Off the Gringo Grid

Jorge Rosales and Cynthia James, La Conchita’s owners, explained that Tulum is holding onto its character largely because it’s still off the grid; the lack of utilities keeps things quiet and small-scale. They rely on solar power, but there are more than a couple of so-called eco-hotels that run generators willy-nilly, and there’s a debate among local hoteliers about whether to pull electricity into the area. Cynthia and Jorge are against — “It’s what keeps us unique,” she says. But they despair that Tulum as they know and love it will stay the same for only another five, maybe 10 years. Seen in that context, Cameron Boyd’s efforts to demonstrate the viability of sustainable water, waste and energy systems take on a particularly relevant urgency.

The next morning, after a fantastic breakfast at La Conchita, we were picked up by another Jorge. A guide for an eco-adventure outfit called Alltournative that caters to hotel guests on the Riviera Maya, he promised a “day of culture and adrenaline in the jungle.” His angular features, braided ponytail, multiple wooden-peg piercings and self-administered tattoos gave him a tribal-piratical mien. Not just another tour guide.

We drove inland from Tulum and turned north at Cobá, headed for three Maya villages where Alltournative has set up zip lines and rappelling facilities. En route, Jorge pulled over at a neatly tended homestead with several kinds of animals in and around the house. A sweet young girl picked up a long-haired, pig-like peccary in the yard and gave it a hug. A tiny deer was inside the house, where mama and a baby girl swung peacefully in a hammock. A tepezcuintle — a grotesquely overgrown hamster — cowered in a cage.

I naively thought it precious that the family kept these exotic-looking creatures as pets — until Jorge explained that the menagerie was in fact bush meat, future table fare. Such are the hardscrabble exigencies of subsistence for the Maya, who mainly rely on barter, fruit trees, and the corn and beans grown in their milpas (gardening plots). Because they lack viable industry, utilities and medical care as well as adequate education, their only other option is to leave their backwoods homes and find menial employment in factories, the hotel zones or cities. And that’s why Alltournative is bringing tourists into the area: to bolster the local economy and help maintain the communities, their traditional culture and the land they look after.

We pulled into Tres Reyes, pop. 500. First we received a blessing from an elder shaman, with incantations and incense and a sip of honey-flavored hooch called balche. Catholic and Maya catechism and symbolism were intertwined in the prayer and on the altar. When all was said and done, I learned that I had been inoculated against the alux, characters lurking in the forest and caves who, like leprechauns, come out at night to do you good or ill, depending on what you’re up to.

Herculano, the shaman, told us he’d always survived and even earned some money from what he could grow, but NAFTA provisions devalued his cash crop, and his milpa had been wiped out in the storms. “We can only make money from tourism now,” he said in Spanish.

Nearby Punta Laguna is famous for a reserve called The Home of the Monkey and Panther, and for a pristine, spring-fed lake. Just for those adrenal kicks we’d been promised, we rode a 200-plus meter zip line over a corner of the lake,  then we paddled canoes around the perimeter where we were able to observe a few clans of spider monkeys in the shoreline trees.

Lunch was a feast prepared by the women of the village, a buffet of vegetable soup, chicken mole made with 10 types of chilies, picadillo (ground beef and vegetables) and handmade tortillas. Afterward I bought a Coke bottle filled with subtle, locally harvested honey at a stand where huipiles (embroidered blouses) were also for sale.

A solar panel mounted on a pole outside a hut was powering a computer and printer inside, where a couple of village men were selling photos of tourists on the zip line. “To me that’s incredible,” said Macduff, not just because the technology is anomalous in that setting, but because the Maya own and operate that business in partnership with Alltournative. Their future viability depends on such enterprise, said Macduff.

In the afternoon, Jorge took us for a swim in a cenote called Chi Much, or Frog’s Mouth, named for the shape of the entrance. One of the most remarkable things about this cavern was a six-foot-long stalactite that looked to have been sculpted as an ornamental serpent’s head — complete with a tree root growing from its mouth like a flicking tongue.

“This is sacred water,” Jorge said as we prepared to get wet, explaining that all of the Yucatán’s thousands of cenotes are connected by an underwater river network that the Maya regard as a circulatory system. “We believe this is the place closest to the heart,” he said. We swam in perfectly cool water pure enough to drink.

With sunlight streaming in through the frog’s mouth, the underground room took on a moody, mystical aspect. I may have been skeptical about the alux, but the serpent’s head certainly set an otherworldly tone, and it wasn’t hard to embrace the concept that this “sacred water” flowed through Mother Earth’s arteries.

Our visit to a third village was blocked by a flood; the road that leads into and out of Pac-Chen, where some 500 Maya live, was completely inundated. We joined a mother with her young children sitting on a log by the end of the road waiting for her husband to paddle a canoe out from the village to pick them up. When he arrived, Deciderio Pech Pech told us that the village was dependent on the tourist business Alltournative brought and that being cut off put his family and community in desperate straits. Their only hope was a plan by Alltournative to cut a new road through the forest to restore access.

On the ride back to Tulum, Jorge said the company was good that way; it had even sent a truckload of relief supplies to his own home village in the faraway Lacondón forest of Chiapas after tropical storm Stan blew through. He himself is half Indian, he said, and identifies strongly with the lot of the Yucatán Maya. Their struggle for survival, he said, is part of the wider fight for Indian welfare, which he used to support as a Zapatista rebel.

“It’s a pleasure for me to be able to speak for my people,” he said. “I used to do it another way, but now I can do my little part like this.”

Damn, I thought, riding through the Maya forest with a Zapatista tour guide and Commandante Macduff, NASA frogman — it doesn’t get much more off-the-beaten-track than this.

Caribbean Travel & Life is the magazine for anyone in search of the perfect tropical getaway. Each issue presents expert insider’s advice on where to find the Caribbean’s best beaches and attractions, its finest resorts and spas, liveliest beach bars and activities, and its friendliest people.   

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