Work beach balance

With blurry memories of Tequila in mind, we headed further West. It was time for some quality time at the beach! We went to one of the popular and therefore touristy beach places in Mexico, Puerto Vallarta.

As it is a popular resort town on the Pacific coast, there are many hotels, bars and restaurants. And unfortunately a lot of American tourists. For the first couple of nights we picked a nice little Airbnb apartment. Really close by were big supermarkets which made it easy for us to cook for ourselves. For going to the center and the beachside we had to take a bus. But it was really cheap and easy to hop on that bus.

At the beachside there are many restaurants, shops, bars and nightclubs. By strolling down “el Malecón”, the beachside promenade, you can find all the popular spots. Along the seashore there are also a lot of contemporary sculptures as well as the obligatory sign of “Puerto Vallarta” in colourful letters.

We really enjoyed the relaxing days at the beach, trying to avoid the mass of tourists on the more crowded sides. We found some nice places to eat, took sun baths and just chilled. Before we got back to business!

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Working at the beach

After the first and really cool promo video we did for the “La Vaina Hostel” in Cali, Colombia, Christian took another job. The owner of the “Chanclas Hostel” in Puerto Vallarta also wanted to have this kind of video to promote the hostel. We found out about the hostel on the popular homepage Workaway, where travellers can easily find volunteer jobs all around the world.

We met Eric, the owner, and it was clear pretty fast that we will be staying at the hostel for one week and do the promotional video for him, as well as some 360 photos! The cool thing was that the hostel just renovated with a great rooftop bar. Of course this area had to be used for a first big party! Free beer, a beer pong table and a lot of cool local people made this a blast! While drinking and playing we still got some first video shots… 😅

There it blows!

Another great opportunity we got from Eric, was that he offered us a quite cheap whale watching tour. We already looked into it before we met him, but everything was so expensive.

The tour started quite early at 8 a.m. at the local port. We found ourselves still sleepy and a little bit shaking from the cold on the catamaran. But that was forgotten fast as we saw the first humpback whales! 🐳

Our guide explained in English and Spanish that a lot of whales come into the calm bay of Puerto Vallarta between December and March. They get their babys here because the water is warmer and also safe from predators. We even saw one of the babys and the mother! It was an amazing experience to see these giants quite close for the first time in our lifes! 😍

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Beach Life

After our first Airbnb quite far from the beach we were really happy about “Chanclas Hostel” as it was only around 100 meters from the promenade. Just doing some video shots around the hostel and then heading straight to the beach was a work lifestyle we can definitely get used to! Sadly after another night out in a local rock bar, Magda caught some kind of food poisoning. She had to stay in bed for some time or just watched Netflix…

While Magda was getting better, Christian used the time to edit the video and also met some people in the hostel. We will never forget “The Dude” as he reminded us a lot of Jeff Bridges in “The Big Lebowski”. He gave us some tips all around Mexico. Of course his favorite places were where you can just relax and get cheap drugs. No, we didn’t look into that…😅🤣

Time flew by so quickly…Magda got better and we found time to enjoy the beach together. Eric was really happy with the video and that makes us still proud when somebody likes our work. We really enjoyed our time in the hostel and at the beach!