The Great Margarita Hunt

THE GREAT MARGARITA HUNT

I DON’T KNOW WHAT’S MORE DANGEROUS, COMPULSIVE behavior or paychecks. One thing’s certain though: The combination often leads to some of life’s most bizarre adventures.

I know this all too well, because one stunning, blue afternoon not too long ago, I got paid, then made the mistake of succumbing to what was initially a simple and straightforward urge: I wanted a margarita. A little while later, fate found me sitting alone in a fancy bar just outside Long Beach. The bartender, a Southern California-ized Mexican fellow named Ray, noticed my puckered expression as I took a daringly large first sip from the salt-rimmed glass in front of me. I wheezed. Then my nose burned. All in all, not the margarita of my dreams.

“Aw, yuck,” I said, pushing the frosty glass away from me as I stifled a gasp. Ray walked up and laughed, tossing what was left into the sink behind the counter. “No offense,” I said, “but where can I go for a really good margarita?” I thought about this a moment. “Actually, where can I go to get The Best Margarita? You know, historically good. The best that’s ever been.”

I was prepared to wait awhile as Ray thought this over, but his answer was as quick as it was firm. “Chico’s Paradise,” he answered, wiping down the counter in front of me. “Chico’s makes the best. There are none better.” It was like Walter Cronkite reporting the Evening News: “Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the world’s finest margarita has finally been located . . .”

I reached over to my duffel bag and pulled out a huge map of the Los Angeles area. “Okay, where is this Chico’s place?”

“About 12 miles south, in the jungle.”

I closed my eyes for a moment, the way people often do when they’ve just been thoroughly confused, and pondered what he had said. Then I peered back at him over the top of the map. “The jungle? What jungle?”

“The one that surrounds Puerto Vallarta.”

“You mean as in Mexico?”

He stared back at me like I'd just arrived on some sort of interplanetary probe.

“Wait a minute,” I said, “that’s over a thousand miles away!”

“Yes. But you wanted to know where the best was. That’s Chico’s. They make pretty good nachos, too.”

True to my nature, I soon found myself on Pier 93B in San Pedro, the Port of Los Angeles. I was waiting to ride a Suzuki Intruder 700 aboard the Star dancer, a cruise ship bound for the Mexican Riviera—which, according to the bubbly travel agent, includes Puerto Vallarta, “a mere 1113 ocean miles away.” Armed with little more than a toothbrush and some new clothes, I was about to embark upon The Great Margarita Hunt. I’d also been informed that “the finest huaraches in all the world” were also available in Puerto Vallarta. Since I did in fact need a good pair of leather sandals, that cinched it—I was going South.

I rode the dark red Intruder onto the ship’s vast auto deck. Although on this sailing there were only five other vehicles aboard, the Stardancers ability to take on cars and RVs makes it unique among cruise ships. In the winter it cruises a big loop starting in Los Angeles, reaching Puerto Vallarta three days later. It continues from there up to Matzatlan, then over to Cabo San Lucas at the tip of Baja, then bobs its way back up the coast to Los Angeles. In the summer it does the Alaska scene. Many travelers take the cruise one way either to Puerto Vallarta or Mazatlan, then drive home (this cruise-one-way, drive-the-other deal is especially popular on the Alaska-bound cruises).

You don’t need a motorcycle, a Mexican cruise ship and a beautiful riding companion to find the world’s greatest margarita. But it doesn’t hurt.

TAL NEWHART

Of course, I had no intention of driving back through Mexico. No way. My plan was much simpler: I'd just ride off the ship when we reached port, find the margarita and huarache joints, and buzz back on board that night before the ship left.

Well, that was the plan, anyway.

The Mexican customs man stared up at me from his portable bridge table set up on the dock beside the huge, white ship. He kept shaking his head slowly back and forth as he rifled an ominously thick stack of official-looking documents. He was definitely not amused with something. He turned to the ship’s representative and zipped something out in Spanish. He might as well have been speaking Moon. I looked at the interpreter, who conveyed, “He says this is not possible.”

I turned away for moment and bit my lower lip. I’d been standing there wilting in the hot Puerto Vallarta sun for nearly an hour. If I were a vase of flowers you’d have thrown me out. Pushing my glasses back up my sweatslicked nose, I turned back around. I didn’t know exactly who to talk to, the interpreter or the official guy, so I gave a sort of split delivery. “Look, I promise I’m not going to sell the damn bike. I’m just looking for some margaritas.” Once repeated in Spanish, this caused the customs agent to stall further.

