 |
|
|
 Travel & Outdoors | December 2006 
After Wilma, Life's a Beach
 Chris Welsch - McClatchy-Tribune
| | Up and down the Yucatan Peninsula's east coast — an area that accounts for 40 percent of Mexico's tourism income — resorts, restaurants and shops are ready for winter's influx of snow-weary Northerners. |
Cancun, Mexico — "Hey, amigo! Wait just a second," the hawker said, motioning me over to his booth on Boulevard Kukulcan, the frenzied strip of discos, resorts and malls that runs the 14-mile length of the island of Cancun. "For just two hours of your time for a meeting on a great product — these condos, right behind me — I can get you two blankets, a bottle of tequila and a snorkel trip."
I wasn't looking for blankets, booze or a hard sell on a condo in the Hotel Zone. I said I was more interested in Cancun's recovery from Hurricane Wilma, a Category 4 storm that in October 2005 stripped the beach to bedrock, blew out plate-glass windows and flooded hotels with torrents of rain.
"Why are you here now?" he asked. "Everything is back to normal."
Well, yes and no.
Up and down the Yucatan Peninsula's east coast — an area that accounts for 40 percent of Mexico's tourism income — resorts, restaurants and shops are ready for winter's influx of snow-weary Northerners. But the world they'll return to is in the process of a transformation that goes beyond hurricane recovery. Cancun and the Yucatan's east coast are in the midst of a phenomenal new building boom.
In the past year, more than 4,000 hotel rooms were added on the "Mayan Riviera," the fanciful appellation for 70 miles of rapidly developing coast south of Cancun. Three thousand more rooms are planned for 2007.
To help keep those rooms full, a new international airport is being built at Tulum, 80 miles south of Cancun. That will also help relieve congestion at Cancun's airport, which is adding a second terminal to help handle its 170 daily arrivals.
Following, area by area, is a look at the rebuilt, and rebuilding, Yucatan east coast:
Cancun
Wilma roared onto the Mexican coast with roughly the same force as Hurricane Katrina when it hit New Orleans. The similarities end there.
The Mexican government was ready for Wilma; vulnerable areas were evacuated and not one person died.
Still, Cancun appeared ruined. Broken glass, trashed furniture and upturned palm trees littered the ground. Some homes and hotels were beyond repair. The foliage was brown, ruined by salt spray.
The government sent in federal troops immediately after the storm to open roads, remove debris and help residents return home. More than $2 billion in insurance claims were filed. With government assistance, the city began to rebuild itself. A year later, the results are stunning.
About 90 percent of Cancun's hotel rooms are open, 6,000 newly planted palms on Boulevard Kukulcan sway in the nearly constant Caribbean breeze, and chaise longues stand ready on a restored beach that is significantly bigger and broader than it was before the hurricane.
The Mexican government paid a Belgian company $21 million to dredge the sand (which had drifted to the ocean floor near Isla Mujeres) and pump it back onto the beaches in front of the resorts. The company accomplished the task in only 12 weeks this summer.
The efficiency and speed of the recovery in Cancun prompted the United Nations World Tourism Organization to declare it a model to emulate in future disasters.
Upgraded hotels and a shift toward condos across the area are moves designed to bring bigger profits, but they also constitute a strategy to put the squeeze on one of Cancun's most notorious traditions — spring break, which no longer fits the image that "The Mayan Gold Coast" wants to project to the rest of the world.
Only about 5 percent of Cancun's visitors come for the annual festival of debauchery, but they claim an enormous amount of publicity, much of it bad. "In April, there are drunken kids everywhere; it's a bad influence on our kids and it's not safe for the Americans," said Fermin Catzin, who was manning a time-share and condo sales office on Isla Mujeres, a quiet resort island five miles north of Cancun.
Catzin said he hopes the upgrades change the tone in spring.
"I think it's a good vision for Cancun," he said. "We want to get a higher grade of people who want it to be tranquilo, not people with something bad in the cabeza (head)."
Playa del Carmen
Forty miles south, Playa del Carmen, like most of the Mayan Riviera, escaped the brunt of Wilma's wrath. If I hadn't seen photos of the stripped trees and fishing boats lying on side streets, I wouldn't have known anything had happened. Along pedestrian-only Avenida 5, lush trees shielded cafe patrons and boutique shoppers from the hot sun.
Playa is a low-key counterpoint to Cancun. Zoning laws keep the hotels under four stories. The tourists are older, and more than half of them are European.
For those who venture under the surf, the changes are subtler. One of the top draws in Playa — and on the island of Cozumel, across the strait from Playa — is scuba diving. Wilma buried some reefs in sand, damaged fragile sponges and soft corals, and deposited tons of wreckage on the sea's floor.
"When we dove the first time after Wilma, it was very ugly," said Jorge Loria, owner of Phantom Divers in Playa. "It looked sad with trash and structures from the beach sitting on the bottom."
Loria said the dive community organized and cleared trash from dive sites, hauling it up with lift bags. "For three months we had no business, so that is what we did. We cleaned up," he said.
I went on two dives with Loria to sites just off the beaches of Playa del Carmen. The strait that separates Playa and the island of Cozumel has a fast current, ideal for "drift diving." Little exertion is required; a few flicks of the fins keep you in line as you glide along the sea floor. As we drifted, we spotted at least a dozen green sea turtles — a couple of them bigger than me — angelfish, moray eels, parrotfish and one gleaming, swordlike barracuda. The visibility was at least 80 feet, and the coral looked healthy.
"A lot of soft corals and sponges got torn," Loria said. "But the hard corals and sea life are doing fine."
Cozumel
On Cozumel, one of the top dive destinations in the Caribbean, divers echoed Loria's assessment.
"When Wilma came, the reefs were called upon to act as the barriers that they are," said Irene Steven Applegate, owner of Dive Paradise. "There was some damage on the shallower reefs, but the reefs at 35 feet and deeper were fine. The diving is good now. We just need to get the word out."
Cozumel, a 45-minute ferry ride from Playa, was among the hardest-hit areas in the Yucatan, with wind and water damage coming from both sides as the hurricane passed. The storm badly damaged all three of Cozumel's cruise-ship piers. Two have been rebuilt, and a third, which serves Carnival, is awaiting repairs while the cruise line and the Mexican government dispute who will pay for it.
After a year of hard work, almost all hotels and businesses have reopened.
"The sea washed away everything, even the concrete foundation, which we've never found," said Sylvia Kuhnemann, who owns Rasta's Beach Club on the east side of the island with her husband, William Carrillo. They used savings to rebuild the grass-roofed, open-sided watering hole, a favored spot for beer and ceviche — a dish made from peppers, tomatoes, onions and chopped fish cooked with the acids in lime juice.
Even in the off-season, the bar bustled with customers, some well into their Coronas already at noon. The bar had an end-of-the-Earth feeling, with empty beaches to the north and south and the vast horizon of the blue Caribbean to the east. An obese woman from St. Louis drew a smattering of applause as she stripped off her shirt to be photographed next to a sign on the beach that said "Topless Pictures Only."
Kuhnemann smiled and returned to her thoughts about the storm; she said Wilma pulled the people of the Yucatan Peninsula together.
"Nobody cried. We all just got to work," she said. "Because this place is 95 percent dependent on tourism, we had to."
"If we didn't get the show up and running, nobody eats," she added. |
| |
|
Vallarta Weddings
Tell a Friend
Site Map
Print this Page
Email Us