World Traveller December 2018

MEXICO
has been around since the dinosaurs,
hombre. You can make way for me.’
I wanted my adventure to have a big
dollop of ‘easy’, and Hotel Esencia delivered
on both. It’s a sprinkling of cool, white,
slightly hacienda-style houses and lawns
carved from the jungle, but the luxury
and quiet good taste have a raffish edge.
So there is discreet abstract art and posh
coffee-table books, but also driftwood
bannisters and hammocks slung beneath
the thatched, open-walled palapa huts,
while elegant lamps hang seductively
from trees beside wild coconuts.
The location is Xpu-Ha (amazingly, just
an hour’s drive down the coast from noisy
Cancuń); the ‘X’, I eventually work out, is
pronounced ‘sh’, like the shhhushing of
the wavelets. It’s so hypnotically perfect
that even the daily deposit of algae on the
sand seems appealing once I learn that it’s
actually sargasso (sounds so much more
romantic than ‘seaweed’, no?). But when,
accidentally up early one morning, I see
the sargasso being carefully, cossetingly
hand-cleared from the beach by hotel
staff, I know I’m going to have to look a
little further afield if I want any of the
‘edge’ I’d abandoned Barbados for.
A quick coach trip to Cobá, however,
and I’ve got edge by the bucketful (it’s
here the lifeblood did its cascading thing).
An important Mayan city from the 1st
century AD to the 15th, it’s now a cluster of
stone ruins looming enigmatically from
the middle of a million miles of jungle.
The biggest is the pyramid of devotion
to honey (Why did he get such kudos?
Because the stuff was an important
ingredient in Mayan cement, apparently.
Though once you’ve tasted the local honey,
rich and intense, no explanation for its
status is needed. In fact, it’s a wonder
they ever built anything above one storey
without licking it into ruin.) Incredibly,
you’re allowed to climb the pyramid, and
the experience is unforgettable – not so
much for the views (an infinite ocean of
green treetops) as for the hairs-on-theback-of-your-neck
tingle of knowing that
others once looked down exultantly from
the same spot, but for them it wasn’t
the pride of summiting the 120 steps,
but the eye-bulging, ecstatic madness
of the decapitator or willing decapitee.
Even weirder than the weirdness,
though, is the fact that (given the
weirdness) it’s so pleasant here. The site
is too big to navigate on foot, so people
hire bikes or get chauffeured around on
passenger trikes by their guides, and
the atmosphere is more weekend cycle
in the park than lingering echo of ritual
murder. A five-minute pedal down a
shady path is Cobá’s poc-ta-poc court,
where matches of the Mayans’ get-theball-through-the-hoop-using-only-yourhips
game could go on for days before
reaching their climax with, obviously,
the sacrifice of the winning coach. And
instead of horror, all I can think of is
whether England's coach Gareth Southgate
would be prepared to go all the way and
get his trademark waistcoat bloody.
So the adventure comes pretty easy
round these parts, but the easy can be
adventurous, too. Even international
luxury hotel brands have a dash of
local fizz in their DNA here, and the
Rosewood, where I’m staying next, is
essentially a vast mangrove lagoon that
just happens to have a few (also fairly
vast) rooms scattered around it.
In mine, the cheapest category, as well
as the (count ’em!) indoor bathroom,
outdoor bathroom, walled garden, roof
terrace, sun deck and plunge pool, there’s
a lovely little wooden boat dock on stilts
above the lagoon, where you can see
nothing but jungle and convince yourself
you’re an intrepid explorer. Indeed, if
you sit still there for 30 seconds, you’ve
got a pretty decent chance of spotting
cormorants, iguanas, raccoons, turtles
and, if you’re really lucky, baby crocodiles
(they’re ‘taken somewhere safe’ when
34 World Traveller