He looked at the brand-new Intruder waiting patiently behind me, its brilliant chromework glistening in the white sunlight. He spoke at roughly the speed of sound to the agent, who turned and relayed to me: “Why do you need such a motorcycle for that? Any of the beach hotels has fine margaritas. And they are right there. You can walk to them.”

“Wait a minute,” I said to both of them. “I didn’t come over a thousand miles for a ‘fine margarita.’ I came this far for the World’s Finest Margarita, which is lurking somewhere in the jungle south of town.”

Realizing that the customs man was probably looking for a little monetary incentive to grant my entrance to his country, I turned and faced the ship’s agent. “Look, I will not give this man money. Period.” I then took a step backward, leaning against the Intruder. I tried to remember what Yul Brynner looked like in “The Magnificent Seven.” I adjusted my posture accordingly.

After a brief discussion between the two men, my papers were stamped and handed back to me, and I was nodded toward the street. With one big step I turned, threw my leg over the bike and zoomed away from the dock. The air flowing in and around my sweat-soaked clothes seemed to breathe life back into me. During the first mile or so I felt like I was flying, floating on a cool, white cloud.

Just before the“PV cobs”(Puerto Vallarta’s famous cobblestones), I spotted the curvaceous Sheila, a winsome lass I had met on the ship. Seeing as how she had expressed an interest in my mission—and since I was forever in her debt for showing me how the twin beds in my cabin could be slid together and locked—I pulled over. After a few minutes haggling with a moped rental place over a helmet for Sheila, we were off to find “the finest huaraches in all the world.”

We bumped along through town on what are the roughest “paved” streets I’d ever negotiated on a streetbike. The cobblestones were all different heights with random spacing, which made keeping the bike upright rigorous, hard work. There was also a variety of other obstacles, donkeys for instance, that made the crosstown experience high adventure in its own right. But the Intruder, despite its aggressive fork rake, performed admirably. With a V-Twin engine that makes enough torque to jump-start the cruise ship, the Intruder was able to scoot by a seemingly endless stream of vehicles lunging at us from side streets.

Sheila and I rumbled up to the sandal shop, but near as we could tell, it would be closed for the next two hours. As we saw it, our only alternative was to walk over the bridge to the south end of town and work our way down toward the beach, buying margaritas as we went.

So we did. But although we did get some good, honest margaritas, they were nothing special. Of the places we stopped that morning, El Torito had the best. Locally known as “Killer Margaritas,” they certainly came close to having that affect on me. So, being worldly enough to recognize shopper’s gleam in a woman’s eyes, I arranged to meet Sheila later, then went down to the beach for a doze.

After a nap and a stroll along the water’s edge, I ambled back to the huarache shop. In the back, behind a low counter, I spotted a stout woman. Equipped with a dark face deeply lined from years of simple labor, she gave the impression you could ask her anything about sandals and she’d know the answer. So I did. And about 30 minutes later, after some minor size adjustments in the factory upstairs, I left wearing a pair of sandals more comfortable that I imagined possible. And they were so inexpensive that I felt guilty about all the time the sale had taken.

I found Sheila holding court back at the bike. As usual, the Intruder was surrounded by a horde of smiling youngsters, staring at themselves in the deep chrome. Wherever the bike went, the amount of attention it generated was intense. Every non-tourist took a long, close look. And I don’t think it was all due to the bike’s wonderful, rumbling exhaust note, since most of the local vehicles lacked mufflers altogether. No, I’m inclined to believe that the Intruder’s expensive-looking finish (not to be too gushy, but the bike really does sparkle in the sun) was the reason, especially in a town where most people can’t afford car wax, much less a car to put it on.

We lit up the engine and thundered along the coast and into the jungle. The gnomes at Suzuki must have had that stretch of highway leading south from Puerto Vallarta in mind when they sat at their drawing boards and drew up the Intruder. It was kind of melodic; one medium sweeper after another, punctuated with torquey blasts around the omnipresent buses struggling mightily up the hills. Pretty much a dream ride, actually. Its only shortcoming was that it got us to Chico’s Paradise much too soon.

And what an odd place it is. Carved out of the dense jungle, Chico’s is a series of open terraces sitting on a hillside above several natural pools created by huge, gray boulders obstructing a small river. The idea is to go there and hang out for the day, swimming, eating and drinking. In fact, as soon as she spotted some people from the ship down beside the river, Sheila decided to do just that and took off. A moment later the waiter came to take my order.

“But we have no ‘World's Greatest Margarita,’ Señor,” he said in excellent English as he stared over my shoulder at the luscious Sheila moving with the grace of sunlight down the path to the river. I looked around the waiter. Beyond him was a guy with a poker laconically spearing cigarette butts on the gravel floor. He seemed to be listening to me.

