One ticket to paradise

Accompanied by the cream of Montreal’s
journalist corps, a Mirror writer snags an
all-expenses-paid trip to the Mayan Riviera
and finds natural splendours, open bars and
Gino Vanelli. A look inside a junket.

SUN, SURF, SAND, NO SWINE FLU:
Reporter takes Tourism mexico’s bait

words and photos by
ERIK LEIJON

On a cramped tin can somewhere between Charlotte, North Carolina, and Cancun Airport, Mexico, I’m debating on which neat pile of self-compiled notes to read first. On the left side of my tray table is a print-out article of the most fantabulous places to visit in idyllic and tranquil Riviera Maya, Mexico, the location of one of the Mirror’s most unlikely stories. On the right is an accumulation of three years’ worth of horror stories about Mexico from alarmist Canadian news media, from an increasingly bloody drug war to swine flu to even resort towns playing host to some rather gruesome incidents.

After a brief moment of reflection, I return both piles to my workbag. Instead, I reach for my digital music player and wedge the buds as deeply in my ears as possible. Eventually, I soak in the calm landing, despite the American traveller sitting by the window two seats to my left, who couldn’t contain his excitement and began high-fiving everyone as the coastline came into view. I’m neither a travel reporter nor a grizzled international correspondent. I’ve essentially taken advantage of Tourism Mexico’s generosity and desire for good press in the midst of their toughest times since the Mexican government plunked considerable pesos into transforming the remnants of the Mayan civilization into a touristic haven in the 1970s.

I’ve also taken the clueless Mirror editorial staff for a ride, considering I was chosen in some mildly offensive attempt at affirmative action—I’m the only member of the extended Mirror family with any Chicano blood and, based on the pallid-to-translucent epidermis possessed by the ghouls who haunt the office, the only person there capable of tanning—so there are no expectations of any mind-blowing journalistic insights. Just arriving there in itself is the victory only a week after being informed to pack my bags for an impromptu press junket. Everything occurring afterwards is icing on the cake.

PLAYING WITH THE DEAD: Locals act out a Mayan fable

¡BIENVENIDO, HACKS!

The day of the flight also happened to be the date of my 25th birthday. It’s a bittersweet day, largely since the career trajectory I had always envisioned involved spending landmark days in tropical hotspots dodging gunfire in the middle of some frantic civil war, not poolside working on a puff piece about how Mexico’s pearl in the Yucatan is being affected in a worldwide recessionary climate. Luckily the Sandos Playacar Beach Resort & Spa where I and a group of 10 or so Montreal-based journalists (of similar non-travel backgrounds) were sequestered was a resort with open bars at every turn and a mini-fridge continuously stocked with Dos Equis to greet me every morning. It made sense to quit moping and act the carefree American tourist, baking in the bright Riviera Maya sun like beached whales. The all-inclusive resort is the precise, holistic anesthetic to get me through my period of inadequacy.

Who knows if things are truly so dire in Mexico’s mini-Potemkin villages that dot the country’s coastline to necessitate a phalanx of Montreal journalists to survey the damage? The iconic tropical vista has done everything from sell beer to star as your default desktop wallpaper, so surely paradise could never truly be killed. (Keep in mind, however, this region was the bedrock of Mayan civilization, who surmised the world would come to an end on Dec. 22, 2012. So to superstitious locals, even the slightest drop in foreign bodies could make one feel like the end is nigh.)

Our NAFTA partners in crime have always had their troubles, but recent times have felt like Montezuma’s Revenge delivered on an entire nation. In 2006, newly elected Presidente Felipe Calderon declared a war on drugs that has claimed over 10,000 lives and has spilled beyond the typical U.S./Mexico border towns. This June, 18 people were killed in Acapulco in a drug war shootout.

