Cancun Sellout

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Parent Category: Travel Info

Category: Travel Feature

Published on Saturday, 16 January 2010 22:11

Written by Eric Lurio

The first time I went to the Xel-ha Eco Park, it wasn’t there. Back in 1969 or ’70, I was just a kid getting myself ready for puberty and my parents and grandparents on my father’s side had taken my two brothers and I to an almost completely unknown island called Cozumel, just of the east coast of Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula.

From our hotel, which presumably isn’t there anymore, one could see the mainland, so near the end of our visit, my parents made arrangements to take a boat over. It wasn’t large boat, it didn’t have a cabin, but had ropes for passengers to hold on for dear life on  one of the of the roughest sea journey’s I’ve ever been on.

Finally, after what seemed to be many hours of tossing and turning, we got there. A delightful bay in front of a water-filled cave called a cenote. It was cool and fresh and perfect for getting off the sweat and salt before going off to explore the mysterious interior. We didn’t find much. A couple of tiny temples built by the ancient Maya and a few sea turtle carcasses, one of which gave it’s skull to as a souvenir. The trip back was even more harrowing, with the pitch and roll of the boat threatening to capsize the tiny craft.

When we got back to dry land, my mother commented: “ This is just like those articles in the New Yorker.” It was indeed.

We went back to the following year, only this time we flew to the Yucatan from Cozumel. There were no airports of note in the territory of Quintiana Roo back then, so we had to fly to Merida, the capitol of Yucatan State, a colonial city far to the west of the   peninsula.

From there we drove south to Uxmal and the east to Chichen Itza, both built by a lost civilization that was both fascinating and mysterious. The guides told us stories of peaceful utopia made up of people who were fascinated by time and sports. The cities had been mysteriously abandoned well before the Spanish arrived, but their descendents lived on still, and in fact the signs had a third language besides English and Spanish… Mayan.

We climbed the fabled pyramids while Mom worried about us breaking our necks. It was a boy’s own adventure, even though we had to go with our parents….

Meanwhile, in Mexico City, very rich men, looked covetously at the virgin paradise that was Quintiana Roo, and in particular a group of sandbars surrounding a picturesque lagoon somewhat to the north of Cozumel. Their plan: Turn it into a world-class resort called Cancun.

Flash-forward a third of a century: There I am on the internet deleting spam from my email reader. There’s another one. The title bar advertises a free trip to Cancun. I like replying to these things sometimes, and I asked how much this “free trip” cost. I’d been invited to go for free before and they always seem to charge several hundred bucks in addition to the time-share pitch.

The reply came back with a plaintive: “it is free!!!!!!”. She was from the PR firm that had the Cancun tourist board account. I talked to some friends and they were more skeptical than I. So I called the Mexican embassy in Washington to check these guys out.

They were legit! Sonofabitch! I immediately sent them a “sign me up immediately!!!” email reply. This was a promotional press junket. I’d been hoping to be invited for these for years. All those year of doing movie reviews for almost nothing had finally paid off. What made it even better was that that the theme of this “fam [for familiarization] trip was archeology and I’ve been a big pyramid fan for years.

I’m going to be a sell-out Coool!

The agenda was pretty filling. From our base in Cancun, we would take all the archeological-type day trips one could take within a space of four days. No probs, I’ve done this lots of times.

Cancun is in Mexico, but it’s not OF Mexico, or at least not the Hotel Zone, the part everyone thinks is Cancun. It’s Las Vegas on the Caribbean. The HZ looks something like this: /_7, with the top bar and most of the diagonal littered with hotels one after another. Big hotels, expensive hotels, all of which have a beach and a huge swimming pool. The HZ is the myth of the place, the home of eternal spring break, where the parties last forever and the booze flows like water.

I’d been there before and couldn’t afford the place, so I spent the first night of my previous trip at the CREA Atencion de la Juvenad, arguably the WORST youth hostel on the face of the Earth. This monstrosity is in the HZ and has a nice beach. But the inside looks like it was supposed to be a prisoner of war camp or a prison and while I was there, I think I was the only guest. You had to practically beg for service.

I checked out and went over to Cancun proper, and Hostelling International has a place which is actually pretty good. Downtown is Mexico at it’s best. The area in downtown Cancun, (not downtown HZ, which is something else entirely), is full of shops and restaurants, where you can get some fantastic local food. This is a real city.

But I wasn’t going to stay in Downtown, I was going to stay in the HZ, at a place called Villas Tacul Boutique Hotel & Marina, which is a bunch of bungalows right there on the beach and air conditioning so powerful you almost need a sweater. Just the thing for Cancun in August.

The people on the junket were almost all travel writers, the singular exception being one lady who was doing seminars on singles’ travel for older women or something like that. Most of them were there because expense accounts aren’t always available, and keeping travel guides updated is an expensive business. This was a nicer bunch than I should have expected. They were all extremely experienced at this sort of thing, and were professionally proficient enough to questing for the lost world of the Maya.

How the Maya lost their world was for centuries a mystery. In recent years thanks to the cracking of their writing system and good old fashioned spade-work, we know that these peaceful philosopher/astronomers were in fact a bunch of warlike, power-hungry bastards who destroyed the environment so badly the common people gave up on civilization at least twice.

