This month’s issue of Travel & Leisure revels in the seductively enchanting reality of how fun it is to have a wad of cash amidst a myriad of poor folk at what it deems “The New Riviera”—Puerto Vallarta and a fishing village named Sayurita. The article’s author, Christopher Petkanas, tells us where we “can drop $1,800 on a leather-and–baroque pearl Les Gazelles necklace in a boutique”, and then sprint towards a street vendor to get some 85¢ fish tacos, all while smiling naively because who knows? We’re probably inhaling a local laxative. Charming. But what about the people? Petkanas sums up:

Sayulita’s streets are dusty, exhausted, bedraggled. The village is definitely not for your stepmother, probably not for your in-laws, and, sadly, not for you if you are not enchanted by these traits. Those who are have nice things to say about the locals. As one American put it, they greet you before you greet them, and unlike the native populations in other parts of Mexico, such as the states of Durango and Guerrero, they don’t make you feel like a foreigner, an outsider, a gringo.

Except for when they sell you the $1800 necklace and the ptomaine taco.

La Nueva Riviera [Travel Leisure]