Puerto Vallarta is one of our favorite places in all of Mexico. Living in Southern California and owning timeshare weeks in a number of towns on the Mexican Riviera - and loving cruises - we go down there a lot.

We were in Mexico five times last year, and will visit the country three times in 2008. We've taken more than a dozen cruises down the Mexican Riviera in the past 35 years, each including a day in Puerto Vallarta. And we've probably enjoyed our timeshares a week at a time in PV six or eight times as well.

There are a lot of day excursions available here - a city tour, cultural tours, trips into the jungle, boat trips to Yelapa beach to the south and Nuevo Vallarta to the north. But our favorite day in PV is spent just walking around town, mainly on the ocean front.

The Spanish word for 'ocean front' is malecon. But when most of us use the word, we're talking about The Malecon in Puerto Vallarta, a mile of beach front on Bandaras Bay, the largest bay in all of Mexico.

Fodor's guide book says it very well: Puerto Vallarta's malecon is the Champos Elysees of PV - only shorter, warmer and less expensive.

Here's what we did and what we saw there just last week, in early October 2008.