Yon Hotel

I'm back from Mexico. I was tempted to blog from Mexico, but the Internet cafe associated with the hotel was not a particularly good writing environment, being socked in with a dense overcast of stale cigarette and cigar smoke on the one hand, and being equipped with Mexican-standard keyboards that I found irksome. Most of the punctuation marks I use often, such as -;',"? and !, were replaced with other things - upward facing arrows, enyas, whatever.

So I waited until I was home. So before I move on to other things, let's say a few things about the hotel. BIG place, for one thing. There were a lot of people there, but the hotel was so freakin' big it was able to accomodate the crowd without ever quite feeling crowded. It was decorated in a strange coral-and-brown Art Deco style, and it featured a buncha bars and restaurants, almost all of them buffet-style.

There were those in my party who grumbled that the food had a distinct been-there, done-that quality, and I'll confess that there wasn't a great deal of variety from one day to the next. "Oh look, here's the plate of cucumbers. Oh look, here's the steak fajita meat. Oh look, here's that mysterious chili-and-tortilla-chip business." But I never went hungry and I never found a food item that was actually objectionable, except for the boiled-down soy sauce and lemon juice found in the Asian-themed restaurant. It was so salty it put my taste buds into comas and I have no idea what it really tasted like.

Drinks were available in many locations pretty much all the time. I tended to specialize in margaritas, Bloody Marys, pina coladas and the occasional gin and tonic just to cleanse my pallette. The drinks were not particularly strong - one night I had, at a conservative estimate, twelve drinks, and though I was tipsy, I wasn't anywhere near the point of doing anything embarrassing. The mini-bar in the room came equipped with four plus-sized bottles of hooch (vodka, tequila, gin and grain spirits) but I elected not to tempt fate by mixing my own drinks; nine stories is a long way to fall when one gets woozy and falls off the balcony.

Accessibility was, frankly, a joke. Each room was divided into two sections, an upper part with the bathroom and beds, and a lower part with the balcony and the living room, separated by two steps. There were no ramps leading to the beach, and there was no easy way to get from the lobby to the pools and restaurants without taking an ill-defined "back way" that included four ramps that were much too steep for wheelchairs. It seemed that there were steps or curbs everywhere. The lobby area was very nice and devoid of steps, but sometimes one wants to leave the nice lobby and go to the pool, the ocean, or points beyond. I can't imagine how someone in a wheelchair could possibly get into the bathtub - I'm 6'4" and even I had to cling to the handrails when trying to climb over the abnormally high bathtub wall.

But - they've put a lot of effort into that part of Puerto Vallarta. The airport has been extensively renovated and is as clean, modern and efficient as anything you'll find in Arizona. The whole tourist industry seems cleaner and more efficient than last time, and I didn't detect the slightly hint of bitterness or resentment in the part of the workers. Everyone seemed genuinely happy to see us, probably because without us in the general sense, they wouldn't have jobs.

So I found the hotel acceptable, but I find that I prefer somewhat smaller and more intimate hotels, like the Presidente-Internacional found much farther to the south, on the other side of Puerto Vallarta. The food was good but not great, the room was good but not great, the drinks were plentiful and tasty, and the ocean was handy. The decor and landscaping were nice, and it was always very clean.

The only area where I felt it didn't meet acceptable standards was handicapped access, which was so poor they might as well not even have tried. Oh, and I didn't much care for the fact that the Internet cafe was an alcove off the side of the sports bar, which means stale cigarette smoke, lots of hoarse shouting, blaring TVs, and that most obnoxious of sounds, the machine-gun rattle of air hockey tables.