We were about an hour from the Puerta Vallarta airport, having just left the highway, meaning, a two- lane, no-shoulder asphault strip barely holding the jungle off of our car. My son pointed toward a lot of green to our left and asked “What are those purple things?”

“Mangoes” our host replied. “We pulled a bunch of them out of the pool this morning.” During the our visit we learn that while the mango hasn’t reached nuisance status, we certainly see as many of them rotting on the ground as we see in margaritas or for sale on sticks.

There was another pervasive fruit on our trip. Sometimes it was luscious – just hit the spot. You’d savor its many flavors. You’d lean in to the table, asking for it to be passed to you. It would be so good, you couldn’t stop. You could do so many things with it.

Other times you’d taste it and fantasize about tossing it over the cobalt blue curved-topped retaining wall to break far below in to small pieces to be carried away in the awkward wave of fluorescent yellow pincers attached to a purple crab the size of a pork medallion.

Shiny pieces then to be passed from crab to crab (they are the ants of this fancy pueblo, but cuter! In a Gabriel Garcia Marquez kind of way, like they might form towers of 10 or so crabs and then spontaneously ignite in to a feral sparkler, a friction fire set by rubbing brutal natural succulence against poverty painted Matisse’s colors, then fanning with a local election, odd tourists, and stray dogs, many stray dogs) to be placed at the center of the jungle in the crab version of junk shop / treasure trove.

This fruit looked like this:

Somehow we managed to get three of these ‘s through customs, even though all other fruit was confiscated. Added to the fourth already at the house, and we were an orchard of DSL-hungry, flickr-uploading, facebook-friending, friend-feeding, yedda-answering, Nana-skyping, yes, even search-engine-optimizing and internet-marketing laptop-dependent tourists on a jungle getaway. (For the demographers in the crowd, everyone using the machines was well over 18, 25, 30, ok, 40.)

Is it so wrong? “Stop splashing, kids, you’ll get the ibook wet!” “Hey, let’s skype Nana in for the sunset.” “He’s sitting where a glance catches the jungle, the pacific, and a Picasso … Is he really reading his feeds?” Muttered disbelievingly by someone who twenty minutes later will be uploading nearly a hundred images to flickr. Then a third person will say: “Is someone uploading pictures…my connection’s really slow all the sudden.”

Do not worry; the crabs are very, very shy. Now, are there more mango margaritas?