadian mostly
Baby-Boomer ex-pats who call the city
‘home’, the destination is a magnet for fun
seekers, foodies, adventurers, birders,
beachers, shoppers and those who want
what they consider to be a meaningful getaway.
In a meeting with Luis Villaseñor, the
Promotion and Public Relations Director for
Puerto Vallarta, he suggested that the millennials
(those born after 1980) tend to look
for things on their holidays that make a difference,
and they find it here. Some still
cling to the old travel acronym FOMO—
Fear of Missing Out, but many are also
adopting the newly-coined acronym, JOMO