Wednesday, January 1, 2020; Puerto Vallarta

Wednesday, January 1, 2020; Puerto Vallarta

The Royal Princess tied up to the dock in Puerto Vallarta early in the morning so when we got up to get breakfast at 6:30am, the ship was already tied up to the dock.  One of the most noticeable feature of the Cruiseship terminal in Puerto Vallarta is that the Walmart and Sam’s Club are only about a block away.  The ship’s crew really likes that feature.  

Our excursion started with a drive to the center of old town Puerto Vallarta, characterized by a town plaza and church.  Our driver said you could tell when we entered old town because the road became cobblestone.  There is a large pedestrian mall along the waterfront, but you can drive just two blocks up from the water.  The waterfront is backed by a moderately steep hillside.  On cross streets, you could look towards the ocean and see a statue at the end of each street, just before the beach.  

The old town square has a gazebo centrally, decorated with streamers of paper cut-outs in all the primary colors.  The square is heavily planted with tropical vegetation, and surrounded by shops and restaurants.  Our mandatory shopping/bathroom stop was a jewelry store just down the hill from the church.  The church is well cared for and well illuminated.  It seemed to be celebrating some sort of centennial.  As we were touring around the church, it began to rain on us.  We boarded the bus and were taken a short distance to the Teatro Vallarta, which is a large theater venue with a small museum dedicated to Tequila making.  The museum was arranged with a multimedia room for an introductory video, then a room with pictures of agave growing and harvesting tools, then a room with bottles of scents that can be associated with the various stages of producing tequila.  Unfortunately, all of these areas were designed for a tour group of half the size of ours.  That made each room uncomfortably crowded and we were rushed through the whole thing too quickly to really learn or appreciate too much.  

We were then herded into the gift shop for “tequila tasting”.  This was really not a formal tasting, but they passed out thimble sized samples of their moderately priced Anejo tequila, aged for 3 years in oak barrels, and then samples of flavored ready to drink tequila mixes.  It felt more like a duty free airport shop than a learning experience.  

We were then herded through the rain about a block down hill from the theater to have lunch at a restaurant called Mango.  The rain had turned into a real gully washer, turning the cobble stoned Street is into full on stream beds with several inches of water rushing down hill.  There fortunately was a large open grate over the sidewalk that allowed the water to drop below the street so we could walk across the street and not swim.  

The restaurant was on the waterfront, but there wasn’t much to see because it was raining so hard, you could hardly see to the ends of the beach, and the roof of the restaurant was leaking pretty badly in several spots.  The lunch was street tacos with hand made tortillas that were pressed and cooked at the buffet table.  The food was mediocre, but better than yesterday’s.  However, there was no sort of beverage included with our tour lunch.  It’s a good thing the beans were watery in texture.  

After lunch, we were herded back up the hill to the Teatro for a folkloric dance presentation.  Up until then, the excursion had turned out to be pretty disappointing, but the show was actually quite well done, with fabulous dancers, live mariachi music, colorful costumes and good stage lighting and effects.  The most impressive display was a lasso demonstration.  The male dancers were also very energetic, and they even managed to out-dance the girls on a few numbers.  Lots of heavy rhythmic foot stamping and hollering.

At the conclusion of the folkloric show, a better video on the culture of Tequila and the history of tequila making was shown, followed by a real tequila tasting in the theater.  They had racks that were custom made to sit in the cup holders of the theater. Each held several small tequila sampling glasses, a bottle of water, and a few things to clear the palate and nose.  We were walked through sampling a silver tequila, a reposado tequila (aged in oak for 1 year) and an Anejo tequila (aged in oak for up to 5 years).  The tequilas were good, but the portions in our glasses was probably only a quarter of an ounce, or barely enough to swirl some around in the mouth before swallowing.  

We had a much better tequila tasting experience in Cozumel during our Western Caribbean cruise leg last spring.  But at least we did get to more or less properly sample their tequilas, and it was raining cats and dogs outside, so any other outdoors oriented excursions were guaranteed to be a wash-out.  

We returned to the ship and attended the afternoon trivia. We missed winning by two points.  One point would have resulted in a 3 way tie, while two points would have granted us an outright win.

We were able to have dinner in the dining room along with dessert.  The Puerto Rican comic was the featured entertainment in the theatre, but he spoke so quickly that none of us was interested in seeing him again. So we watched the evening game shows including a Movie Madness trivia, which we lost by quite a margin.  There was a team near us that consisted of 20-40 hear olds who got a perfect score, which was quite impressive.  They had outscored anyone else in the room by at least 7 points.  

This was followed by a “Strike Out” game show where participants moved back and forth across the center line of the stage to vote on answers to music trivia questions that were binary choices of years that a song was released in.  They had songs dating from the early 1950s to 2017, and many of the binary choices were just a year apart.  It didn’t take too long to weed out a single winner as the last man/woman standing.  They did several rounds, and the winners got the usual trivia prizes of notebooks, string bags, water bottles and wine bottle stoppers. Price and Ben each managed once to get into the final 3 but didn’t manage to win anything.  

Next we watched the Liar’s Club. The words were Pisonia, Hopack, Eruct and Schemoozle.  We wound up the evening with a battle of the sexes gameshow, which divided the room into men on one side and women on the other side. Half the game was trivia questions, and the other half was Minute to Win-it physical challenges like card house building, coffee bean chop sticks transfers and ping pong ball bounce and catching.  It was entertaining.  

Tomorrow is a sea day.  We’ll get our last batch of laundry out so that we can get it back in time to pack it back into our suitcases.  We’re having some of the kids’ stuff laundered since its a free service for us.  Tomorrow will probably be full of trivia and game show challenges.