I received this nostalgic email from Tony Collins who lived in Yelapa in the 70's. I don't know Tony, but his entry certainly took me back. I think you'll enjoy this.....faye
"I had been to Yelapa for a day trip in 1972 but went back in October of 1974 and stayed there until about Feb of 1977. I spent most of my time in Yelapa at Casa Arriba but I rented a cottage in Vallarta also and had the use of a friends house in Bucerias so I had 3 different living experiences during that time period. There was 1 period that I did not leave Yelapa even to go into Vallarta for 7 months. There were other periods when I would stay in Vallarta for 3 or 4 days at a time. I had been coming back and forth to Vallarta since 1970 and a few friends from California had ended up in Yelapa and Vallarta for a while; I became one of them as well even before I realized they were there.
In Yelapa I first stayed at the little white house that was immediately at the top of the trail from the beach where you turned right to go to town. Enrique who had a small store on the beach let us stay there for a few days, then we moved in to Byron and Bets' rental guest house for a couple of weeks. During that time, I had met the Alaskan guy that was staying in Casa Arriba and he introduced me to Don Arturo Cruz and I made arrangements to move into the "House Above" as the Alaskan guy was leaving to go back to Alaska. We also stayed in Pipeline Jim's house for 1 night and did not like the house except for the roof. Of course, living next door to Benny Shapiro has a million stories in itself, but not all of them so nice. So, I will try to stay away from the bad ones. Benny was OK, he was just Benny.
Casa Arriba had been going downhill in repairs etc. prior to my moving in and so we did some minor things to fix it up, I bought and had delivered a new refrigerator and had some tiles repaired and replaced on the balcony, some brickwork, but nothing major. My understanding is that after we moved out it went downhill again for several years but Lance(?) has it now and it appears that he has made substantial changes and repairs to the house which is a good thing. The main bath house has been changed substantially from what I can see in new photos.
I paid for 6 months rent to Don Arturo at one point by "bouncing" to the states for 2 days and bringing him a nice professional style chainsaw. In fact during the two plus years I rented the house from him, we usually did similar "trades" for the rent. I brought him a Honda generator at one point and some other things which slip my memory. Those were the days!
I stayed in the house during all the seasons and in fact, summer is one of my favorites as I like the rain and less people. One of my fondest memories of Yelapa are the sounds the frogs made at night, it would get so loud sometimes it was unreal... I used to call the sounds like "spaceships taking off and landing". Now that there is electricity in most of the area and more people, I would imagine that it is not quite so "natural" in the sounds at night. Of course, the Raicilla helped. I swear it has psychedelic properties, or maybe that was just the rust from Eliadoro's gas cans that used to bring it down the hill from Chacala.
Regretfully, I have no photos of the time period. I wish I did, but I just wasn't a camera guy in those days. Yelapa was so quiet in those days, that during the summer of 1975 we had nightly readings out loud of pages from the book Shogun with us all sitting around the tables on the balcony of Casa Arriba by bomba light. Very exciting and missed times. Dodging the banana bats and plotting which bananas off of the stalk you were going to eat for breakfast tomorrow were other highlights of nightly activities.
Names I am bad with, but characters seem to stick with me. One of my first friends in Yelapa was Santiago, we went fishing together many times and I think everyone probably knew Santiago at one time or another. Rita Tillet of course, although we were never close. Benny Shapiro and his family. Enrique, Byron and Bets, Simon (the artist and beachcomber, always wore white) The two gay guys that lived up the river just a bit and right next to it, can't remember their names, but very nice folks. Juan Cruz, Don Arturo Cruz and others from their family. People in Vallarta I was close to were Leon Rosales, a bald headed guy named Al... Silver, Joy (Alegria), Carlos Anderson (when he was in town), Chico Perez, Pepe Gutierrez from Tepic, Guillermo Wolfe and his sons, Memo, etc. Miguelon of the JPF and many others. Pancho from Obrien's, the guys from Capriccio and City Dump, etc. Octavio the Police Chief (my wife trained his horses) and many others.
There was a dog in Yelapa named Rufus. Rufus was a pitt bull and the story was that Rufus had become abandoned when his people got arrested in one of the Federali sweeps that used to happen about every 2 years. They used to come to Yelapa and check everyone's papers that they could find. Rufus got left behind and became the baddest dog in the valley and everyone had stories about him. All the other dogs were afraid of Rufus and frankly, not a lot of Mexican dogs had personalities like the American dogs. When my dog came to town. things changed... Rufus became King of The Beach, and Puppy (yes, that was his name... he was a Basenji) became King of The Mountain. There were 3 inevitable confrontations over the next 2 years, in their first battle, Puppy was hurt and it took him a while to get better. The 2nd battle was a few months later, Rufus was hurt and kind of disappeared for a while, but he got better and returned to strutting his stuff on the beach. No one ever seemed to know where Rufus spent his nights, he would come and go at various peoples houses but never seemed to get "attached" to any other humans. In time, the 3rd and final battle occurred and Puppy (sadly) killed Rufus in the fracas (I think he was getting older). Puppy became the stuff of legend for a while and this was in addition to the fame that had become Puppy's due to his swimming ability and the Captain of the Paladin telling people about his swimming. If I would catch a ride into Vallarta for the night on the Paladin, Puppy would chase the boat 2 or 3 miles out to sea before he would turn around and go back to shore. The Captain would be asking me if I wanted him to stop and pick up the dog, This of course would drive me crazy, but there wasn't much I could do about it as you can't really keep a dog in a house with no walls.
I was called "Ballena" by the people of Yelapa because I did something regularly the people were not used to seeing. In the mornings I would come down the mountain from Casa Arriba and go down to the beach. I would them proceed to swim straight out to sea for 2 or 3 miles and would be gone for quite a while before people would notice me coming back to shore. I grew up as a surfer in both Hawaii and California and in my younger days had spend a few months surfing up and down the coast of Mexico which is how I discovered Vallarta and Yelapa in the first place. My swimming strokes where very long and strong and I would blow water and breath up and out of my mouth on every other stroke and it would spray up in the air quite a ways. Hence, people started saying "la ballena viene" when I would be coming back to the beach. It stuck. There are many people around Latin America who call me "La Ballena" to this day."
