In heaven, the bread baskets at breakfast are stocked with warm banana bread and fresh fruit spread, and the water is always heated to within a few degrees of body temperature. I know this to be true because I have seen and experienced it at Rosewood Mandarina, which opened to visitors on the Riviera Nayarit in Mexico last summer.
Boasting panoramic views of the water, beachfront dining, and a spa so relaxing as to be borderline lobotomizing, the hotel offers a stock photo of a vacation. The ocean is just that blue. The horizon is just that expansive and mesmerizing. Even the alligators bobbing in one of Mandarina’s (enclosed—don’t fret) estuaries seem to smile. It’s cliché to call a resort paradise, but there is something divine about the new development—like Eden before the fall. It’s the kind of place that drives a person to make resolutions—and to bargain. “I’ll be good!” I think as I check in. “Just let me come back here.”
defaultPhoto: Courtesy of Rosewood Mandarina
I have arrived on site after a multi-leg trip from New York via Houston (visitors land at the airport in Puerto Vallarta, and the Rosewood is an hour north) that is the opposite of ethereal, and I feel wholly error-prone and fallible as I fumble with passports and tickets and miscellaneous wrappers at the indoor-outdoor reception area. A host of staffers liberates me from all that, orienting me and handing me a welcome drink that is cold as space and inscrutable. I taste pineapple. I taste… corn? I down it in two sips. This exchange will repeat several times over the next 72 hours. Here, welcome drinks are not restricted to the reception area. The welcome is constant, an unceasing parade of treats and niceties that conspire to make a person feel not just greeted, but embraced. I drink all manner of citrus-laced beverages served out of little stoneware vessels while I roam the grounds. I match the alligators’ smiles.
