Like every traveler, I love a beautiful vista and a great meal. I fill up my Instagram with stunning sunsets and lazy shots of myself in a hammock. But to be honest, most of the time I canāt help but be obsessed with ordinary people and their lives that I am just outside of.
Does my Puerto Vallarta bus driver come home after a long day of sitting in the heat of the front seat, tear off his polo and jeans, and trade them in for boardshorts and flip flops? Does he have a lover or a wife (or maybe a husband?) that he goes to in the evening for a cold beer and a conversation while they swat at mosquitos and search for a sea breeze? Or does he stop for a cold one at the bar next to where he parks his bus and tell stories about the day with other drivers (like about the guera that poured with sweat on his route today)?
The guy who loads the Yelapa panga boat taxis, all day going to and from the dock, carrying luggage and cases of beer and bags of ice. Does he talk to himself because he’s crazy or because he sees how invisible he is to the tourists and imagines it doesn’t much matter what he does, no one will notice.
There’s an extremely pregnant woman working the fruit stand. She calls out to her mother “Ma, cuenta cuesta?” when I ask the price of a coke. When is she due? Is she worried about what kind of 
mother she will be? Does she have someone to help her once the baby arrives? Do her feet ache?
I want to know about their lives, about whether they were born here, and if living in a place where you have to depend on undependable water taxis drives them crazy. The freshly laundered couple riding on my boat today, with the giant sheet cake which has “Congratulations Dad” written in blue icing… is it for her dad or his? Congratulations for what?
Coming across my water taxi driverĀ on Sunday morningĀ coming back from a trip out in his kayak, I didn’t recognize him at first away from his boat. “You were with me yesterday in the boat” he says and suddenly Iām embarrassed that he had to tell me three times to put my hands inside. I didn’t do it on purpose, it was sin querer as they say in Mexico, I didnāt mean to. We joke. He tells me he paddled his new fishing boat all the way from Boca de Tomatlan (almost 20 minutes by boat with a motor). For a few seconds I believe him and think he’s crazy, until I realize he’s fucking with me. We talk about the weather, the heat, he agrees, is a bit unbearable.
I wonder if boat drivers ever get tired of the view — those gorgeous emerald-covered mountains that edge the tiny sugar sand beaches and small palapa huts that seem to disappear into the mist if you look at them too long, the white-topped rocks with a random Virgin of Guadalupe statuette placed at their peaks for protection from the sea. I ask one, one day, but in Spanish “Do you ever get tired of the view?” is vaguer than in English.
“I wear polarized sunglasses,” one driver tells me, surprised at the question, “so I’m usually fine.”
I want to know them more than they want to know me for sure. For them I am just another tourist come to ratchet up the cost of living and make impossible requests, but for me, the people that inhabit a place are the most interesting part of it, even though I know us humans are a plague on the planet and all that.
But it’s more than that. I want the ease to make jokes with my neighbors as I get on the boat. I want to know how early the corner store opens without having to ask. I want to take photos of the girls doing tricks in their kayak and send them to their mother with the text “look at these clowns.” I want to live here because it’s the only way to really know it, except my life is somewhere else and I am just passing through.
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