I just returned from a week in Sayulita, north of Puerto Vallarta. We were fortunate to have been able to rent a house on the beach; I'm not a beach person, per se, but I do appreciate both how much other people enjoy it and the campfire-hypnosis effect of watching the ocean. It was... "fun" isn't exactly the right word, because we spent a lot of time lounging around doing very little, but it was a very pleasant vacation.
Daily, we'd walk the beach to get into town for breakfast and dinner, and sometimes we'd walk around in town, just taking it in or looking at what was on offer in the little shops or the market stalls. We were travelling with some people who deeply love beachfront communities; they grew up in an American beach town and visit lots more, so it's not out of line to consider them connoisseurs of such places. But I have to confess, I really don't get it.
Our companions, like many beach-connoisseur Americans, especially love beachfront towns in developing countries. (Side note: I think of "developing" in this context in the same way that I think of "developmental delay" versus "developmental disability"; the former expresses the hopeful idea that full normal development is a possibility, whereas the latter expresses the - often more accurate - idea that full normal development is not possible. I don't know whether U.S.-style or European-style or Japanese-style full normal development is possible for every so-called "developing" country, but I don't see tremendous harm in holding out that hope. This attitude of mine might just reveal me as the softy I am, but there you go.) There seems to be a sense that these developing-nation beach communities are more "authentic," live and operate closer to their origins, than their developed-world counterparts. But cheap souvenirs are cheap souvenirs, in the end; the fact (if it is a fact) that the people selling colorful beaded bracelets in Sayulita made those bracelets instead of buying them from a factory somewhere else (a) doesn't erase the fact that the beads and the thread did come from that faraway factory, and (b) doesn't change the fact that the goal in both cases is simply to separate tourists from their money. The bracelets have no cultural significance. They have no utility - they're so very colorful, in fact, that outside the milieu in which they're being sold, it's unlikely they'll ever be worn. They are "handcrafted," if that claim is made, only in that the seller's family cranked them out during the low season, as fast as possible, without great artisanship or loving care; they're a commodity, not an heirloom. They're no more "authentic" representations of Sayulita than if they had been bought by the gross in Mexico City.
(I don't begrudge the sellers one peso that they make in selling them. Good for them, to recognize a market and try to capitalize on it. And I have no animus against the buyers, either; I once bought a God-awful purple crushed velveteen dress at a Parisian street market that, in my teenage excitement about being in Paris, I thought was the most exotically beautiful thing I'd ever seen - only to find that there was no way on Earth that that dress could be worn anywhere but to a costume party [dressed as what? I don't even know] or on stage. But in the moment, in that setting, it was stunning to me. I'm just speaking generally about the souvenir biz.)
Let me see if I can describe a morning. I'd wake up in my own time - one of the great joys of vacation for me. I was never the first one awake, so I benefited from whoever was, because that person would start the coffee - coffee purchased in town from a restaurant that roasted its own beans. The roast was not nearly dark enough for me, but because it was locally roasted (I don't know where the beans were grown), we bought and drank it, and it was a darn sight better than out of a can. I would sit on the broad tiled patio or down on the little lawn terrace above the beach, looking out at the horizon and chatting loudly with whoever was up over the rumble of the surf below us.
Eventually we slathered ourselves with sunblock and hit the beach to walk into town. In that quarter of an hour, we passed beautifully appointed houses like ours, and abandoned and grafitti'ed concrete shells, and open areas dotted with tents both modern and makeshift. As we came close to the town center, the beachfront bars, restaurants, and vendors of massages and surfing lessons took over, reggae music and shouted invitations to eat, drink, relax, and learn competing with the waves. American voices cut through the rest of the sounds, for me; there's a particular tone we seem to share, along with the familiar sound of our vowels and r's and harsher gutturals, to which I think our ears are tuned.
If I looked inland at many points, I saw the rest: the battered cars, tarped-off shelters of scrap wood and corrugated metal, overflowing trash bins (I was surprised, in fact, to see trash and recycling bins at all - and I confess I'd be surprised if anything was done with the contents of the plastic and paper recycling bins besides emptying them into the same garbage trucks, though I didn't witness it), roaming dogs, small piles of feces of indeterminate origin. But we tended not to eat where these... complications were obvious. We flip-flopped our way up one of the couple of main streets leading from the beach to the main plaza, where we ate in a restaurant that nodded to local culture by serving house-made chorizo and refried beans at breakfast - which meant that it could have been picked up from the beach where our companions grew up and transplanted to Sayulita without anyone noticing the difference. In no way "authentic." But two streets over, we could have had breakfast for certainly no more than half the price, cooked on the brazier on the sidewalk. The problem was, we would have had to contend with the sights and smells of underdevelopment as we ate.
Let's face it. We were dilettantes. This town was nice by comparison with a number of developing-country beach towns I've visited; as I said, they had public trash bins, they had trash collection via a truck that looked just like the one that picks up my trash at home, they at least made a show of collecting recyclables (one day I should write about virtue-signalling inconveniences), they had drinkable water both in and out of bottles, shops refrigerated perishables to what seemed to be similar temperatures to those we would use at home. But it was still desperately playing catchup. The infrastructure to keep it truly clean wasn't there yet, so it was only clean by comparison with even less developed places; trash and shit were almost everywhere, and where they were not visible, they were still apparent to the nose. Tourists clearly didn't trust the water - bottled water was the norm at almost every restaurant, and at the one we visited that didn't sell bottled water, people were drinking juice or beer or soda from a can or bottle instead. One stretch of sidewalk (props for having sidewalks) was raised a good three feet above the street on one side and the shops on the other, with no railing or even a visual indication of the drop; I couldn't help picturing the late-night barflies who must plummet off that causeway nightly. Potholes were marked by sticking something taller than the hole was deep in them - a palm frond, a broken plastic barrel. I don't get the romance to such in-between places.
I'm giving a wrong impression. I enjoyed Sayulita, I thought everyone we dealt with was lovely, patient with our poor Spanish, and accommodating, the food was good, the prices were good, and I've returned relaxed. But I didn't think it was "paradise," as at least one transplanted American called it. I thought it was a piece of normal, coastal Mexico doing its notable damnedest to attract dollars and doing an excellent job of making American surfers and other privileged sandal-wearers (myself included) believe they have changed the world. Who knows? Maybe they have - or are on their way to having done so. But I'll be more bullish on recycling, for example, in a place like Sayulita when I am not crossing the street to avoid a huge and reeking pile of rotting trash on my way to the little rack of nicely painted bins.
First things first.
