Yesterday was exhausting, but today eight of us managed to drag our tired butts out of bed and meet up before 8am to head out for more adventure. We grouped, walked over to the Vallarta Adventures office and met up with our guide for the day – Mary-Lou. She turned out to be an absolute delight. She ushered us into a truck that was built in the 1960’s and which looked to be the likes of something one would expect to see loaded with fully armed soldiers in Afghanistan, albeit painted a different colour than our transport.
From the hotel area we headed out through Old Town and up into the mountains. If we thought taxis had been exhilarating, they didn’t hold a candle to this ride! Along the way Mary-Lou filled our heads with information on Mexico; its people, its tumultuous history, its flora and fauna – terrestrial and aquatic, its climate, its economy, its food & drink….and everything else you could think of. I imagine that with anyone else we would have been staring out at the passing scenes more, but she was simply riveting and so full of information that she captured almost all of our attention. We learned that the number one input to the economy is not tourism or agriculture, but migrant workers in the US and Canada sending money home. The minimum wage in Mexico is 59 pesos a day, A DAY! That amounts to about $4.80 a day for working a 12 hour day. Consider the minimum wage in BC at $10 for an 8 hour day. That’s a fortune compared to what they could make back home, and their skills in agriculture make them valuable workers in the orchards and fields. They collect their wages and send them back home via Western Union, therefore any tiny little town in Mexico sports a Western Union.
After about an hour on the road we pulled onto a side road and stopped for about an hour at the Puerto Vallarta Botanical Gardens.
We wound our way into the hills and stopped at a barbed wire fence, which one of the fellows in the cab hopped out and moved out of the way. We then did a bit of bouncing along a rough dirt road and stopped at a giant rock under a palm leaf shelter. It was covered in petroglyphs that are dated to about 1200 years ago.
From there we bounced back up to the main road and continued on to a racilla distillery. Racilla is basically the moonshine version of tequila, as if tequila isn’t bad enough. Racilla is made from wild Agave, unlike Tequila, which is made from domesticated Agave. For a product to be certified as Racilla, it must also be made completely by hand, no machinery is used to harvest, cook, process, or distill it. The end product has a distinctly different taste from tequila, I would say that it is worse 😉 We had a lovely lunch at the distillery and then headed off for more adventure.