I looked back at the waiter. “But I heard Chico’s Paradise had the World’s Greatest Margaritas.”

With apparent effort he turned his attention from Sheila back to me. “So, one margarita. Is that all? Nothing to eat? A nice taco, perhaps?”

“Nachos,” I answered cooly.

A few minutes later, two brilliant green parrots ambled over along the balcony railing to my table. Being a hopeless romantic, I thought they came over to keep me company, since I was now alone. As it turned out, my new friends were simply on the prowl for a handout, and signaled their happiness at the waiter’s return by cutting loose with screams that were so loud I leaped out of my chair, nearly knocking over the table.

As the waiter left, I made the mistake of sitting down with my back to the birds. A moment later, I was startled to feel something pecking at my back. As I was about to look around, one of the birds grabbed my shirt, tugging with its powerful, curved beak. So I did the only thing I could do: I split the nachos three ways. The parrots apparently found this an equitable solution, because they left me in peace to eat what was left.

Through all this, what was supposedly The World’s Greatest Margarita, rather inappropriately encased in a short milk glass rimmed with salt the size of Scotty’s dilithium crystals, sat on the table patiently waiting for me to render my opinion. I’d come a long way for this moment. About 1200 miles. So when I finally raised that moist, dewy milk glass to my lips, the sweet smell of tequila wafting up to my eager nose, I’d have been more than willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. But it was pretty damn ordinary. And not only that, it was small!

I must have taken it worse than I thought. Suddenly, I wanted to slug one of the birds. I finished my portion of the nachos, which were in fact excellent, and walked down to the river to collect Sheila, stopping first to heed the call of nature. As I walked into the men’s room (“Hombres”), I was greeted by an old guy who appeared permanently bent over at the waist. He was mopping the place out. I recognized him as the guy who had been stabbing the cigarette butts in the bar. He had such a genuine smile on his face, such a look of contentment, I actually felt a tinge of envy for him.

“You’ll never find it if you look for it this way,” he said out of the blue, looking at me from the corner of his eye as he mopped.

“What? The World’s Greatest Margarita?” I asked, remembering that he’d overheard my conversation with the waiter.

He nodded slowly. “It’s not something that’s in a glass.”

I shook my head in disbelief. Here I was in the middle of the Mexican jungle getting a lecture on metaphysics from an old, gray-haired Indian mopping a restroom floor. Actually, it kind of made sense.

He walked over beside me and, with great effort, straightened up and pointed toward the coast, the direction we’d come from. “Go almost all the way to the sea. On the left you’ll see a small road leading down through the trees. It’s a bad road. Watch yourself.” With that, he turned around and bent back over his mop. The discussion was apparently over. So I did what I’d gone in for. And after arranging a ride back for Sheila—who by now was more intent on sunning herself than continuing the margarita chase—I climbed aboard the Intruder and headed down the highway.

Sure enough, hardly visible over the highway’s shoulder, there was the old road. We’d zipped right past it earlier.

It was a rough ride down; the Intruder’s exhaust crossover pipe took a couple of jolting whacks. At the bottom of the hill was a tiny fishing village nestled into its own halfmoon-shaped dent in the coast. There, a couple feet from the water, was an old bar surrounded by open fishing dories.

The rest of the dusty town consisted of tiny, ramshackle houses, none with a closed front door. I rode over toward the open-sided bar, scattering chickens as I went, and parked the Intruder next to a six-foot-high stack of bottled Coke. Although there were a few people around, nobody paid much attention to me. I did feel a few eyes gazing out at me from the dark interiors of the houses, but beyond that, nothing. The Intruder attracted no flocks of children here. I went into the bar and sat down beside the low wall on the beach side. A soft voice rolled out to me from somewhere behind. The voice gave the sentence that little upturn at the end that universally marks a question.

“Margarita,” I answered.

As I waited, the sun, now low on the horizon, streamed in on me. I felt a release from the tensions of riding down the hill, as well as from the strain of pursuing perfection, any kind of perfection. I pulled off my boots and slipped on the huaraches. As the fading sun continued to work its magic on me, I put my feet up on the wall and watched the fishermen sewing their nets. A relic of a ceiling fan turned lazily overhead. Without a noise, the margarita appeared in my hand. I held it up and looked at it framed against the beach and jungle, the orange glow from the sun making the Coca-Cola-style glass appear molten.

I toasted the sun and took a sip. It was pretty run-of-themill tasting. And for a fleeting instant, I was disappointed. But then I looked around, remembered the old man’s words and laughed, because I realized something.

I may not have found the world’s best margarita, but I never felt better.