YUCATAN PENINSULA
Cancun, Mexico: Rebuilt and showing off
Hurricane Wilma swallowed beaches and scared off visitors. But Yucatán resorts are back, upgraded and awaiting tourists.
Seemingly, all is bueno here on Mexico's sunny, sinny Caribbean coast, a year after Hurricane Wilma bore down for a three-day weekend like some party girl who wouldn't leave.
In the Hotel Zone, the ribbon of resorts along Cancún's beachfront, innkeepers have been on a spending spree, adding presidential suites and tennis courts, flat-screen TVs and more shore than ever before to its world-renowned beaches.
Along Kukulcán Avenue, 6,000 freshly planted trees sway to the billowy tropical breezes that seldom rest. (Think Rachel Ward wrestling with her hair and skirt in the movie "Against All Odds.")
And diners are again ordering pork chop Milanese at La Dolce Vita or the buttery broiled grouper at Lorenzillo's, where customers pause on their way out to feed the 10-foot crocodile that swings by almost every night for a little late-night bite.
For decades, travelers have come to this glitzy peninsula, 640 miles due south of New Orleans, for its guilty pleasures and remarkable setting, the Yucatán jutting out so far into the gin-clear Caribbean that you can almost smell Castro's cigar.
And a year after a Class 4 hurricane swallowed the beaches and tore open some of the nation's priciest hotel rooms, all is well here in Cancún and the sprawling resorts to the south and east.
Or is it?
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Guests will return
THERE is no heat like a tropical heat, a warm cup of coffee down the back of your neck, but I am not the only one to have broken a sweat here. Roman de la Cruz melts a little as he describes cowering for three days in a cottage as Wilma skidded to a halt, held in check as if by the devil's thumb.
"It got here and just stopped," recalls De la Cruz, 46, who has seen other hurricanes come and go, usually in 12 hours. "All I could do is stay in my cottage."
Remarkably, no one died in the storm that caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage. But when it finally left, so had those magical beaches and something else vital: As they were with New Orleans after Katrina, tourists were wary of visiting during the next hurricane season, June through November.
It left tour promoters such as De la Cruz in dire straits and the little vendors at Market 28 in the city's core suffering for customers.
"It was the worst summer I can remember," De la Cruz says.
The cabbies, tour promoters and bellhops are now sweating the prospects for the coming tourist season, which begins in earnest in late December. Will the über-rich return to the luxe shopping malls and five-star resorts that line Kukulcán Avenue? Will the college kids guzzle their way through Dady'O, Bulldog and the other steamy clubs at the north end of the island, where parties once lasted till dawn?
 This city got its name in the 1860s. The operation shown here has been under the same management since 1987. |
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