Cancun

National Review, May 31, 1985 by F. Reid Buckley.

MEXICO IS FILTHY. You cannot eat the food. If you touch a salad or drink the water, you will come down with that complaint jocular mention of which made President Carter so popular when he visited there. And the Mexicans who serve the food are a surly, creasy, thieving lot with a crippling inferiority complex, who make ethnocentrism a tempting, albeit never a good, option.

!Tonterias! (Rubbish!) At least in Cancun, on the Yucatan Peninsula. If your cuppa tequila is: good food and potable water, a shy and gentle native population, and spic-and-span surroundings, all set in a lushly exotic Eden with seawater in which you can spy a copper penny ten fathoms down, go there.

Cancun proper is a long narrow island, the ocean to the east, a lagoon to the west. It was just a spit of crushed coral and limestone 15 years ago. That's right. In 1970, there was nothing at all here; not a living soul. Split-tailed frigate birds riding thermals in the stratosphere. Terns and oyster-catchers. In the marsh, a roseate cloud of flamingos. Herons white and blue, egrets, black-and-white stilts (how elegant they are on their long languid legs!). And snakes, a mess of them: coral, rattle--the dreaded bushmasters, up to 12 feet long and packing 350 milligrams of venom.

Not to worry, they have been eradicated. Former President Miguel Aleman Valdez is credited with "discovering" Acapulco, which lies across the Mexican subcontinent on the Pacific coast. President Luis Echeverria Alvarez, that pious scolder of the United States, taking example from his predecessor, pushed the development of Ixtapa-Zihuantenejo and Cancun, in the second of which--it was rumored--he had more than merely pro bono publico interest. Never mind. Today, on the mainland, there is a booming town of fifty or sixty thousand inhabitants, complemented on the grand strand, in the season, by thirty or so thousand tourists, of whom 99.97 per cent are gringos. By 1995, Cancun's population is scheduled to increase to an optimum 250,000, at which point the Mexican government will cry halt and move elsewhere on the Yucatan Peninsula to establish a new resort.

For this gorgeous place is a government creation. It is a deliberate bureaucratic invention . . . and who says governments, even Mexico's notoriously corrupt and inefficient governments, can do nothing well? I have no idea what may be the municipal short-comings of Cancun, nor how much more the infrastructure cost than it should have done, but from a tourist's point of view the place is enchanting. Crossing the bridge onto the island, one comes on the boulevard, dividend in the center by a continuous strip of casuarinas, coconut palms, palmettos, Spanish bayonet, flamboyant trees, hibiscus, mangrove, sweet bay, bird of paradise, trumpet vines, bougainvillea, plumbago--a profusion of efflorescent tropical shrubs and trees whose clashing oranges, reds, and pinks express that riotous exuberance that characterizes the Mexican aesthetic gift--punctuated every half-mile or so by great stone monoliths from the Mayan past. Planted similarly on both sides, the boulevard is a gorgeous passageway, which crews of gardeners maintain in resplendent condition. This is not what one might rename Puerco Rico, where the public beaches can only be gained by braving a no-man's land many yards wide of garbage and human waste. Every now and then, in Cancun, one may spy a discarded paper cup, but this is the exception. As my ten-year-old son might say, a Switzerman would approve.

Cancun's architecture is not distinguished. The Hotel Presidente, the Sheraton, the two Hyatts, are hulks--though luxurious hulks. Contemporary Mexican architecture can be first-rate. Nothing in Cancun, however, is going to survive to challenge the Mayan heritage, which is one of the major attractions of the Yucatan. For ourselves, though, winter-weary as we were, we came for sun and surf, lazing like lizards on the beaches the first two days. There was never softer, more glistening sand: It compacts when wet into a kind of paste. And the weather, in February, is pleasantly warm during the day, cool in the evening . . . and no bugs! I recalled to my wife, Tasa, a night in Acapulco, many, many years ago. It was a February also--of 1942. The place had just opened to tourism, and there were but three hotels.

Returning from supper the first night, Brother Bill and I barged back in to our quarters and found the soles of our shoes crunching--as, to our revulsion, we became aware--not popcorn, but the shells of innumerable scarabic carcasses. Crackle, pop, ooze. Oh, horrors. The floor; our sheets and pillows, dresser and washbasin; all were littered with insect cadavers, or crawling and writhing and buzzing and clicking with half-dead disgusting creatures that had tumbled from their crevices in the dark ceiling, among which were distinguished by their repulsiveness centipedes, millipedes, silverfish, big and little cockroaches, hairy-legged tarantulas and lesser spiders of venomous hue, ticks, powder-post beetles, ants red and black, the pupae and larvae of wasps, termites, sowbugs, and other large-abdomened abominations, all squushing green and yellow fluids underfoot; and near the closet, crepitating among the crusty corpses, a veritable dinosaur of the insect tribe, a fist-sized armored tank of a beetle whose carapace was bilious green with yellow polka dots. In Cancun, there are mosquitoes in December, but few thereafter, and we slept blissfully, windows wide open to the scented night air.