out of the country

coritas cocina mexicana

Last night we returned from our spring break vacation to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. It was a smooth trip, if too short. We got away from the resort atmosphere a bit more than last year and enjoyed it more, as a result.

I’m a reluctant traveler, for the most part. I hitchhiked a fair amount when I was young and it got the travel and adventure bug out of me pretty thoroughly. The whole idea of spending a lot of money and having to deal with airports just doesn’t excite me, in fact the reverse. So now, I travel because my wife loves to travel. For the most part, I enjoy it when we get to where we are going and now that I do photography there’s at least something to occupy me while we’re there.

During this trip, I was happy to find some of my usual themes, transferred to a different culture. One could easily spend probably years in that area finding all kinds of unique and fascinating visual material. There is the old, vernacular layer, which now has an uneven overlay of the modern, with white high-rises and many areas cordoned off for the “safety” of the tourists. And many other contrasts of this sort.

In the couple of days we were there, I know I only scratched the surface. It’s not easy to know what to focus on when it’s all new and something you probably will never see again. While I didn’t shoot wildly, I think that I found many photos that are representative of the area. At the same time, I found many abstracts of a different nature than I tend to find at home and some of the work I did is more interpretative.

This photo, of course, is more toward the former, just a quaint little cocina in Bucerías, a small town a mile or so north of where we stayed.