Famous Faces, Famous Places and Famous Foods
Swept Away on the Mayan Riviera
Pre-hurricane weather on the Mayan Riviera is delicious.
Robert and I stroll to the hammock that sways under the thatched palapa that will protect us from the brutish sun. The breeze lifts the clammy heat from my hands in the swelter of the 98 degree Fahrenheit heat.
Robert and I are finally man and wife, after a drawn out and difficult divorce; finally honeymooning after the tiresome chore of selling house and kicking years of my collected treasures and detritus out the door.
We are coddled vagabonds exploring the Mayan Riviera. We are each other's anchor. No home, except each other. No plans. Except later, as summer wanes we'll meet Tyson (my adventuring son) and his girlfriend at a yet undecided place on this Mayan manyana coast. It is as we dreamed it.
Max, our Swiss host at the tiny four-roomed Casa del Agua where we spend our first three days of our honeymoon, in the gated and American-style condo and yachting community of Puerto Aventuras, wrings his hands and says, "Maybe… we must close down. But maybe … the hurricane will veer off, change course. Probably it will. But yes, we must board the windows this evening to be safe." He councils, "I would go to the Omni"
That was our last night at the lovely Casa del Agua before moving to the 35-room Omni Resort, just a quarter of a mile's walk away. The beach in-between is a tattered blonde scarf laid down for the waves to tread on. The condo builders at the beach further south, towards the archeological site of Akumal, have sacrificed the width of this beach by building spits that have changed the course of the ocean, moving the sand-gobbling surf here, to Puerto Aventuras.
The temperature has dropped. It is 96 degrees. Our ocean view room faces the Caribbean, a sea shell's toss away. The bathroom's outer wall is glass, the bedroom wall is glass. We are told by a plump and dark-eyed women at reception, "manyana, tomorrow, 8 a.m., we weel evacuate guests to Cancun." I delve for more information and find the hurricane shelter is a school. I've seen photographs of government shelters and can't imagine being there. I picture a swelter of sweaty bodies sitting cross legged, hip to hip on a concrete floor. Crying children. Pilfering must go on too.
Omni's desk clerk advises with the cool that authority brings, "You mus leave the luggages. You mus only take passport and air ticket. Nussing else. Nada."
Robert and I have moved purposefully to the Omni, thinking that if the hurricane blew by we would be safe in this larger structure, and, if not, we would be moved to an even larger and therefore safe sister five-star property. We do not want to lose our luggage. We have all our valuables along.
I call the airlines. We can't get flights out. The airport is closed. I call hotels in Cancun that are back from the sea. If, the hotels answer the telephone I get a terse, "Nussing available"
Then I try the larger hotel properties nearer by, south towards the archeological site of Tulum. The television drones in the background, I look up, CNN's tickertape reads 'The Category 5 hurricane that skirted Jamaica looks set to hit the Mayan Riviera' They are calling it Emily.
We are desperate. All the resorts are evacuating. Except one, it is so close, we can, if we choose, stroll the beach to it. It is just a mile away. The Copacabana, described in Fodor's guidebook, '224 rooms, an all-inclusive' I telephone again and the employee I speak with is proudly positive, "No, madam," he reiterates, "We do not need to evacuate. The Copacabana is hurricane safe."
The hotel is a beauty. Marble. Granite. Palms and paths and bridges over shallow cenotes, or sink holes, the Mayan's collapsed sea caves. Yes, it seems a safe bet, and a beauty.
We settle in, proud of our foresight. We could be languishing in the shelter. Here we have comfort. I call reception for news. We are told not to worry. But, yes, hurricane Emily is calling. She is delayed enroute and will be arriving at 4 p.m., what should have been siesta time.
Time which flows so smoothly for Robert and I, has become stunted. We are CNN junkies, watching the same reels over and over. We are clock watchers waiting.
Emily is very late. It is by now dinnertime and I think that maybe it's a mistake and she's not coming. She certainly wasn't invited on our honeymoon, to our party.
The guests kibitz and wander around as if nothing is wrong while the hotel staff is busy as bees. They board up windows with a bang of hammers. They climb ladders and tie up the wrought-iron chandeliers in the 100-foot high lobby that gleams with sheets of glass like calm water and is crowned with a thatched palapa roof. The only sound outside is the frittering of the wind in the trees.
