Spotlight :: Puerto Vallarta

[trip style = all-inclusive + beach + urban + sightseeing]

{Editor's Note: Nolitours recently sent me down the coast to Puerto Vallarta to test drive noliZONE, their new all-inclusive program which promotes the resort as a base camp for around-town exploration, meals out, cooking classes, fiestas, etc... I wrote about the deets on Friday and wanted to round-out the coverage with my top PV picks and pics!}

Liz Taylor and Richard Burton put Puerto Vallarta on the jetset's map when they descended upon the remote fishing town in the early 1960s for the film The Night of the Iguana, the screen version of a Tennessee Williams Broadway play. Surprisingly, Mrs. Taylor wasn't even in the film. Much to celeb gossip columnists' delight, she came down as Mr. Burton's famed mistress/+1. Puerto Vallarta was her quiet, romantic hideaway where she could roam unrecognized and free, for a time...

Now their separate, time-worn residences---connected by a Venice-like pink bridge towering above a cobblestone street---hint at a local fishing village transformed by the earliest and flashiest flash mob around. The Hollywood heyday couple may have ignited Puerto Vallarta's early fame, but the town's history, warmth, vibrancy and safety have maintained its A-List status with a steady influx of international visitors, as well as the largest community of foreigners in the country.

Eat The Cool Spot - La Leche When I walked into La Leche I wanted to break out in song because the whitewashed interior was more than a "blanc" palette. Look close enough and every detail from life-sized chalkboard menu to the shiny marble floors were high design. The cuisine matched the interior's ingenuity and taste. Every colorful dish---intended to be the art in the stark space---surprised and delighted my palate. Leaving 'no course unturned', even the starter salad came with a syringe of balsamic reduction dressing. PS - the chef studied cuisine in Vancouver, Canada! *La Leche offers a $30 prix fixe menu to all noliZONE guests.

The Splurge - Cafe des Artistes En vogue and whimsical, Cafe Des Artistes oozes posh. The restaurant itself is a lavish work of art and the food takes it up a notch with artful renditions of coastal Mexican fare. *Cafe Des Artists does not have a noliZONE prix fixe menu, but it's 100% worth a visit.

Do Take A Stroll

Puerto Vallarta rises from 40 miles of coastline toward the foothills of the Sierra Madre Mountains. Don your walking shoes because it's worth the uphill stroll on Liz and Richard's former cobblestone side streets on which you'll find their crumbling abodes. Back at the sea, a 6000-foot pedestrian Malecón stretches between the ocean and the town's shops and restaurants.

Take A Cooking Class - Cookin' Vallarta

Set in an open-air kitchen beside a rectangular pool {it's Mexico after all}, I learned to make proper: guac, salsa, hand-pressed tortillas, tortilla soup and mole chicken. As the sous chef I might be slightly biased, but it was the best-in-class Mexican I'd ever tasted, and I left with recipes for each dish! Don't even ask me how many times I've sliced, diced and devoured guac since I've returned home. *This cooking class is offered as part of the noliZONE. At the time of my travel the cost had not yet been determined, but I got the idea it would be between $20 - 40 cdn.

[photos by @tripstyler---except cafe des artistes & la leche---shot while a guest of Air Transat in PV]

Exploring Canada - Postcards {3/3}

[trip style = urban + sightseeing + wine tasting]

The past week has been a full pour of Canadian Kool-Aid---the best flavor, obviously. I just got home from BC's wine country Saturday morning, and somehow I've ended up in Whistler {where I'm writing this now} on Sunday. Though I travel {outside of Canada} almost as much as George Clooney's character in Up In The Air, I'm a little obsessed with the place I call home.

Canada's diverse. Full stop. Using Vancouver's wilderness-meets-cosmopolitan backdrop as an example, within a:

• one minute walk, I can run beside the Pacific Ocean on Vancouver's impressive seawall network
• nine minute {Canada Line} train I can taste world-famous gelato, nibble on local cheese or drink craft cocktails in Gastown
• 11 minute bike ride I can sit in the sand at Kits beach and watch the setting sun
• 20 minute drive I can go for a heart-pumping hike in North Vancouver
• 25 minute {Canada Line} train I can eat a traditional Cantonese dim sum feast in Richmond
• 50 minute drive I can pick strawberries in Abbotsford
• 90 minute drive I can ski at Whistler Blackcomb, consistently voted the number one ski resort in North America
• four hour drive/ferry I can ride Tofino's surf on Vancouver Island
• five hour drive/30 minute flight I can sip wines in the Okanagan, Canada's second largest wine region

I could go on, but the list would never end....

