If the quality of a travel destination were best measured by how difficult it is to reach, the mini resort of Verana would earn five stars up front. The flight to Puerto Vallarta is easy enough: only two hours from my wife's and my hometown of Dallas (about three from L.A., four from New York). But Verana is the anti-P.V. It is a place to go to escape crowds and commercialism.
After landing, we traveled another thirty-five minutes by cab down the Pacific coast to the next way station, the tiny Mexican fishing village of Boca de Tomatlán. There we boarded the hotel's skiff for a thrilling thirty-minute romp farther down the coast to another village, Yelapa. This was necessary because no paved roads go to Yelapa, a sign that it was our kind of place.
At our first glimpse of Verana, I was reminded of the scene in Apocalypse Now in which Martin Sheen and his crew finally find Marlon Brando, who's wandering around in a bedsheet and muttering blank verse. There aren't any natives with scary face paint here, but the place seems just as remote and primordial. Set in a fecund jungle that overlooks the cobalt blue Bay of Banderas, the hotel's six houses loomed on a cliff above us. Mules carried our luggage, and the sweet-faced young lady with them told us that the animals could take us up the dirt trail too, but I wasn't about to wimp out. Paradise isn't easily found, after all.
This particular paradise is a modest study in the juxtaposition of man and nature, modernity and antiquity, and it grows on you as a piece of great art does. Its husband-and-wife creators, former Hollywood set designer Heinz Legler and Veronique Lievre, formerly a set decorator, did not intend to overwhelm the visitor with monumentality or sizzle. In fact, they refer to Verana, which they opened in 2000 on land they'd begun leasing back in the late '80s, as a "handmade hotel." "We put it together as we could, with whatever the mules could get up the mountain," admits Lievre.
The result is a collection of half a dozen idiosyncratic houses. Each has a distinct personality—including the cozy Bungalow; the breezy Palapa; the Studio, which has a dramatic view of the Pacific; the Casa Grande, which might have been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright; and the Stone House, where we stayed, a brooding structure designed to resemble a near ruin—and all are delightfully eclectic. Modern chairs and sculptures are slung together with vintage pieces and Mexican folk art to the point that the imaginative jumble forms an organic whole, rather the way one's own home can.
Verana is thrown together, but stylishly, the way George Clooney can wear a T-shirt with a tux. Our fellow guests—a hip couple who'd flown in from New York, four young guys enjoying a boys-only reunion, a few professors—seemed thoroughly at one with this spirit and as intent as we were on striking another important balance: that between respecting one another's privacy and making new friends. Fortunately, this is easy; there's ample space between the houses, yet guests feel relaxed enough to drop by their neighbors' place.
We spent quite a bit of time at Verana simply Zening out on the patio of our house, staring at the heart-stopping view of the bay, in the surprising eighty-degree heat (this was in January, one of the best times to visit), or downing the latest nouvelle Mexican offering at the restaurant, which sits on a long stone terrace. The menus tended to be stylishly thrown together too: our favorite dinner was a fish-taco buffet starring grilled dorado caught in the bay that day, along with fresh vegetables from the garden.
When we felt like getting off our deck chairs, we walked up the hill and took a swim in the infinity pool or enjoyed a massage in one of the spa palapas or hiked twenty minutes or so down the beach to Yelapa. It turned out to be the sort of grittily picturesque, lost-in-time village that the film-noir protagonist always disappears to after being jilted by some femme fatale. We were told that electricity had arrived in the village only a couple of years before, and we did not hear a word of English from the locals.
On our third day we felt ambitious enough to hike about three hours beyond the village to a few waterfalls. Along the way we passed tiny farmhouses dripping with bougainvillea. Kids waved and burros brayed as we walked past, leaving us with that most prized of travel sensations— of being far, far away from our ordinary lives. Verana is open from November 1 through June 5. Best time to go: December through May. Houses from $380 to $710, including meals. 800-530-7176; fax: 310-455-4348; verana.com.
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