The Pleasure Is All Mayan: Part I

[NOTE: This column is the first in a two-part series about attractions in Southwestern Mexico. The first looks at the ancient temples and beachfront beauty of the Mayan Riviera, and the second explores further inland, describing SW Mexico’s colorful Mayan heritage.]

We were jarred awake by a 4am alarm, rolled our exhausted bodies out of bed and stumbled onto a bus headed for the Mayan temples. What could be so wonderful about a pre-dawn hike, I whined, to merit this sort of punishment?

At the site, we slogged uphill through a vine-strewn jungle and a pea-soup fog in the dark. Twenty minutes into our nocturnal adventure, the silence was pierced by the opening sounds of morning - a chilling, primordial howl that echoed through the empty jungle, and that can only be described as the groan of mournful souls in Hell. It was coming from the trees.

The inexplicable moan got louder as we reached the top of the rise and began to ascend the stone stairway of the temple. With every knee-straining step, the fog grew thinner, the dawn grew a little less dim, and then, an epiphany. We broke through the top of the clouds to an extraterrestrial sight: a rising sun and the peaks of two Mayan temples piercing a blanket of fog. That’s all we saw, two triangles of hewn stone and the sun, penetrating an infinite layer of grey. The howler monkeys below had reached a roaring chorus. This was the climax of our Yucatan vacation.

I had never realized that such an otherworldly experience existed so close to the United States. The Yucatan peninsula is scattered with the remains of a glorious pre-Colombian civilization, and if you see the sites early enough in the morning, the experience can transport you back 2,500 years in time.

On that day, it was in Tikal, in northern Guatemala, which incidentally served as the backdrop in a number of scenes from Star Wars (I presume the shots of Yoda’s home, the Degobah System.) On the Mexican side, in the north-central part of the Yucatan, another UNESCO World Heritage Site, Chichen Itza’.

Those are two of the best examples of Mayan remains in the area, though dozens of other, lesser-known sites are reachable from the international airport in Cancun. One of the most scenic is Tulum, just south of Cozumel, with a smallish temple seated like an ancient lighthouse overlooking the blue waters and white sands of the Caribbean.

The beaches themselves are another reason why Americans come to visit this once hidden corner of Mexico. It wasn’t until the 1970s, after a group of computer programmers got together to calculate the ideal beach destination in Mexico, that massive hotels were constructed on this previously anonymous island.

Since then, the Mayan Riviera has stretched itself south to Playa del Carmen, whose beach resorts and all-inclusive fares cater to a slightly more exclusive crowd than those in party-hearty Cancun. Neither are very adventurous destinations, especially when compared to climbing temples in the midst of the jungle, but that, indeed, is the point. Leave your wallet band and every other earthly possession in the room, swim up to the poolside bar, and enjoy a weeklong daiquiri diversion from work.

Or, if you’re in this for some excitement, a diving trip to the underwater caves of Cozumel would be an excellent choice. (Note: Mexican dive masters are not always as cautious as their American counterparts - my concerns about my dwindling air supply before entering underwater tunnels 60 feet below were waved off with indifference - so be sure that your appetite for adventure is at an all-time high.)

The other bonus to Playa del Carmen, and the adjacent island of Cozumel, is that they were not quite as affected by Hurricane Wilma in 2005 as was Cancun. Cancun has made a gradual recovery, but the damage in Playa del Carmen seems simply a distant memory.

John Moretti  is a freelance travel writer who divides his time between Europe, Florida and Vermont. He is the author of "Living Abroad in Italy" (Avalon, 2004) as well as a number of guidebooks. He writes about European sports and culture for the New York Sun. 

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