Trip Report - Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, Mexico
AMQUA '98

AMQUA, The American Quaternary Association, holds a big meeting every two years. These meetings consist of series of talks and poster sessions about ongoing research, so it's an opportunity both to present one's own research and to hear about the cutting edge of the field. Incidentally, the abstracts from this meeting (short descriptions of scientific work that was presented and some that was simply ongoing) are available in PDF format at the link above. The meeting lasts two-and-a-half days, but I ended up going one day early and leaving a day late because of flight availability. Since the meeting was at a resort in southwestern Mexico this time, I figured I'd have plenty to do. The Quaternary is the geological term for the last two million years, so the research being presented at this meeting comes from the fields of geology, paleoclimatology, paleoecology, and archaeology. Grants from the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior at the University of Minnesota and AMQUA covered my plane fare and most of my hotel cost. As for the rest, it's fortunate that I had lots of work this summer!

Thursday, September 3rd:

Linda Shane gave me a ride to the airport at a hideously early hour of the morning. I managed to pack everything I needed into my backpack, so I didn't have to worry about checking luggage. My flight was delayed, so I had to change quickly in Houston. One of the other passengers on the second leg of the flight vacationed frequently in Puerto Vallarta. He recommended changing money at airport, taking the bus, not a taxi into the city, and the names of several restaurants. We arrived in Puerto Vallarta at 2:30 in the afternoon, and managed to be last in line through immigration.

I took a taxi to the Hotel Krystal Vallarta where the conference was being held and where I would be staying at least for the conference. It is a huge, walled, motel-style village, part of a long strip of such hotels along the beach between the town and the airport. I ended up deciding to stay there for the first night instead of going into town (where hotels are cheaper) just so I could change into shorts. The lobby staff decided to start things off by sending me off to my room on a tram rather than just showing me the location of my room on a map, but they gave the bellboy the wrong room number. So I had to walk back to the lobby with my backpack to get the right room number and then go back.

I hopped on a bus full of alarmed Mexicans and headed into town. The Mexicans local to Puerto Vallarta seem to be mostly of native stock (Mayans), so American and Spanish-descended Mexican tourists really stood out, and the locals did not expect to see any on the bus! I wandered around the town for a while. It's a pretty, colorful place. Near the beach, it's all geared to tourists: restaurants and gift shops. Inland, going uphill, are the Mexican neighborhoods. I don't speak any Spanish and few of the shopkeepers spoke English, but it wasn't a problem to pick up soda and snacks. I decided to find Scotch tape for the poster I'd brought to the conference. This turned into an absurdly complex enterprise. The only department store I could find was Woolworth's which was going out of business. I finally broke down and went into a scuba-tour agency to ask the receptionists if they knew where to find Scotch tape. It turned out that they didn't speak much English, but one had a handheld-computer dictionary and was able to tell me that the Spanish word for "tape" was "cinta". I asked someone else for directions and found a stationary store hidden behind an unmarked door between two gift stores.

I ate dinner at one of the places recommended by the guy on the plane, Spaghetteria Cianti. It was early enough that I was the only customer. I ate on a patio with a beautiful view of the Pacific. Then I headed back to the hotel, just as the daily rainstorm hit. The other Quaternarists were just setting off to get dinner (on the hotel strip, sadly). There was a gorgeous rainbow over the mountains, but it was one of those things that just never comes out in a photograph (though no one had a camera to test this). George Jacobson recommended the pool by the ocean, so I put my swimsuit on and headed out there. It was actually several connected pools with bridges over them and various platforms under the water. I stayed to watch the sunset over the Pacific, then went about trying to get postcards mailed, but selling stamps was beyond the power of the Krystal Vallarta (the staff recommended I get stamps from a liquor store outside the compound).

Friday, September 4th:

I woke up late. I wandered into the lobby and registered for AMQUA. AMQUA gave every attendee a handy small backpack so I could bring my umbrella into town, which is what I did. The town was teeming with agents for a local time-share corporation. They just wanted to make sure that you weren't a student (which I wasn't at the time), had you leave a deposit, and offered a free lunch, a bottle of tequila and other silly things. It sounded like a good way to waste time, so I drank grape soda in the park and waited until noon. The time-share hosts, the Hotel del Palmer, even covered my taxi fare. So I ate sandwiches and sat through a brief presentation of this vast flexible time-share operation that a group of major corporations, controlling about 5,000 resorts had put together. It sounded like fun and a good investment, but right now, I don't have time for non-family vacations, let alone excess money. The presenter, an Englishman named Martin, had been dealing with technicians going to AMQUA all day, so instead of doing the full presentation, he got me a beer and asked me about geology. Then I walked back to the Krystal Vallarta and hit the pool. I found the two people I was supposed to be sharing a hotel room with on the way back from the pool, but they ended up getting another room.

