A Little Bit about Paradise Village

January, 2014

Paradise Village is a hotel resort in Nuevo Vallarta, and it also has a first-class marina. Our first visit there was by bus to attend one of the Pacific Puddle Jump Seminars, and we took the kids so they could play at the pool while we listened to someone drone on about stuff we already know about our radar.  Think of any stereotypical cheesy resort, and you’ve got Paradise Village.  Unlike La Cruz, there’s no cute little Mexican town just off the marina, no, there’s an American style shopping mall.  It definitely wasn’t my idea of a place I would like to stay.  However, there were a few upsides that we just couldn’t pass up, and we did end up staying there for a full 10 days.  One upside is that they have dockside potable water, so you can fill your boat tank directly (although there was some concern about chlorine content and whether it could damage our watermaker membrane when it fresh-water flushes).  The other upside might seem like a small thing, but it was a huge thing to us.  The hot tubs.  Almost every evening after the day’s tasks were complete, we would go sit in a hot tub.  Sometimes we’d just go to the yacht club, which was near our slip, and sometimes we would go over to the hotel and use the more touristy hot tubs.  A perk of staying at the marina is that you can use all of the hotel facilities as well, and that included the pools, which the kids enjoyed immensely.  They played on the alligator water slides and picked up games of pool basketball and volleyball with other hotel guests.  The alligator slides had a rough texture that destroyed the seat of many a set of swim trunks, that’s for sure.  Alex even made some friends, including a girl that he was very hush, hush about.  I heard about it from Brenden.

Every Sunday the hotel does a “welcome party” at an outdoor amphitheater where there was free food and drink, so of course we checked it out.  It was pretty crowded, and they did have some nice snacks like bruschetta, but it ran out quickly.  There was a line for drinks, and they had alcoholic and non-alcoholic, and as we were making our way to find a seat, Brenden let me know that he did not like his drink at all, it was bitter and not sweet.  I tasted it, and sure enough he somehow ended up with some sort of rum and fruit juice concoction.  This is the sort of thing you would never expect to happen in the States, and you might even be a little peeved about it and want to go talk to a manager or something.  Here in Mexico, we’ve gotten used to more citizen personal responsibility/accountability, and things like this don’t surprise us and we just roll with it.  Even see the humor in it most times. And this time I saw that bright side that now I have two drinks, as Brenden just went and got himself another one.  The welcome party had some nice dancing and fire twirling, but overall, it was a bit cheesy and somewhat reminded me of a timeshare presentation.  They lure you in with free stuff only to get you to sit there and listen to their marketing.  In between dancing acts, they had restaurants and other businesses in the area that cater to tourists give little speeches about this offer and that special.  And the MC was so engaging everyone really seemed to be enjoying themselves and laughing and clapping over what were basically live commercials.  It was surreal.  The best part of the whole thing were the games, especially the game they did with the kids.  They called kids up there and I basically made Alex and Brenden go up.  In hindsight, I feel bad about it, because Alex was by far the biggest kid up there, and some of the kids were like 4-5 years old.  They lined them up in a single file line, smallest to biggest, and did this thing where they had to hop back and forth on command, and they would go fast and whoever messed up was out.  Big surprise, Alex won the contest, and I felt really bad for him, because it was almost like the crowd was rooting against him, because he was competing against these tiny kids.  He was miserable.  His prize was candy, and he ended up sharing it with some of the other kids that were sitting near us, so maybe if the crowd saw that they would have cheered for him a little more.

I mentioned the shopping mall near the marina, and one nice thing is it had a decent grocery store, even if expensive.  The best part was the bakery, and every morning I would send Alex to the store for Baguettes.  It was heavenly.  After white Bimbo bread for so long, we could not get enough of these baguettes.  It was so nice to have daily access, and unlike most of the items in the store, they were pretty inexpensive.

They also have a tiny zoo, and by tiny, I mean not many animals, but they have gone big with the ones they have: a couple of Tigers named Daisy and Diego.  They are caged (obviously), and I felt pretty sad about it, but apparently it started as a rescue effort.  Not sure if I believe that one or not.  They also have several parrots, and some of them say “Hola” and some of them say “Hello.”  We always tried to talk to them as we walked by.

Our stay at Paradise Village just happened to coincide with the full moon, so we got to attend one of the yacht club full moon potluck parties.  They fired up a big grill and everyone brought something to grill and something to share.  I brought artichoke bruschetta (of course, with access to all that bread and all) and I think we grilled chicken.  It was a nice event, though we didn’t really know anyone there other than Lady Carolina.  The evening culminated with open mike storytelling, and wow there were some good ones.  Cruisers really do have lots of good stories to tell, because you just never know what’s going to happen out here.  Steve told his story about crashing the RC airplane in Agua Verde, but the Exodus crew stayed our usual quiet, shy selves.