We eat dinner in the lobby restaurant. No liquor is served; a sign states that it is a government rule during emergencies
Reception announces we are to pack our luggage and stay in our rooms, "you weel be safe," they say unperturbed. If needed, we will be moved from our rooms to one of three evacuation rooms within the lobby of the hotel. If so, they will come to our rooms and get us. We are to wait.
Robert and I peer into the evacuation centers to check them out. Most of the windows are boarded with plywood or taped with an odd crisscross of masking tape. I wonder what good masking tape will do. A few small windows are left bare.
Emily has sent word by way of her government minders, the hurricane watch; and is now set to arrive at 10 p.m., in approximately two hours. Party time.
Robert and I pace over the bridge and up the solid gray marble stairs to our room.
I call our son Tyson on my cell phone. He advises, "Most deaths are caused by drowning. Make sure you are somewhere above twenty feet." Our room is on the second floor. It is thirteen feet above the ground. But we are back from the sea. We count on that. It is, by now, 9 p.m. Outside the tall palms begin to swing their fronds in a demented hula. The sky is black yet the clouds have been blown away.
It is 10 p.m. Robert and I are lying on the tiny marble square of floor in our bathroom waiting on Emily's arrival. It is humid and hot away from the room's air-conditioning. We have dragged the bedding from our king-size bed in. I lie in a curl under the sink. We have closed the heavy drapes in the bedroom, placed furniture against the balcony's sliding glass window and stuck a rug underneath the hotel room door to keep out water We are in the building furthest away from the sea. Robert has paced the distance. It is six hundred feet to the sea. We count on that.
The wind has picked up pace. Emily's entourage howls outside like a pack of nasty wolves. Robert tells me, "Even if we die at least we've had each other." I smile and feel both joy at his sentiment and a cold fear. There is a beating sound. We listen intently. The door. The staff is evacuating guests to the shelters in the lobby. "Come!" They yell over the wind, flashlights like bright moons on the blackest of nights We follow, leaving our luggage where we have placed it. In the shower stall. The highest place in the bathroom. The safest place in the room.
It is 11 p.m. and Emily has arrived. Late and in bad humor. The boarded up windows shudder, they cringe against the invading army that is called Emily. Emily is in a rage. 'Emily go. Go way.' The families, the children, everyone in the hotel shelter say a silent mantra. 'Emily go away...'
Emily wreaks havoc. The noise, her voice, is demented with fury. I can't listen. Perhaps she will kill us. Perhaps we will die. The whole room holds its breath. I plug my ears, but Emily's rage knows no bounds. The 15-ft by 10-ft panes of glass in the lobby just a staircase away, crash. I picture the shards, like dangerous crystals raining down, then exploding on the hard marble floor. Everywhere, glass smashes, the sound rising like screams from the lobby just below us. The wind reverberates like bass drums and crashing cymbals. Emily is throwing things, throwing the room around, trashing the place. She twists metal window frames with her fierce inhuman strength. She pulls doors from their hinges and throws them hither and thither. Her gift to us is destruction, like the stories I read as a child of Thor with his thunderbolts. But Emily is real. She is in the room.
I wake hours later. Emily is gone. Gone on. We are told by the staff, who've held the doors of our shelter closed against Emily's ire with their mortal bodies, that we survived the eye of the storm. The young staff, some busboys, have raced through the 200-mile an hour wind over broken glass and under falling ceilings to keep us safe, to get us food. Outside it is peaceful No wind, no rain. Sunlight like yellow butter flows in through the two small windows that are still intact behind us.
Outside the path is knee high with debris, branches, glass, metal, whole trees uprooted. A war zone, Emily against everything, even her own nature. On the way back to our second floor room a squirrel clings to the wall. He is wet, bedraggled. Like us. His teeth chatter, then he moves on, like we will, on what we'll always remember as our hurricane honeymoon.
When you go: Flights to Cancun are year round and cheap.
The Mayan Riviera begins in glitzy Cancun and continues a 100 miles to the Belizean border. The range and style of hotel properties and resorts along this coast are diverse and suitable for different types of travelers: independents with an eye for nature, families, honeymooners and those seeking exclusivity. Victoria and Robert checked in to check out a range of properties on this beauty spot of a coast.
To match your persona with a property contact Wiep at Incentive Travel wiepb@hotmail.com
Update: Emily may have caused minimal damage to the Mexican Riviera but the more recent Hurricane Wilma caused $1.4 billion in damage to Cancun and Cozumel. Check with your travel agent before heading to the Mexican Riviera.