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 Travel & Outdoors | October 2007 
When in Cancun ... Head for the Downtown
 Angela Woodall - InsideBayArea.com
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| | Cancun is known for its wildlife — both natural and touristic. |
Cancun wasn't my idea.
I wouldn't have chosen the Mexican resort town, which lies along the eastern tip of Mexico's Yucatan peninsula and the Caribbean shoreline.
But the "Mayan Riviera" is where this night owl found herself for nearly a week, including prime weekend after-hours prowling.
Cancun is known for its wildlife — both natural and touristic.
The geography translates into paradise and one of the worst-kept secrets in traveldom.
The city has nearly 30,000 hotel rooms, 200 restaurants, and several hundred shops.
Most of it is in the zona hotelera, a long strip packed with college-town party palaces bearing such traditional Mexican names as Shrimp Bucket, Pat O'Brien's, Hard Rock Cafe and TGI Friday's.
My fellow birdies and I — a tidy group of six — ended up at Carlos 'n' Charlie's ("Where spontaneity is our specialty") after a near brush with the even louder, even more beer- and margarita-soaked Senor Frog's.
The strip is like Las Vegas meets Hawaii.
In Cancun, the Mayans lived way before anyone thought to turn it into a tourist resort.
The Spaniards arriving in the 16th century came to visit and stayed for good. Tourism was made official policy by the Mexican government in 1967, with the first Club Med built several years later.
At Carlos 'n' Charlie's, we got a giant-screen video dose of Ricky Martin singing "Livin' la Vida Loca" in front of the long-gone Twin Towers in New York.
Many visitors come to Cancun for a dose of la vida loca, which seems to involve a filter of booze and sex.
Even larger than life Ricky Martin shaking his hips, Christopher Walken hoofing it on screen to Fatboy Slim's "Weapon of Choice," and Corona beer couldn't loosen me up enough for that scene.
Come to think of it, nothing could.
So, we decided to seek out a place where talking couldn't scar our vocal cords and reality didn't feel like an episode of tropical "Twilight Zone."
Really, it was the ho-hum waiters trying to look festive as they bopped to some generic spring break-type party song that sent us packing with relief.
Downtown is the place to go to escape the party animals. As a shuttle driver told me on the way from the airport: "The zona hotelera is for the tourists. Downtown is for us."
We were too tired the first night to get there.
That's how we stumbled across the Sea Horse, a hole-in-the-wall restaurant with a karaoke sign that lured us in.
The Sea Horse wasn't downtown, but it was like an oasis along the strip.
The two-for-one beer special kept us there for hours belting out bad'80s hits (think Pat Benetar and Quiet Riot) with the aide of the sole karaoke CD.
The Sea Horse became our nocturnal watering hole for all but one of five nights (the reason is another story), so I never made the pilgrimage to the bar boasting dozens of martini varieties: the Cancun martini (coffee liquor and vodka, topped off with a maraschino cherry), the Union Jack (the classic martini with a splash of rum) and the Pineapple Upside Down Cake martini. OK, maybe not that one.
But, when in Rome ...
The first night, I opted for a margarita and french fries, which I later learned were made by Jose Andres, a slight Guatemalan cooking solo in a sweltering kitchen to support his wife and their three children. Our group swelled to at least two dozen people one night. He cooked for us all.
Then there are the Mayan children who comb the streets late into the night, hawking woven belts that look like giant versions of the friendship bracelets kids here make in camp.
The most beautiful but bizarre moonlit apparition was the young men covered in glitter who earned about $90 a night for, it appeared, just standing there looking amazing in their sheaths of shimmering gold, silver, red or green.
"You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave," sang the Eagles in that oft-quoted tune "Hotel California" that was on the karaoke roster.
If they were singing about Cancun, it would be "you'll never want to leave." |
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