Maya intervention

By Christine Richard

updated 1:48 p.m. ET Feb. 9, 2007

Always refuse if offered a flaming drink, and definitely decline if this flaming drink comes with a straw. Trust me, I’m from New Orleans. That’s why I was a little surprised one Mexican evening when my friend Prisca and I found ourselves — two New Orleanians — poised with straws in hand, the other ends dunked into glasses whose contents had just been set afire. The liqueur in question was xtabentun, made from honey that comes from a type of flower grown only in the Yucatán. Our friend Nacho, who was hosting a seafood dinner on Playa Norte (all the stops: tiki torches, glittering slice of moon, waiters with silver trays), wanted us to try something Mayan. And what better setting than this small island just off Cancún and the Yucatán Peninsula.

We readied our straws. The other dinner guests encouraged us, telling us it was a rite of passage on Isla Mujeres. Had I known then that the Maya calendar predicted that the world will come to an end in the year 2012, maybe I wouldn’t have even hesitated.

Prisca finished first and laughed, but the laugh wasn’t real — it was what I had come to identify as the post-Katrina laugh (PKL). Behind it lay an edginess that said, “If I laugh too hard, I might scream or cry or crumble.”

But that’s why we had come to Mexico: to scream, to cry, to crumble and then to emerge.

Although I had left the city six months before Katrina and had only lost a house, many of my friends lost that plus everything in their houses. And how exactly do you define yourself when you don’t have things? How do you rebuild? Those who stayed in New Orleans after the storm sought those answers and, while they did, they transformed. I watched Prisca bounce from happy and carefree to weighted. Burdened.

So last spring, when I visited the city, I took her aside and confided my plan, code-named Maya Intervention. She resisted. Mexico? How could she think of herself? There was too much work to be done, she told me. She didn’t have time to find herself on Isla Mujeres. Maybe, I said, we can learn something on this so-called island of women. Maybe we can see how the Yucatán Peninsula coped after Hurricane Wilma, a storm that followed Katrina in the 2005 season. Maybe, I insisted, we can venture into the lost cities of the Maya — wasn’t there a connection we could learn from? Wasn’t New Orleans’ culture at risk of being lost like the Maya culture that suffered from the arrival of the conquistadors in the mid-1500s, then the missionaries? Prisca remained unconvinced. So I pulled a New Orleans trick: “Maybe,” I went on, “we’ll drink tequila under the Mexican sun and gorge on ceviche. We’ll be mediums for the ancient knowledge of the Maya. Their ghosts will talk to us, teach us!” Her eyes shone for an instant — long enough, anyway, for me to book tickets before she could change her mind.

Later that spring day, I reserved a room for us in an inn whose name triggered my imagination: Casa de los Sueños. The House of Dreams seemed a promising place to start.

And it turned out to be exactly what we needed at first: a beach fairy tale. The island was easy to navigate at only five miles long, and we developed a routine. Prisca and I slept late, taking our coffee in the open lobby that overlooked a peaceful sea, Cancún sparkling in the distance. We spent afternoons on popular Playa Norte, a beach with water so inviting and blue I wanted to dive in and never come up for air. We ate heaps of fresh ceviche at Picos on the seafront avenue, Rueda Medina. We got to know our neighborhood ice-cream man: a señor in a sun-bleached cowboy hat wheeling a white cart hand-painted with the word Tuggui (a brand name of a popsicle). Each night on the 10-minute cab ride downtown, on our way to pedestrian-only Hidalgo Avenue, we’d pass the roundabout near Playa Lancheros where they make tikin xic: whole, seasoned fish squirted with lime and thrown on a grill.

Downtown, we’d sip tequilas at La Adelita, avoiding the new slew of timeshare hawkers. Or we’d mingle, making quick friends like Nacho, who manages Posada del Mar; and César, who owns the Elements of the Island Café and who, the day after the xtabentun, introduced me to chayote, a vegetable cultivated by the Maya and which, because of its high vitamin C and amino acids, had become a hangover godsend for a New Orleans girl who should have known better than to take any alcoholic drink through a straw.

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As I slurped a chayote drink, flipping through the local newspaper, I became restless. Yes, Prisca and I had come for an escape, but we had also come to lose life’s distractions in order to find … something. So, despite our original plans to stay on Isla for a week, I turned things upside down. I wanted to dig deeper.

“Let’s go to Chichén Itzá on the mainland,” I suggested, “to see the ruins — to learn something.”

Prisca tossed a brochure my way. “After, let’s go here,” she said. “Xaloc Resort on Isla Holbox. It seems lost, unheard of. And it’s whale-shark season.”

Great, I thought, a half-day excursion on a boat. Boats are tedious to me. I faked a smile. I threw a PKL her way. “OK,” I said.

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