I talked to a group of Quaternarists I met on the beach, including Walt Dean, a carbonate guy from the USGS and Cathy Whitlock, a palynologist from the University of Oregon. We ate a leftover buffet that one of the Quaternarists had told people was free, but the bar folks wanted money for it anyway. That evening was the opening mixer for the AMQUA meeting. I found out that Barbara Hansen and Vic Barnett, who are also from the University of Minnesota had come. I talked a group of students and techs from the University of Oregon: Colin, J.J., Jerry, and Jenny. The beer was taken away before I was done with the non-alcoholic stuff. Vic declared a trip into town for dinner, so he, Val Barber from Fairbanks, Cary Mock, and I squashed into a cab. We ended up at Mariachi's. I was so full after the mixer that I just ate a fruit plate. Vic demonstrated the proper way to drink Mexican beer: out of the bottle, after running a lime around the mouth. We walked part of the way back along the beach, then got a cab back to the hotel.

Saturday, September 5th:

The morning started with a wake-up call at 7AM. The sessions started that day, so no more being a beach bum. The talks start at 8 in the morning and run until 5 PM, with a one-hour lunch break and two 15-minute coffee breaks, and then everyone looks at posters or, if they are presenting posters, talk to the people looking at posters until 7 PM.

I arrived at the conference hall early to put up my poster, but there were only enough boards to put up half of the posters at a time, and mine was scheduled for Sunday. But some folks were putting their posters on the walls, including Lisa Doner, a grad student I knew from Colorada, so she let me use her poster board for Saturday. I lent my pen-knife to Kate Laird and my "cinta" to Platt Bradbury, then left the hapless diatomists to their posters while I tried to help Barb Hansen put up hers. The sessions started with oceanography and ice-core stuff, including some major new records. I got no breakfast until the coffee break, when we were supplied with tasty little breads. I finished putting up my poster over lunch, so there was no time to eat then, either. The afternoon talks focussed on climatology, glaciers, and diatoms and went by quickly.

That evening, I was able to go look at the other posters and talk to the other Quaternarists. Rhawn Denniston had his poster on the wall behind mine, dealing with carbon- and oxygen-isotope ratios in stalagmites. I also got a look at Dick Baker's poster on early Holocene plant macrofossils from Iowa, and promised him a copy of my thesis. Eric Grimm chastised me about the low percentages of spruce in the late Wisconsin part of my Pittsburg Basin record. Bill Watts, from Trinity in Ireland also visited my poster.

Vic and I tried to recruit the Oregon crew into coming to dinner with us, but they made "I'm tired" noises. Val and I watched a really interesting fingerpaint artist in the lobby while we waited for the others. Finally, we had the whole gang from Friday evening plus Val's mom Marilyn Barber (who had crashed AMQUA as an excuse to vacation with her daughter). We tried to find a restaurant Val had located on the Internet, but it had gone out of business. The cab drivers decided that we should go to !Ah Caramba! instead and set off uphill at breakneck speed over the cobbles. This restaurant also has a covered patio where we had a great view of the thunderstorm outside. A mariachi band went from table to table looking for tips and requests. I had a glass of wine and some really good fajitas. We walked down the hill towards the beach. We found an amber merchant that Vic had spoken about. He'd set up his table in the awning of a closed store. All of us but Cary bought amber pendants for very reasonable prices. We got back to the hotel by midnight, then Vic, Valerie, and I put on our swimsuits and hit the pool.

Sunday, September 6th:

Yet again, I got an early wake-up call and headed for the poster room in the conference center. I moved my poster to the approved spot, then went to the talks. Our hosts, the Quaternarists from the National University in Mexico City presented the morning sessions up. They had obviously been preparing for these talks for a while with well-organized talks and excellent graphics. Deciding we needed a break from our posters, Val, Marilyn, and I ate lunch in the pool. It was only 60 pesos for chicken tacos and mixed drinks as big as our heads! The afternoon featured a number of neat archaeology talks dealing with recent discoveries like the Sundadont people who first colonized the Americas 13,000 years ago and the trade between the Mesoamericans and the rest of North America, particularly the Anasazi people. During the evening, I stood by my poster to talk to people who wandered by, like Greg Willes, Tom Minckley, Val, and Victor. Finally I took down my poster and headed over to another building for the AMQUA '98 banquet. Yet another failure on the part of the Krystal Vallarta: the meal, though plentiful, was flavorless. In fact, it was the only disappointing dinner I had the whole time I was in Mexico. However, the entertainment: a mariachi band and a group of dancers, was excellent, and the banquet included an open bar. The management must have been rather distressed when the mariachi band went away and the Quaternarists proceeded to have a balloon fight with the room's décor. Afterwards, Vic, Val, Marilyn, Greg Willes, and I went for another midnight swim in a pool with a waterslide.

