Arriving at Puerto Vallarta airport

One of the most anxiety-inducing parts of travel is arriving at a new destination — especially a foreign destination. There are so many unknowns: What will I need in order to get through immigration? Will  customs search my luggage?  How will I get local currency? How will I get to my destination? 

That's why, as my wife's and my recent trip to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, approached, I haunted the travel forum pages at TripAdvisor and other websites searching for information about the airport there and the arrival process

It worked —  mostly. I learned enough to reduce the number of unknowns and ease the anxiety just slightly. But there were still surprises awaiting us. 

To pay this forward, I thought it might be helpful to other travelers to share our experience from our arrival in Puerto Vallarta on April 18, 2023.

We arrived at PVR (aka Licenciado Gustavo Díaz Ordaz International Airport) at 5:15 p.m., about an hour late, and the crew encouraged us to move speedily through the facility as Customs closed at 6 p.m. This was both worrisome and comical (what happens if you don't get there until 6:01? Are you locked in the airport?). No matter, we fully intended to get through the airport as quickly as possible. 

We got off the plane and there was a long walk to our first checkpoint — immigration.  This was a large room and it wasn't immediately clear where to go, but a worker directed us to one of the stations where an immigration officer sat at a booth.

We only waited briefly before stepping up to the officer and presenting our passports. The officer asked me to remove my hat (there was a camera there, so maybe we were being photographed), but otherwise quickly stamped our passports and we were on our way.

We proceeded into the next room, a large space that houses baggage claim and customs. We only had carry-on bags, so we had no luggage to retrieve, but we did need to fill out a customs form.

In some cases, your airline may hand out customs forms to fill out on the plane, but our Southwest flight crew said they were out of them. There is also, supposedly, a way to fill out an online form ahead of time and pre-print it, but when I tried that before our flight it didn't include Puerto Vallarta as an option for the arriving airport (weird), so I gave up.

You'd think there would be plenty of customs forms in the customs hall, but at first we saw none. We found a few people filling out the form and I asked one of them where he got his. He pointed to a nearby counter. 

I hurried over there, just in time to see someone else snatch up the last of the forms on that counter. As I continued to search, another traveler handed me a form —  she had accidentally grabbed two. I was glad to have a form but couldn't help wondering what the other hundred or so people in the hall were going to do.

The form was pretty easy (you only need one for you and your family members traveling with you), but I did mess up my birthdate, reversing the month and day. Spoiler: It didn't matter.

There are numerous stations to exit the customs area. Some people report that they had to press a button and if you get a green light, you just leave, but if you get a red light, they search your luggage. 

That didn't happen with us though. We were directed into a line and then told to put our luggage through an X-ray machine. We did so, but it didn't appear that anyone was even looking at the X-ray screen. As our luggage came out on the other side, no one gave us any instructions, so we simply picked up our bags and left.

As you exit Customs, you enter the "Shark Tank." This is a hallway crowded with people, almost all men, offering to help you get a taxi or van. Some have on official-looking badges, but there's nothing "official" about them. By all accounts, if you decide to employ one of them for your ride, you will be charged much more — sometimes double — the prices of other options. The best advice is just to look straight ahead and keep going.

After the Shark Tank, you enter the main airport hall. Immediately on the right are five or six ATMs.  I pulled over to one to get some pesos. You, of course, want to be knowledgeable about fees anytime you are using an ATM not affiliated with your bank. Some U.S. banks will have partnerships with foreign banks, which may help you avoid some fees, but your best tactic is to get a Charles Schwab checking account and debit card. With the Schwab card, which I have, you pay zero ATM fees anywhere in the world.

I entered my Schwab card, and followed the prompts. There is one important step here: You need to say "No" when the machine offers to convert your dollars to pesos. If you say "Yes," you will be charged a much worse conversion rate than you would if you just said "No" and left the process to your bank. I knew to do this, but I almost fell for their trap.

Here's why: You have to accept the ATM fees (even though, with the Schwab card, I wouldn't end up paying pays them), so you click on "accept." On the very next screen is the conversion question, and it looks almost identical to the ATM fee question, so it was very tempting just to say "accept" again. Fortunately, I realized what they were asking and declined. Be wary! 

Pesos now in hand, we went in search of an Uber. We opted for Uber because by all accounts, Uber is something like half the price of taxis in the airport. Fortunately, there are numerous articles and videos online about catching an Uber at PVR, because it would be difficult to figure out how to get one on your own. 

Here's what to do: Exit the front of the airport and turn left — again, you will have to dodge numerous people offering you a taxi. Go to the end of the building and turn left again. You will see a footbridge that will take you over an adjacent road (the bridge has a ramp, so you can roll your luggage). Go up the footbridge and to the other side where you can catch an Uber. They're not allowed to pick up in the airport.

This might sound confusing if you've never tried it it but it turned out to be really quite simple.

