Fun to the MEX

(Conclusion)

When you go on a cruise, don’t miss the land tours.

A seven-day cruise of the Mexican Riviera on board the luxurious 116,000-ton, 2,670-passenger Diamond Princess took us to three port stops – Puerto Vallarta, Mazatlan and Cabo San Lucas, which we further explored with a guided tour. You sign up for the tour (there is a menu of choices) in a counter inside the ship, you are issued a boarding pass with the pick-up time and place and voila you’re on your way.

On the ship, you cannot get by without your cruise card, which looks like a credit card. It literally opens doors for you – like your stateroom door – and pays for your drinks (soda and alcoholic beverages, unlike meals and coffee, are charged to your account), tours, spa charges (all to be paid for at the end of the cruise). You run your card through a machine each time you get on or out of the ship, so they know which passenger is still missing when it’s time for the ship to sail.

From Puerto Vallarta, our next stop on the Diamond Princess was Mazatlan, a seaport nestled between the Sierra Madre mountain range and the Pacific Ocean. The temperate climate, the beaches and the quaint towns on the mountainside make Mazatlan a real getaway. It is also a place after Forrest Gump’s own heart – Mazatlan exports 40 million pounds of shrimp every year!

My sister and I signed up for the Sierra Madre Tour (for which you pay an additional $69) in Mazatlan, which we both enjoyed immensely because it took us to two quaint towns, Concordia and Copala, somewhere up the Sierra Madre. On the way to Concordia, we passed by a clay farm and a handicrafts store, which sold artworks of clay and ceramic and silver jewelry. It is a bit cheaper in Mazatlan than in Puerto Vallarta, but the best advice to any traveler is to buy what calls out to your heart when you see it. Hesitate at your peril because chances are you won’t be able to go back for it anymore.

Concordia has brightly colored homes, courtyards and low-rise buildings – in orange, yellow, hot pink and apple green. The town has a beautiful baroque church, San Sebastian, in front of which is a plaza with stalls selling religious objects, ponchos, embroidered cotton blouses and more silver jewelry. From Concordia, we took a bus ride to Copala, another quaint town with cobble-stoned streets etched on the mountainside. It also has a beautiful church with a handpainted altar.

We had a traditional lunch in a café of chicken tamale, enchilada, beef and potato, tacos, Mexican rice and refried beans, with a big glass of frozen margarita. Thus, most of us slept on our motorcoach on our way back to Mazatlan, awakened only by the sight of more shops in the downtown area.

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Our final stop during the cruise was Cabo San Lucas, the resort town of the rich and famous and where Sylvester Stallone and John Travolta have beach houses. Cabo San Lucas is a combination of Hundred Islands in Pangasinan and the Manila Yacht Club. On one end of the town is a beach with cream-colored sand and on one end is a cluster of islands and rock formations, that most awesome of which is the "Los Arcos," so called because the giant rocks have been sculpted by nature to resemble arches. These rock islands are on one end of the seaside town, so one of the tours offered on this stop is called the "Land’s End" boat tour.

For this tour, we were ferried to the pier by one of the ship’s lifeboats (also called "tender"), a two-story motorboat with a steering wheel and its own captain (and I was thinking all lifeboats looked like those in the Titanic!). From the pier, we took a yacht to Los Arcos, an even more breathtaking sight up close. After the 45-minute tour, I took a 15-minute walk from the pier to the downtown area (my sister chose to sunbathe because she says nobody leaves Cabo San Lucas without a tan) for more last-minute shopping.

Cabo San Lucas, like Mazatlan and Puerto Vallarta, is very clean. The public restrooms, including the one on the pier, are spic and span, and smelling of disinfectant. The sidewalks and gutters are litter-free, devoid of the stagnant water we often see by Manila’s sidewalks. And no one has the habit of spitting.

We had another sail-away party on deck as the ship left port and headed for Los Angeles. From the deck, we could see whales frolicking in the deep waters, as if bidding us a happy trip.

Truly it was a trip of MEXI-mum fun.

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We arrived in Los Angeles’ Port San Pedro a day and a half later, and except for the long lines at disembarkation, everything went well. A few days later, I hopped on a Cathay Pacific jet for a flight to Manila via Hong Kong, where I had a steaming bowl of wanton noodle soup on the Wing Business Class Lounge at Chek Lap Kok International Airport.

So close to home and it surely tasted like it!

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(For more info, call Cruise Professionals, Inc. at 813-7407 to 09.

You may e-mail me at [email protected])