Monday, September 7th:

I packed quickly and carried my gear down to the conference center. I spent the early part of the morning and the coffee break trying to desnarl my hotel bill (the lobby staff were in fine form that morning). The last talks were that morning, dealing with tropical ecology and resulting in interesting debate between Paul Colinveaux, a palynologist, who sees no evidence of prolonged drought in the Amazon Basin during the last ice age and David Webb, a mammal paleontologist, who does.

Cary, Vic, Val, Marilyn, Ray Spear, and I assembled an expedition to Yelapa, a nearby fishing town with no roads leading to it and therefore no cars. We headed for the ferry docks, but were stopped by taxi drivers who pointed out that it was siesta hour and recommended that we charter a boat at the city docks. So we grabbed sodas from a nearby convenience store and tacos from a street vendor and rented a boat (it cost $20 an hour). We had a long, beautiful trip across Flag Bay. The hills around Puerto Vallarta are covered by lush secondary rainforest. We could see the resort where "Night of the Iguana" was filmed. The boat handler took us through caves in Los Arcos, a group of tiny islands, where we saw huge tropical fish and dolphins busily hunting. We landed at the beach in Yelapa and a couple of small boys appointed themselves our guides to a really spectacular waterfall that none of us had known to expect. Val, who had worn her swimsuit under her clothes, and Vic, who hadn't, went swimming under the waterfall. Our young guides led us to a small shop where one of the locals sold tiny animal sculptures and tee shirts. I got a "family" of multicolored stone toucans for Linda and the others picked up little animals as well. Hopefully our guides got a good commission on that deal. We headed back to the boat, and the boat guy simply took us to the other side of town, where there were a row of bars along the beach and lots of lounge furniture, where we sat for the rest of the afternoon and drank beer. Lots of friendly village dogs came by to socialize. We did a little beachcombing and turned up some sea glass for Marilyn Barber to bring back to Vermont.

We returned to Puerto Vallarta and did some shopping. I got a rainbow cotton blanket. We ended up at a restaurant whose name I can't remember. Vic requested "Guantanamera" from the mariachi band. Here I had the only spicy meal I ate in Puerto Vallarta: chicken molé, in a chocolate sauce that is rich but not sweet. It was very good, so I will have to find out the name. The Oregon group was also at the restaurant. We walked along the beach, then got a cab back to the hotel. Vic, Val, Marilyn, Ray, and I went to the pool for our midnight swim, but were run off by a staff person who insisted that the pools were closed after dark. So, we went for another walk along the Pacific instead. Vic and Val went back to town to go drinking and dancing, but Cary and I drank beer in the room and gossiped about Quaternary academic community. I stayed in Vic and Cary's room and slept in my new blanket.

Tuesday, September 8th:

I slept in, then had another lunch with Val and Marilyn in the pool. This time, we got our mixed drinks in coconuts. The others ate on the beach with David Foster. Finally I took a cab with Cary and Vic to the airport. I had to search my luggage for my plane ticket. The duty-free shop was having a sale on Kahlua, so I took a bottle of that home. I spent some of my remaining Mexican money on Swiss chocolate and left the last few pesos along with the tip for Vic's last Mexican beer (of 1998). I read articles on the plane back, discussed them with Vic.

All-in-all it was a good conference. The work-hard-and-play-hard ethic of geology definitely dominated our activities. The locals organizing committee from the National University of Mexico did a great job not only presenting their own work, but in getting everything set up. Although they had fantastic facilities, the Hotel Krystal Vallarta does not deserve their five stars. Their lobby service was wretched and cost me a lot of time I would rather have spent elsewhere. For a resort, Puerto Vallarta has incredibly affordable food and drink. I understand that it's a good place to shop for bargains too. However, without the grants I'd never have been able to afford to attend the conference and I understand that many graduate students and unemployed academics weren't as fortunate. As a result, a lot of Quaternarists could not attend and the scholarly part of the conference was very likely poorer for it.

Photos

© 1998 Rebecca Teed