Because a picture is worth a thousand words, here are some of the local finds and moments I'll never forget, snapped this week exploring my backyard.

Vancouver {A Vancouver Aquabus swishing from stop to stop around the harbor.}

{A world of flavors and vendors at Granville Island Public Market}

{"The world's best gelato" from Bella Gelateria, as voted by judges and people at the Firenze Gelato Competition in Italy. I concur; it's the best I've tasted in a long, long time.}

{Two Vancouver cocktail institutions: An Old Fashioned---taking seven minutes to make done right---at the Di6mond, and a line up of libations at Pourhouse.}

{Coffee---no decaf here---and a homemade peanut butter cup at Nelson the Seagull.}

Richmond {Learning about sustainable fishing from "fisherman frank", a second-generation fisherman based in Steveston, the largest commercial fishing port in Canada.}

{A farm-to-table education at Terra Nova Rural Park, home to projects for local schools, as well as garden plots for local restaurants and residents.}

{Bubble tea and a hot pot dinner on "food street", a three-block strip of over 200 Asian restaurants. A local expert told me that ordering bubble tea is akin to personalizing your drink at Starbucks, so I ordered a pudding-flavored bubble tea with pearls, add extra pearls and add extra pudding. The bev was giant and I drank the whole thing...and then ran on the treadmill the next morning.}

The Okanagan {It's still summer in the Okanagan, Canada's only desert. The view from my room at the Manteo Resort in Kelowna.}

{Uber local cuisine at RauDZ Regional Table in Kelowna. Crushed from nearby grapes, the dinner started with white wine sangria accented by Okanagan peaches. From there, we ate chicken poutine, Dungeness crab cakes with salsa verde and a salted caramel dessert---that in a perfect world would be bottomless.}

{Wine tasting amid vines, sunflowers and a chicken coop at the Okanagan Crush Pad, moving toward biodynamic wine making by 2014.}

{Buying local at its best; picking apples right off the tree at Matheson Creek Farm in Penticton.}

If you're interested in seeing postcards from the international bloggers on my get-to-know BC tour, check out their posts here!

[photos by @tripstyler taken while exploring BC with Tourism Canada]

Exploring Canada - Maple Syrup & All {2/3}

[trip style = urban + wine tasting]

I feel very strongly about Canada. When someone tells me they like Quebec's maple syrup, I take it as a personal compliment. I'm not from Quebec, nor do I make syrup or know anything about tapping the tree, but as big, as far, and as wide as Canada's border extends, every bit is part of me. Maple syrup and all.

Since Tuesday I've been tasting my way through Vancouver, Richmond and the Okanagan with four other bloggers from Paris, Australia, the UK and India. The maple syrup factor has come into play a lot. I blush a little hearing them gush about eating doughnuts in Vancouver, drinking bubble tea in Richmond, and sharing chicken poutine in Kelowna, again, as if I had something to do with the process.

Being a tourist in my own backyard offers a crash course in Canada all over again. And I love it. Everything is new. Even in familiar territory, it's healthy to switch into tourist 'learning' mode sometimes, because there's always a region, restaurant, shop or person that's new---something I've been discovering on this trip, as well as on jaunts to Montreal, Banff and Victoria over the past few months.

As my train was pulling into Banff National Park a few months ago, I could not believe my eyes. Surrounded by a real-time reel of nature through my glass-domed coach, the jagged, snow-dusted edges of the rocky mountains humbled my soul and put my camera in workout mode.

Oh, and by the way, when everyone in my train coach was admiring the Rocky Mountains, I took that as a compliment too, as if I painted the snow on the rocks and hand-selected the positioning of the trees below the peaks.

Speaking of real-time reels, you can find my Canadian version via instagram, twitter and facebook. Otherwise, I'll be posting a full feature on Monday. In the meantime, I'll be sipping wine on the Naramata Bench. Cheers!

[photos taken while exploring BC via Tourism Canada]

Exploring Canada {1/3}

[trip style = urban + sightseeing + wine tasting]

This week I get to be a tourist in my own backyard, gushing about BC’s coast and countryside, while snapping and scribing the latest and greatest.

Over the month of September, Tourism Canada has invited a bevy of international bloggers to comb the  True North from coast to coast. Some are pop culture junkies, some are foodies, some are adventurers and some are photogs {for example, in my group we have a New Delhi-based photog whose shot for National Geographic}. On the menu: Heli-yoga in Alberta, lobster fests in PEI and wine tasting in the Okanagan. {Mountie sightings not guaranteed}.