The glory of the Maya was from the 400s AD to around 930, when the whole artifice collapsed in a heap. This is called the “Classical” period. The Toltecs invaded from the north sometime later and helped start a “post-classical” civilization. This collapsed around 90 years before Columbus. There were a couple of cities left when the Conquistadors arrived in the 1520s. But if you’re at all interested in the subject you should have known this by now. One should always do their homework before leaving, if only a back issue of “Maxim” magazine’s spring break issue. But….

If you’re on the lazy side, Maya ruins aren’t that difficult to find. There was a town right there on the HZ during the “Decadent Postclassical period,” which is what the archeologists call the time period right before and during the Spanish conquest. It’s not all that big, but the ruins are quite picturesque and “El Rey” as it is called is good place to contemplate the fate of mankind while recovering from a night of hard partying.

But if you actually want to see the “real thing,” you have to go out and find it. There are lots of kiosks and storefronts in the downtown HZ area around the convention center, which will take you on a day trip to Chichen Izta, the great Postclassical city of the second millennium. This is where you want to go to look at a real, pyramid. “El Castillio” is the second most famous one in all Mexico and the reconstruction is almost perfect [they left one of the stairways as they found it]. The rest of the ruins are in a greater state of disrepair, and that’s all to the good, there’s a huge number of them, in fact, one can spend several days and not see it all...

That’s why they have quite a few hotels in the area. Far more than when I was a kid. The Mayaland Hotel, which has been there since the 1930s, has been joined by dozens of smaller and cheaper residences. What’s interesting is that the Mayaland owns the land on which Chichen Itza sits but not the ruins themselves. The Mexican government does things like that.

A few dozen miles east of Chichen is Ek Balam. At first, it’s not nearly as impressive. The ball court and the other buildings aren’t that big and there aren’t that many which have been excavated with as much care. That is except for the pyramid, which doesn’t exactly look like a pyramid, but more of a perverse office building. About half way up the grand stairway, there’s a grass roof, which protects something really special, a huge stucco frieze that looks like a pagan parody of the interior of St. Peter’s basilica in the Vatican. Warriors and priests flank a giant snake head while a large pile of rubble has been preserved in order to keep the whole thing from collapsing in a heap.

At the top of the pyramid one can see Chichen and the ruins of Coba in the distance. It cannot but impress.

South of Cancun are Coba and Tullum, the last Mayan city.

Coba is for the most part unreconstructed. This is the way most of the great Maya cities were found, piles of rubble among the trees. There are some major excavations going on but nobody will tell you exactly where. Archeologists generally hate tourists with a passion and they don’t want to be disturbed. The pyramids that are open to the public are pretty impressive and a bit on the dangerous side, but you  can rent bikes or tricycle-rickshaws and go from one group of ruins to the other underneath a canopy of trees. Really quite lovely.

Tulum on the other hand, is not. They’ve done a good job here. The city was still in good working order when the first reconnaissance missions arrived from Cuba in the 1510s. Compared to most of the other ruins in the area, this is brand spanking new! There’s also a beach, something you can’t really find anywhere else besides maybe El Rey.

Tullum is about as far south as one can go for a day trip from Cancun. There are other sites, but for that you have to stay down there and go on the next day. From Tulum, it’s actually possible to get all the way to Florez in Guatemala, but that takes an entire day (and I mean by getting up at 4:30 in the morning!) If you’ve got the time, it’s worth the effort, Tikal, Copan in Honduras and Palenque in the Mexican State of Chiapas are astounding. But generally people only can afford a week or so.

And, dammit it’s the Caribbean, where being in the area without going for a swim would be a crime. If you’re staying in the Mexican part of Cancun, there’s always the public beach in the southern part of the HZ, but then there are a couple of theme parks between Cancun and Tulum. They’re called Xcaret [the ‘X’ pronounced ‘ix’] and Xel-ha [the ‘X’ pronounced ‘sh’].

Xel-ha has changed a great deal since I was first there in 1968.

There’s a restaurant there now, as well as changing rooms and a beach, boardwalks and helpful signs to show you the cultural and “enhanced” natural landmarks. The birds and the fish are real, and some of the parrots, too. But they don’t have a floor show, and what’s Cancun without a friggen’ floor show?

For that there’s Xcaret.

It’s far the more “disney-fied” of the two. They have restaurants [which serve great food], a slow motion flume ride, and picturesque actors in Mayan costume, as well as professional “Ulama de Cadera,” players, imported from the state of Sinola, where the ancient ball game is still played,  who play a few matches in specially built stadium as well as during the aforementioned floorshow.
 
 The floorshow is an educational extravaganza, resembling a those 4th of July specials that they show on PBS every year. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s actually very entertaining. The audience, who were mostly Mexicans [Cancun is filled with vacationers from Mexico City in the last week of August and the CVB had a hell of a time finding us rooms] sang along and had a real blast.

The official price for these two is expensive. Xcaret is almost a hundred bucks US per adult. But the dozens of tourist kiosks to be found in downtown HZ generally have discounts that range from 25 to 60%, so it pays to go shopping.

The junket lasted five days. That’s not really enough to do it right, but then again, it was a fam trip. The price was right and I wanna do another one.