The sun had risen, only minutes ago, across a horizon of waves, over an instructor and four teenagers lined up practicing karate kicks. They were going through their routine at the end of a long wooden wharf, a working-man’s wharf fitted with old tires, jutting into the turquoise ripples of Puerto Juarez.
There’s a beach here–a dirty one decorated with rusting boat hulls, ragged palapas and someone’s laundry hanging out to dry. But this is not the Mexico that Americans are looking for, though it can be seen from here, across the water, shimmering in the magic dust of sunrise, the hotel zone of Cancun.
A generation ago, the ugly stepsisters of Puerto Juarez and pre-tourist Cancun, and their mixed odors of fish bait and open-air butcher shops, were about all the northeast tip of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula had to offer.
Then in the ’70s, developers set their sites on that dagger’s slash of white sand that cuts east, then south into the Caribbean.
There in the hotel zone, it’s the citrus tang of the day’s fruit delivery, warming in the early morning rays, that scents open-air cafes, such as 100 Percent Natural, just welcoming the breakfast crowd.
Some of their patrons will have come fresh from their beds in one of Cancun’s 64-and-counting megahotels. Others may arrive via the taxis that line up at 6 a.m. outside clubs such as La Boom, where revelers have spent themselves dancing all night.
This is the quietest Cancun will be all day. In two or three more hours, rental cars and sport vehicles will screech between city buses and tour shuttles in traffic buzzing by bumper-to-bumper. An overpopulation of cabdrivers and time-share hustlers will catcall to pedestrians. Each member of the tan patrol will find his or her 6 square feet of beach to lie on, within earshot of a poolside stereo. Shoppers will shuffle through the malls.
Despite the morning’s heat–even at 6:30 it’s already too hot to eat “outside” at the cafes–people jog with hand weights, pedal rusty bicycles or go in-line skating along the paved pedestrian route that parallels Boulevard Kukulcan, the hotel zone’s sole thoroughfare.
It’s a street landscaped with scalloped hedgerows, topiary animals and Mayan-style artifacts as it runs from downtown Cancun on the north, leaps a short bridge to the island of hotels and reconnects to the mainland on the south via another small bridge heading straight for the airport.
Travel assurance: Between those borders, laced among more daring curiosities, lies the timid tourist’s safety net: Planet Hollywood, Gold’s Gym, TGI Friday’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Hard Rock Cafe, Denny’s, McDonald’s.
True, these places reflect a hint of the international–McDonald’s sells world T-shirts and jeans, KFC’s billboards make double entendres about breasts. But many quote prices in dollars as well as pesos. Planet Hollywood, for example, offers a leather jacket for $408; a simple shot glass goes for $6.
What’s in store: And then there are the malls, so many it’s hard to tell them apart, especially near the dizzying congestion around the convention center.
Duty-free perfume shops and designer salons, cigar stands and cute restaurants pack the labyrinthine Plaza Caracol, most upscale of the malls. Here, $8 will get a roll of 24-exposure color film developed in 45 minutes; $66 buys a pair of women’s Gucci ankle boots. One of those big, fat Monte Cristo cigars from Cuba runs $13; a slim, discreet Cuban Partagas goes for $2.
Every fifth store, or so it seems, sells perfume: Christian Dior’s Poison in the 1-ounce eau de parfum, $59; Rochas’ Byzance eau de parfum spray, $56; Calvin Klein’s 3.4-ounce Obsession for men, $39. And all these places give out free samples of the only perfume bottled in Mexico. It’s called Cancun. It’s $45 for 4 ounces. It’s Caribbean blue.
There’s shopping downtown, but prices there, especially on cigars and perfume, are comparable to those in the hotel zone. So the only items browsers are likely to miss, should they not make it to the zocalo in the city, are the more earthy, Mayan-styled figurines–couples in various sexual positions, $11; grimacing females giving birth, $6-$11; and phallus pipes, $17–in natural terra cotta.
Day trips: Cancun serves as a base camp for those planning expeditions to view real Mayan artifacts: Tulum, the fortress city that rides the cliff tops on the edge of the sea, is two hours south. Chichen Itza, with its massive pyramid, observatory and ball court, is 2 1/2 hours west, in the very center of the Yucatan Peninsula.
Several tour companies run excursions to these sites as well as other popular spots such as Xel-Ha, an underwater national park for snorkelers near Tulum, and Xcaret, the Six Flags of eco-tourism, about an hour south of Cancun.
One tour operator departs from here for the island of Cozumel, but most passenger boats–those that aren’t party boats–are headed for Isla Mujeres, the 5-mile-long, five-minute-wide island about eight miles off the north shore of the hotel zone. A half-day is plenty of time to walk around the town, snorkel at El Garrafon National Park and make the pilgrimage to Isla Mujeres’ sad little lighthouse.
The beaches: Hardly in better shape is the hotel zone’s lighthouse, reached by taking the walking trail behind the Camino Real hotel, where the island turns sharply south. The dull white cylinder isn’t very tall, its windows are broken out and its light is only a small bulb on top. But it commands a windy crag of black rock that bristles with razor-sharp edges where the surf hits.
This point serves as an easy dividing line between the north-shore beaches, where the waters sometimes are so calm as to hardly show a ripple, and the east-shore beaches, where the waves break hard onto the shore, sometimes dangerously so.
