The last time that I went to Puerto Vallarta, I stayed at a large hostel for two months. There were a lot of cool people passing thru and I got to know many of them fairly well.
There was a 600# gay Dutchman who kept hitting on me (I don’t swing that way in the least!). He ended up in jail for getting sassy with some police. A Hollywood actress was doing a lot of drugs and slept with every guy in my dorm room, except me. Her parents eventually came to take her home, after she got booted from the hostel. A bald, deaf Hari Krishna from India conversed with me through writing and talking. He could lip read and talk fairly well. He couldn’t convert me to his religion, though. A Portuguese writer counseled me on my romantic troubles and shared about his life in Africa and Canada. He is a deep intellectual and I enjoyed his company. An Australian girl of 19 walked in on me showering. She said the girls shower room was disgusting and hoped I didn’t mind her showering with me. An English girl, also 19, was spending a year traveling before starting college. I don’t think I ever saw her sober. A Norwegian lesbian bicyclist had the coolest tattoos and showed them all to me, telling me the story behind each one. The bicycle tattoo on her arm, shoulder, and chest areas was the most interesting.
I became friends with an old, semi-senile dentist from Canada. We worked together a few weekends on building a community center for locals who lived at the dump. We tied rebar, mixed concrete, carried it in 5 gallon buckets up ladders, and handed adobe blocks to masons. His wife was about 10 years older than me, a complete pothead (she got me to try pot for the first time), and was hot after me. She wanted me to be her personal gigalo and travel back to Canada with them. She mentioned they were millionaires. I could see that she used to be pretty, but I wasn’t attracted.
But the guy that I think about the most, from that time period, was a 65 year old Canadian fellow. He was the first to greet me at the hostel and told me the ins and outs of staying there, who to watch out for, the best rooms to stay in. He had just retired and was super healthy. He was thin, a vegetarian, and exercised religiously. A couple days after I arrived, he cut his foot while wading in the ocean. It got infected and he couldn’t walk on it. I picked up his antibiotics at the pharmacy and fixed him Epsom salt baths in a bucket. When his foot turned black, I put him into a taxi and took him to a doctor. The doctor prescribed something different and sent him home. The next day, his other foot and leg was becoming black, too. A lady at the hostel gave him a ride to the hospital in her car. I went to see him that night. He was quite worried and just wanted to return to Canada, where he trusted the doctors. The next morning, he died. The hospital never did figure it out and incinerated his body right after death. Thinking back, I now believe that he had flesh-eating bacteria.
I still enjoyed my trip to PV, but his death cast a pall over the whole time there. It made me think a little harder about my decisions while there, and kept me from jumping into some possibly dangerous situations.
iggyvandweller 