Kim Kardashian goes to the Riviera Nayarit yearly. Christina Aguilera got engaged there. And on the visit I finished last week, I shared the sands with the Presidents of Chile, Peru, Costa Rica, Columbia and Mexico. (OK, I never actually saw any of them in their speedos and bikinis, but they were gathering in the town of Punta de Mita for a high-stakes meeting of the Pacific Alliance).
Yet ask the average North American where Nayarit is, and they’ll likely guess Africa. And that may be part of the reason you want to vacation here and do so soon.
The Riviera Nayarit is a 192-mile band of sand that’s closely backed by the Sierra Nevada mountains, a fact that keeps overdevelopment in check (the land behind the beach is often just too steep for skyscraping multinational hotels). Some 23 tidy little beach communities are strung along the sea, each cuter than the next. The sands tend to be a golden yellow, the seas teeming with critters (this is a major whale shark and whale watching destination come winter) and the people welcoming.
Over the next five weeks, I’ll post about my experiences on the Riviera Nayarit, one a week, so this column doesn’t get shanghaied by one small corner of the globe. I hope you’ll enjoy this series and I think you’ll be struck, as I was, by the variety of experiences you can have here. Along with this blog, I’ve posted a slideshow about the area (please click here for that).
