Everybody's Hideaway

Acapulco is beginning to look like Miami Beach; Cuernavaca is more for the old folks. Where is the In place for tourists in Mexico this year? It is Puerto Vallarta, a remote little fishing village midway up the Pacific Coast, where everyone is going to warm his bones and taste what the travel folders call the "real, unspoiled Mexico."

Marlin & Mariachis. Ten years ago the only way to get to Vallarta (the In name for it was by boat or on burro-back over the Sierra Madre mountains.

There was a dirt airstrip but no commercial service. Fishermen caught mackerel and bonito from dugout canoes; farmers marketed vegetables in the central plaza. A couple of temperamental diesel engines generated electricity to light the four-block bay-front promenade, and the townsfolk got along fine without a proper bridge across the Cuale River that split the town. Pedestrians took a swinging footbridge, and Vallarta's five taxis just sloshed across the shallow stream.

A few passing yachtsmen put into the placid bay, with its long, empty scythe of golden beach and tile-roofed houses climbing the slopes behind. The fishing was great--leaping sailfish and 400-lb. black marlin. The daytime temperature was in the 70s; in the evening, cooling breezes blew down from the mountains, and the mariachi music lasted far into the night. In the early 1950s a dozen or so Americans went to live in Vallarta. Friends came to visit--and hurried back on their own. Before long, Mexicana Airlines started flying in DC-3s, then DC-6s daily from Mexico City and Los Angeles. The boom was on.

In 1953 there were only 30 rooms around town picking up an odd tourist dollar. This year's estimate: 32,000 visitors, nearly 1,000 rooms, and a tourist trade of $2,400,000. The burros are still there and the bands play on. But the old footbridge has given way to a broad concrete span.

No longer do beach boys take people skindiving from their dugouts for $1.60 a day--they buzz around in motor boats. Twelve deep-sea boats stand ready--at $30 to $50 a day--to bring in that trophy for the game room. The bungalow that rented for $30 a month brings as much as $250, and a one-bedroom house on the fashionable hillside called "Gringo Gulch" goes for at least $10,000--still a bargain by Acapulco standards. There is neon, a supermarket, a nightclub. The new Posada

Vallarta, a 140-room luxury hotel will be open soon, and there is even a Dairy Queen abuilding.

No More Parrots. Now Hollywood has arrived. Last September Director John Huston appeared with Richard Burton (chaperoned by Elizabeth Taylor) and Sue (Lolita) Lyon to shoot The Night of the Iguana. Huston liked the fishing so much that he bought a $30,000 house in a cottage colony eight miles outside town. Liz and Dick are house hunting too. Playwright Tennessee Williams, whose Iguana is set in an unspoiled Mexican resort in 1940, took one look at Vallarta and exclaimed: "This is precisely what I meant. This is Acapulco 20 years ago."

The early discoverers shudder to think that Vallarta may go the way of Acapulco--even though they will be able to sell out handsomely as they move on to the next "undiscovered" spot. This appears to be a place called Yelapa, 20 miles down the coast, where half a dozen American settlers have already set up housekeeping. "When we first came," recalls a retired American woman in Puerto Vallarta, "you could hear parrots from the mountains at night. You can't hear them any more." But to the Mexicans, the clang of cash registers makes up for a lot of squawks.

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