Chacala

The morning after we arrived into Chacala, Doug and I dinghy-ed to shore while the kids stayed onboard to do home school.  We found Chacala to basically be a one road town with friendly locals and surprisingly quite a few Americans who preferred the small town and get-away feel to the largeness of Puerto Vallarta which sits three hours south.

While wandering around town, Doug and I picked up a few provisions.  We saw this lovely display of fruits and vegetables in a restaurant/tienda and put them in our bag before asking how much we owed.  The shop keepers told us those items were to serve at their restaurant. Whoops! We put everything back and continued on our way.

At the end of town we noticed a campground that offered hot showers for 10 pesos (about .80 cents). I was thrilled.  It didn’t matter that it was in a free-standing M*A*S*H* - like outdoor stall.  The sign said, “Caliente aqua”…“Hot water”.  When I returned to the boat and told Chandler she was as excited as I was so we packed our shower gear and headed to shore.  As I walked Chandler up to the stall, pointing to it and saying, “There it is” she stopped and said, “That’s it?  That’s where we’ll take hot showers? I thought it would at least be in a building!” (sorry, no photo)

Long story short, the “hot” must have been dependent on the sun and time of day because we didn’t experience anything close to hot.  As we left the campground, informing the people who ran the place that there wasn’t any hot water, they just smiled and said, in Spanish, “No, no hot water.”  We heard them chuckle a bit as we left.  Not in a mean way but in a “You should have known better” way.  After living in Mexico for 3+ years I guess we could have been a bit less gullible.  We did however find another hot shower place that was located at the back of an open-air restaurant.  Although the showers were still basically outdoors, Chandler got a hot shower and I got a semi-warm shower. It felt divine!  We were clean again.
Later that night we cruised town with the kids and tasted coconut milk, although it was more like clear juice and the meat inside, which was slimy versus crisp and chunky like what we were used to.