Riviera Maya, located along the eastern coast of the Yucatan peninsula in the state of Quintana Roo, was dealt their own harsh blow following a gruesome double-murder of an Ontario couple in 2006 at the Barcelo Maya hotel, and neighbouring Cancun’s newly installed anti-drug czar’s bullet-riddled body was found just a day after assuming the post this February.

APOCALYPTO NOW

And then there’s swine flu, the pandemic now referred to as H1N1. It’s everywhere now, including tourtière-devouring Quebec, where 24 people have died. With angry Canadian pork vendors hoping to change the flu’s nickname to “Mexican Flu,” there’s still a predominant feeling the country is currently battling their own disease-riddled apocalyptic nightmare. Like 12 Monkeys but with mariachis.

The reverberations have been felt in paradise: the Mexican National Trade, Services and Tourism Chambers Federation says 140,000 tourism jobs were cut during the traditionally slow periods of April and May, although the Sandos resort, where we stayed, was confident the largely seasonal workforce would be back on the job once Mexico returns to the back recesses of newspapers and the U.S. economy begins its slow recovery.

The hotel employees were all freakishly cheery, albeit more genuine than the plastic smiles one might encounter at your typical Toronto steakhouse. Old habits die hard though, and as my Mexican relatives are always quick to warn me about their own kind, I hung the “Do Not Disturb” sign on my room doorknob upon arrival as a sort of ill-conceived security barrier. Although the need for fresh towels was great, the risk was simply too high to allow someone into my long-weekend base of operations. Sure enough, about an hour after I unpacked, I was exiting the shower when a hotel employee attempted to infiltrate the room, the dead-bolt being the only thing separating me from the unwelcome invader. It turned out he only wanted to bring me some freshly chilled beverages, but the damaging effect of having my personal quarantine threatened had irrevocably seeped into my fragile psyche.

COBA COMMAND: Climbing the Nohoch Mul pyramid

GINO!

As if an invite to an all-inclusive resort wasn’t enough of a dangling carrot, Tourism Mexico did have a more timely reason to fly an oddball collection of hacks to their neck of the jungle. Ripping a page from our own city’s bag of tourist-attracting tricks, Riviera Maya is now five years into their own growing jazz festival, headlined out-of-season by Montreal’s own afro’d maven of blue-eyed soul, Gino Vannelli. The actual festival will occur from Nov. 25–28, but organizers said the chance to bring Gino aboard warranted the one-off event.

Starting with a surreal press conference in the morning, where doeeyed sycophants hung on his every word concerning metaphysics and how to solve all the world’s problems (he not-so-casually ducked the one attempt by the La Presse scribe to equate his appearance in Mexico to the Rolling Stones grabbing SARS by the surgical mask in Toronto), Vannelli-mania culminated on the sands of Mamitas beach near the junket-hosting hotel. Clad in his Grease leather Halloween costume, his permed Bride of Frankenstein coif immobile despite the gentle seaside night breeze, Vannelli swung his limbs uncontrollably and with the energy of a man half his age. Frankie Valli would be proud.

Admittedly, I was a year old when his iconic ’80s opus “Black Cars” graced this mortal world with its timeless awesomeness, but I genuinely cast aside my Mirror-induced music pretensions in order to enjoy the Montreal native’s performance with fresh Mexican eyes and ears. The man who cited Barry Manilow as a spiritual rival (a reference to Manilow usually beating him out for Grammy Awards) during the presser is like imported fruit to these nascent jazz fans. And yeah, the energy began to dwindle among the 2,000-plus beachside attendees when Vannelli forgot his whereabouts and thanked hated neighbouring resort town Cancun. But when he put his all into performances of Q92 mainstay “Black Cars” and his Italian numbers, one could feel for the ageless musical mercenary, who has probably gone woefully unprepared into dozens of dangerous locales with only a comb and signed copies of his poetry book and lived to sing another day.

