Located within a few hours' flying time from many US cities, Cancún has become Mexico's premier tourist destination – with all that entails, writes FRANK McDONALD
OUT THERE on the Mayan Riviera, it was a totally different world, far away from the heavy snowfalls, icy roads and freezing fog Ireland was bedevilled by when I left Dublin. “Ah, Cancún”, a good friend in New York had said. “That’s where all these American high school kids head for their last spring break.”
They drink margaritas, Tequila slammers and endless bottles of Corona by the neck, partying with abandon on the beach or in the noisy nightclub zone (the boom-boom-boom there makes Temple Bar seem almost restrained). Some of them end up sprawled on the streets. “It’s loco!”, one taxi driver told me.
Cancún is now Mexico’s premier tourist destination, far outstripping Acapulco, on the Pacific coast. The numerous hotels – towers, slabs, pyramids, ziggurats, even faux Mayan temples – are strung out along a narrow strip of land that’s actually a barrier reef second only in length to the more famous one in Australia.
Its location near the northeastern tip of Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula, just across from Cuba, puts Cancún well within four hours’ flying time from New York and many other US cities. Package deals offer winter sun, turquoise waters, white sandy beaches and palm trees (typically ringed after dark by luminous rope lights).
In short, it provided an ideal setting for this year’s UN climate change conference, after we were all nearly frozen to death in Copenhagen last December. And I thought I was being really clever booking a hotel that was within walking distance of the convention centre, after locating it on Google’s map of Cancún.
Except the Mexican government decided to hold the conference at the Moon Palace golf and spa resort, miles away from the hotel strip. Not only that. All participants first had to go to Cancúnmesse (think RDS Simmonscourt pavilion writ large), even further out, to be cleared through security and then bussed to the Moon Palace.
Security was tight, and with good reason. Last August, eight people were killed when six armed and masked men threw Molotov cocktails into a sleazy bar on the western outskirts of Cancún – far away from the tourist strip. The incident was linked by police to the vicious warfare between Mexico’s drug cartels.
It seems to have had little or no impact on tourism, certainly not in Cancún or elsewhere on the “Mayan Riviera”. Apart from Mexicans having a home holiday, most of the seven million tourists come from the US and Canada, with a growing number from Europe. The airport is one of Mexico’s busiest, handling more than 200 flights per day.
Most of them take a package deal, with all food and drink included in the hotel price, and you get a wristband to show you’ve paid for it. But there are also lots of restaurants, such as the posh Limoncello, with its uber-kitsch Itialianate exterior, or the simple and affordable El Fish Fritanga, with tables under thatched tropical umbrellas.
Wine is expensive everywhere, as most of it is imported, mainly from Chile and Spain. It’s also very far from Ireland, which means you have to take not one but two long-distance flights – in my case with a five-hour layover at JFK in New York. By the time I got there, late on a Saturday night, I was practically a basket case.
The weather can also turn nasty. Cancún is on the frontline for Caribbean hurricanes and has been hit repeatedly, most recently in 2007. Hurricane Gilbert scored a direct hit in September 1988, causing widespread damage to beachfront hotels. If only they had kept more of the mangroves, to blunt the impact of high winds.
Beyond what’s left of the mangroves alongside Kukulcan, the strip’s main boulevard, danger lurks in the swampy lagoon: “Crocodile Zone”, the bilingual signs warn unsuspecting passers-by. But then, they’ve been there since long before the first tourists came to Cancún, which coincidentally translates in Mayan as “nest of snakes”.
Looking at how overdeveloped it is now, few could believe that there was almost nothing there until the mid-1970s when the first nine hotels were constructed by the Mexican government, because no investors would take the risk. Now “The Glistening City” has nearly 30,000 hotel rooms and all the major chains are represented there.
With their clipped shrubbery and manicured, sprinkler- watered lawns, the ritzy hotels look almost surreal. Downtown Cancún, where most of the city’s 700,000 people live, is teeming and untidy – and all the more real for that. Frequent buses link “Centro” with the “Zona Hotelera”, where the jobs are. Fares are cheap at just over 50 cent.
Despite the incessant “drugs war”, tourism is now Mexico’s third largest source of foreign currency, after oil and emigrants’ remittances. And Cancún is still growing. A new “low impact” marina complex north of the existing hotel strip, called Puerto Cancún, is under construction, and the Mayan Riviera is also extending further south, as far as Túlum.
The most extraordinary intervention is Museo Subacuatico de Arte by English sculptor Jason de Caires Taylor. Consisting of 400 statues cast in highly durable concrete from real people, it has been installed on the seabed to ease pressure on nearby natural coral reefs – and produce a new “reef” that will ultimately be colonised by coral species.
Giving something back is what it’s all about.