People who discover their hotel is on a shoreline not to their liking have only to head for another strip of sand, because all Mexico beaches are public.
Actually getting to other beaches, though, can be another matter, because Cancun lives with the dual faces of Mexican resorts: construction and neglect. In July, weeds grew in the parking lot at Playa Las Perlas, where old motor boats were moored to wooden wharf posts sticking every which way out of the water. Playa Langosta hid behind a gathering of shops. Playa Caracol, more often referred to by its English name, Coral Beach, was all but obstructed by heavy equipment installing the new Xcaret tour bus terminal. Playa Las Balinas was accessible only through a narrow passage next to another construction site.
Night scene: But when the sun goes down, the eyesores of desolation and progress dissolve in the twinkle of starlight over Playa Delfines. If there’s a moon out, it will spin silver threads across the sea all the way to the beach, where spectators sit on chairs and recliners made of stone. From here, near the southern tip of the island, the lights of the hotel zone stretch northward, pointing toward more cosmopolitan pursuits.
Shopping for dinner can be as much of an adventure as eating it. Enormous red claws cling to chunks of ice in the windows at Moro’s Stone Crabs. Jaguar’s adds a Beatles Revue to its $17.20 food bar that offers eight beef dishes and nine salads. Faustino Cuevas, the singing chef at El Mortero, supervises meals served on bluebird place settings in a fountained courtyard. Whole baby goats turn on spits behind the glass at La Rosada. And there’s usually not much of a wait at any of the restaurants.
Club lineup: There is a long line to get into Planet Hollywood, though would-be patrons have the handprints of stars to play with in the meantime; Wesley Snipes, William Shatner and Kurt Russell are among those who’ve left their imprints on the wall outside. Inside there’s zebra-striped tile in the women’s bathroom and Madonna’s twirl bra from her Blond Ambition tour. And lots of smoke for the dance floor.
Other lines form at Dady Rocks for the $13.95 all-you-can-eat-and-drink special, and at its next-door neighbor Dady-O. Together the pair of purple and black buildings look like the bat cave.
There’s a line of frozen drink machines along a wall at Fat Tuesdays, a daiquiri bar where men’s T-back underwear hangs in neat little rows from the ceiling. Then there’s the line of hip-thrusting waiters, dancing in the windows of Tequila Sunrise, one floor above the Pizza Hut.
Only the tamest spots close before dawn.
DETAILS ON CANCUN
Activities: Dolphin Discovery tours offers a Swim With the Dolphins experience for $84. The galleon Captain Hook operates a beach party day cruise for $30-$40 and an evening dinner-and-pirates cruise for $54. Atlantis Submarines runs two dives at $55 and $62.
AquaWorld is a sort of one-stop shop for all sorts of water sports: parasailing for two, $35 per person; wave runners, $35 per half hour. Jungle Tour includes a guided wave-runner ride through mangroves to the Punta Nizoc snorkeling reef, $35-$38.50 per person.
Tours: Tours to Chichen Itza, to Tulum/Xel-Ha and to Xcaret start in the $50-$60 range and include transportation, admission and lunch. But different operators may have special deals that can cut prices by 30 percent to 40 percent.
Isla Mujeres: Round-trip passage to the island costs $10-$12, but it may be better to purchase one-way tickets as you need them: Despite posted schedules, some operators will only make the return trip when they have “enough” passengers who are ready to get back to Cancun, which could translate into a wait of two or three hours. First boats depart Cancun at 8-8:30 a.m. and the last boats return to Cancun about 5 p.m.
On arriving at Isla Mujeres, passengers are met by people offering mopeds for $5 an hour, golf carts for $10 an hour. These are common means of getting around, but prices are lower–$3 an hour for a moped–a short block or two into the town. Cab fares are negotiable.
Points of interest are a run-down lighthouse at the far end of the island and El Garrafon National Park, a snorkeling spot. The lighthouse is free. Park admission is about $1.65, with snorkeling gear renting for $5 a day.
Getting around: Buses continually run the length of the hotel zone and into town, about 33 cents one way.
Prices: Luxury items may be a bargain here, but routine items–sun block, aqua shoes, snorkeling gear–are cheaper if bought at home before the trip: Xcaret’s private-label suntan lotion, with an SPF 6, is about $10 at Plaza Caracol. Aqua shoes average in the $21 range at most shops in the hotel zone.
Dining: La Palapa’s Spanish architecture of white stucco and tile shingles overlooks a marina on Nichupte Lagoon and offers a Caribbean breakfast buffet for $6 from 7 to 10:30 a.m.
In the Plaza Kukulcan mall, OK Maguey’s has all-you-can-eat dinners for $9.99, lunches for $5.99 and breakfasts for $2.99. A ribeye at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse, also in Plaza Kukulcan, costs about $21, with a side of garlic bread $1.25 and baked potato $3.
A glass of wine in the better restaurants runs about $5.
Time-share: Time-share operations masquerade as tourist information booths, and hotel lobbies are filled with tour desks and discount offers. If it’s for sale, chances are someone in Cancun will have printed a coupon–likely several–for it.
For more information: Call Mexico Tourism, 800-446-3942.