Covering the nation from the Pacific to the Atlantic, four teams are combing Canada's varied landscape for a class in Canadiana 101. Four Canadian bloggers are also jumping onboard, each one of us covering a different region. I’m e-x-t-a-t-i-c to be part of the BC group, because eh, as much as I write about traveling elsewhere in the world, I’m also a huge proponent of getting up close and personal with one’s own nation.

My trip started yesterday and wraps up on Saturday. I’ve made a short video---gulp, please DON'T judge or stop reading TS because of it---outlining the trip's 411. I wish it was funny, but it's not, and someone has already "disliked" it on YouTube---SO MEAN. {Note to self: get better at videos.}

As a result, this week we’re tweaking our regular editorial schedule to fill your cuppeth full of red and white kanadian Kool-Aid {my fave flavor} today, Friday and Monday. Follow my adventures sipping cocktails in Gastown, sampling dim sum and bubble tea in Richmond and savoring wine in the Okanagan.

I’ll be posting regularly to instagram, twitter and facebook, and if you’re a real keener, follow the #explorecanada hastag on instagram and twitter to see BC from FIVE different perspectives.

[graphic via tourism Canada]

School Is Cool In PDX

[trip style = urban]

Whether it's just-pressed apple juice, just-cured bacon, or just-foraged mushrooms, everything tastes better fresh. This farm-to-table approach to food defined my weekend at the first-annual Bon Appetit-sponsored Feast Portland, a culinary celebration of Oregon's biggest export besides music, hipsterdom and Pendleton. If you read TS regularly, you know that I'm a big fan of the place and its provisions, so when I got the chance to see the faces behind the food and the techniques behind the craft, I was in like {barrel-aged} gin.

Like iron sharpens iron, diners and chefs keep each other accountable in Portland. There's truth to the Portlandia sketch where Fred and Carrie sit down at a local restaurant for a chicken dinner and ask to visit the farm where the bird is sourced. Putting this to the test, when eating brunch yesterday morning at The Woodsman Tavern, I jokingly asked my server where my bacon was from and he responded with a cheerleader-like fist pump: "It's hyperlocal; the pork hails from a nearby farm and we cure it in house." Touché.

Attending Feast was like going back to school {except cool}. At "Feast U", the principal is a fashionable foodie magazine editor, the gym coach bartends, the teachers dish up 10 courses of passion and the dress code is denim-on-denim. After class, foodie grand central keeps boiling with grand-scale events---sans tuxes or gowns---and a baker's dozen chef-led tasting menus at restaurants like Luce, which was recently voted one of the top 10 new restaurants in the US by Bon Appetit.

Did my culinary classes measure up? My teacher evaluation would give four heaping tablespoons of YES.

A Taste Of Feast

{Thursday Night :: The Sandwich Invitational. Multiple chefs, a bajillion sandwiches. Shown: maple-glazed pork belly with pickled watermelon slaw on housemade semolina buns from Beast---the evening's big winner.}

{Friday Morning :: Coffee That Rocks with the guys behind Portland-based Stumptown Coffee, who demonstrated how to make the most of your morning ritual with five home-brewing techniques.}

{Friday Afternoon :: Strange Brew with local brewers, where I learned about commonplace to experimental craft brews, like lychee beer aged in white wine barrels, or cucumber and lime zest beer with hint of sea salt.}

{Friday Night :: Feast Portland Night Market. An outdoor street food party with corned duck pancakes from Departure, smoked salmon poofs from Bent Brick and a DJ on the side!}

{Saturday Afternoon :: Thai Street Food with Andy Ricker of the always-busy Pok Pok. Note: you can only get Andy's pad thai at sister restaurant the Whiskey Soda Lounge---across the street from Pok Pok---from 10pm onwards.}

{Culinary Techniques for the Home Bartender with Jeffrey Morgenthaler, experimental barman and cocktail blogger from Clyde Common.}

{Sunday Morning :: Brunch at The Woodsman Tavern. Shiffed eggs with local bacon.}

If you can believe it, I did a ton of eating outside of Feast too---my belt has since been adjusted accordingly. I'll share my best extracurricular meals on TS at a later date. Stay tuned.

Related
Fashion Friday :: Falling For Portland
PDX'ing in Pictures
Ace Portland
IMG_FRI :: Portlandia
Vancouver to Seattle Must-Stops

[photos taken by @tripstyler when in portland as a guest of oregon cvb]