ATTRACTIONS, NATURAL AND NON

Importing Gino Vannelli to the beach is pretty emblematic of how all of Riviera Maya is a jumbled mix of waning Mayan tradition and the arms race between the competing resorts alongside the highway from Cancun Airport. Each one of these fortified, all-inclusive hotels has its own unique, gaudy entrance gates featuring the best in Western architecture and the kind of empty yet jaw dropping flashiness of Las Vegas.

This conflict reared its head again during what was a packed day for the press junket, a wonderful blend of appreciating and killing nature in one fell swoop. In between the stalagmite and stalactite caves and the coral reef snorkelling expedition was a long jungle trail, to be traversed using gas-guzzling ATVs. This gave us the chance to marvel in nature’s greatest masterpieces, such as the stalactite rock formations—which can grow from the cave roofs for hundreds of years provided they aren’t touched by human hands— as well as the second largest coral reef on Earth (the Belize Barrier Reef). Yet nothing invigorates a young man’s soul like kicking up dirt and revving an all-terrain vehicle to utterly dangerous speeds. Nearby plant life and animals (varying from iguanas to monkeys) be damned, man has usurped your turf.

Back at the hotel and free of anything remotely educational or ethnic, there was another breed of loud species marking their territory in the most ungraceful of manners: Americans. On the whole, them’s good people, although take an American outside of their delineated territory and suddenly their inherent abrasiveness seems more anomalous. A relaxing afternoon smoking a Cohiba from my secondfloor balcony was largely nixed by a large contingent of boisterous and unrepentant Texans—complete with obligatory cowboy hats—taking advantage of the poolside bar. I actually felt envious about their ability to accept the allinclusive resort for what it is: a liberating purge to the binge of the daily grind.

Coming from a city where asking for water at a restaurant is made to feel like an unreasonable request, the idea of having everything provided with a mere wave of a goldenbraceleted wrist was a great source of intrigue. One feels compelled to find out just how far the arrangement extends, to the point where you’re grabbing a fistful of chorizo sausage at hotel buffets and running out, or ordering as many 100 Anos tequila and Cokes as your outstretched arms can carry.

The attitude is infectious too; on the first night, I and a few nameless assailants jumped in the pool adjacent to our rooms after designated swimming hours. An American couple, a large black man and a diminutive white woman, walked by and seemed none the wiser to our transgression until they returned a few minutes later, in the buff and ready to dive right in.

SOUTHERN COMFORT

It’s inevitable many tourists will never leave the confines of the resort, a shame because the memorable final day of the adventure consisted of climbing to the summit of the Nohoch Mul pyramid at the Mayan ruins of Coba and learning about Argentine expat Agustin Villabos’s project to preserve Mayan culture by teaching local children pottery after school. The native children conversing amongst each other in Mayan dialect and the humble straw hut where the finished bowls were sold presented a stark contrast to the bloated, modern, Trumpfunded resort hotels along the beach. Even more astounding was the elaborate yet DIY presentation of a traditional Mayan fable created by Villabos and a group of local players with renewed interest in their roots, held in a cave-side sinkhole (called a cenote) converted into an outdoor theatre.

The press junket had learned earlier in the day at the Coba ruins that, following a Mesoamerican ball game that had two teams competing to place a rubber ball through a small hole affixed to the top of an inclined playing surface, the winners would be sacrificed in ritualistic fashion at the top of the pyramid. Surrounded by fire and to loud percussion, the local troupe breathed life and history into a territory that perhaps loses some of that rich culture every time a tourist ignorantly shouts, “No problemo!”

In reality, Tourism Mexico doesn’t need Gino Vannelli to pack their hotels, as time will likely do the healing. If all could afford resort packages that start well past the $1,000 U.S.-mark, few would say no to sun, sand, surf and an open bar. Riviera Maya is one of the most perfect spots on Earth, and if paradise can’t survive here, 2012 will feel like a welcome release.

MAYA CON DIOS: (from the top) Reporter vs. nature,
Gino Vannelli, Sinkhole or swim, Kids return with heritage pottery