No Crowds? No Rush? In Mexico, No Problemo

That first year, I didn't catch anything. Then I caught nothing, the Big Nothing. I've been coming back for it ever since.

It won't last. It can't. Regulars who've been snowbirding here for years predict that, within a decade, La Manzanilla will be another international tourist destination like Puerto Vallarta. "But it will take 10 years at least," said one baked Canadian, a week into his stay.

Foreigners are moving in, importing the norte americano ideas that have transformed town after town along a mellow coast some developers now call "the Mexican Riviera." Already, a new cyber cafe is up and running. Bulletin boards advertise personal growth workshops and wellness spas, and Web sites describe the village where La Manzanillan men still bond while mending nets in an old fishing cooperative as "an artist colony." Indeed, expats have built a new nonprofit multicultural center where locals and visitors take classes in pottery, painting, language, dance, yoga. Below is a high-end gallery with exquisite jewelry and folk art.

Even at siesta, real estate offices are buzzing with gringos, and new construction is crawling and sprawling up the jungled hill behind the town. "It's just gone crazy," says Jane Gorby, a rental agent and columnist who writes for the Guadalajara Reporter about the town. When she first visited, in 1995, the typical truck cruising the main drag had no roof, no hood and a plastic jug of gasoline in the back with a tube going into the manifold. Now locals drive spiffy cars and big trucks.

Gorby's not bemoaning the changes. "The charm of this town is that it combines Old Mexico with modern conveniences."

Some in town urge caution, however. A hand-painted sign placed conspicuously in the center of town several years ago bears an old American Indian warning, admonishing, in part, that only after the last tree has been cut, only after the last hill is sold, only after the last fish caught, will people realize that "money cannot be eaten."

Still, the old and new seem to coexist comfortably in a slow seven-minute stroll down the main dirt drag -- hosed down each noontime for dust control. At the village plaza, giggling Mexican girls stroll arm in arm past awkward town boys, while gringos watch from an outdoor bistro, sipping shade-grown organic coffee. Down the street from local mom-and-pop groceries, past the new galerias, a white-haired Mexican woman falls deep asleep in her plastic chair at noon, her big legs held in the timeless spread of a flowered housedress.

Ready for Action?

Walk a minute more, and you come to the town's end -- and its unexpected edge: a mosquito-humming mangrove lagoon that's home to an estimated 75 to 100 American crocodiles, Crocodylus acutus, some 12 feet in length. The species is said to eat almost anything that moves, and over the years the crocs have developed a taste for mongrel perro -- dead dogs, tossed into the lagoon by locals, and live ones that wander into the wrong place at the wrong time.

I've spent hours swatting skeeters at the viewing platform above this ecological preserve, watching crocs snake through the swampy water with their horny hides and prehistoric scales, cold Godfather eyes half-shuttered, terrible jaws opening to reveal jagged rows of razor teeth.

It's one of my preferred breaks from nothing. I've also spent hours snorkeling in the rock reefs at beach end, seeing turtles and wrasses, baby stingrays and schools of silver-sided needlefish. And I always take the long hike down the smooth, curving beach to Boca de Iguanas (Mouth of the Iguanas), past campsites with embedded hippie buses, a sand cemetery with plastic-flower wreaths on gravestones, and the crumbling remains of a luxury hotel, never completed, that was reportedly blown up in a mysterious propane explosion tied to shady drug dealings.

If I'm really ready for some action, I call on Davison Collins, a high-energy nature guru, professional whitewater kayaker and dedicated conservationist who guides birding and snorkeling eco-tours, whipping out a juice-swollen pineapple and an umbrella to sit under midday as he tells tales of shooting Class V rapids or kayaking the croc lagoon in the dark of night.

On the open kayaks he calls "sit-on Cadillacs," I've followed him down a river that ran to the Pacific, navigating rapids and sandbars as we tracked birds -- white ibis, gray hawks, wood storks, roseate spoonbills, ringed kingfishers. We listened to the girly screeches of yellow kiskadees and the prehistoric squawks of herons, and saw vultures gather in dense black packs, holding their wings out for airing, like dark angels.