The only thing that's not obvious is where exactly you catch the Uber. There's a bus stop, a small restaurant and some shops in that area, and quite a few people milling about —  including even more people trying to offer us a ride. 

I opened the Uber app and it first asked where exactly we wanted pickup — "Restaurant" or "Footbridge." Since we were standing right next to the footbridge, I almost clicked on that, but looking closer at app map, I realized that that location was the other side of the street (and seemed impossible to use). "Restaurant" was the right choice.

We were close to making our full escape from the airport, but there was more hitch ahead. When I tried to reserve an Uber, my Bank of America credit card was declined. Freakin' Bank of America. They specifically tell you that you don't have to warn them about foreign travel because they have "advanced" fraud detection in place. But when I tried to use the card in Mexico for this Uber ride, they detected that as suspicious and blocked the transaction. This was the second time B of A had unnecessarily blocked my card due when I was in a foreign country.  Grrrrr.

Fortunately, I had a back-up payment option in the Uber app and activated that. The lesson: Don't use Bank of America cards in foreign countries, and always have a backup payment source in your Uber app.

On second try, my ride request went through. And in just two minutes, our driver arrived at the footbridge and we were on our way to our destination.

Book review: "Lies Across America" by James W. Lowewen

The cabin where Abraham Lincoln was supposedly born isn't genuine. The quotations on the walls of Jefferson Memorial aren't accurate. And the oft-described harsh winter that American troops endured at Valley Forge in 1775-76 really wasn't that bad. 

These are just a few of the startling facts described by James W. Loewen in his 1999 book "Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong."  

This compendium lists nearly 100 sites across the United States where, according to Loewen, the history presented to the public is wrong. It's not just a game of "Gotcha!" — he's trying to make a deeper point: Much of the way history is presented in this country is twisted, or even flipped, to fit political or religious agendas. The achievements of white European men are emphasized, their mistakes ignored, while the contributions of women, blacks, and Indians, are omitted or minimized.

Loewen is a thorough researcher, but "Lies Across America" is a poor title.  Most of the flaws he finds are not "lies" or even inaccuracies, but omissions or simple differences of interpretation. Throughout much of the book, he seems peeved that history is not presented exactly the way he would like it to be. Maybe it should have been called "Hidden American History" or similar.

Omissions can certainly be important, such as on the marker of the Mountain Meadows Massacre in Utah that fails to mention who committed the slaughter of 120 people traveling in a westward-bound caravan in 1857 (spoiler: It was Mormons, not Indians). Kudos to Loewen for this section's great title: "Bad Things Happen in the Passive Voice."

But in other spots Loewen seems to be reaching for things to get upset about. He calls out a small marker in Nebraska praising author Willa Cather for not saying that she was a lesbian — but c'mon, how common is it for a historical marker to note the sexual orientation of any figure?

He's peeved that Virginia has no historical markers honoring Abraham Lincoln and there are no plaques mentioning slavery in Richmond, Virginia, He chides Indiana for having "only" one plaque mentioning the Ku Klux Klan, even though he notes that there are only four such markers in the entire U.S. He's miffed that a marker in Nevada describing nuclear tests, while not inaccurate, doesn't include the information he would like it to have.

To be clear, the book has some great stories, He describes the bizarre history of how a fake cabin ended up at the Lincoln birthplace in Kentucky to represent the birthplace of our 16th president. He outlines how Thomas Jefferson's quotes are mangled on the walls of the Jefferson Memorial to the extent that the meaning is distorted. And he cites George Washington for fueling the false idea that American soldiers were "naked and starving" at Valley Forge.

He finds some fascinating lesser-known stories, too, such as the tale of how Alaska's Mt. McKinley got that name due to a squabble over whether the U.S. dollar should be on the gold standard. Two good chapters are from the Civil War, one detailing the life of Elizabeth Van Lew, a Union spy living in the Confederate capital during Civil War, the other a description of Abraham's Lincoln's walk through Richmond, Virginia, at the end of the conflict. 

Still, Loewen seems too eager to hear himself talk, repeating the same points about historical injustices too many times. The 50-page opening to the book could be about half that long.

Too often, he comes off as an irritating know-it-all scold. He seems like the kind of guy who would say, just as you're about to dig into some ice cream, "Do you know how much fat is in that?"

For all his historical knowledge, Loewen overreaches when he says, without the slightest qualifier, that President James Buchanan was homosexual. This was eye-opening to me; I'd never heard this. So I dug deeper and found that the scholars who know most about Buchanan's relationships (such as Thomas Balcerski, who wrote a whole book on this question) have concluded that he was not gay. This is just one mistake in a book full of footnoted facts, but it's enough to make the reader wonder what else here is untrue. 

"Lies Across America" could be a decent reference book to look at just before you visit a historical site. But I would not recommend reading it all at once, or you'll just end up irritated by the author rather than absorbing the history