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 Travel & Outdoors | November 2005 
Mexican Tourism on the Mend
 Laurence Iliff & Lennox Samuels - Dallas Morning News
| | Though Hurricane Wilma swept away the sand at Delfines beach in Cancún, tourists have begun going there again. (AP |
Cancún, Mexico – The top foreign playground for Dallas-Fort Worth residents looks ragged nearly a month after Hurricane Wilma rudely halted the party. Hotels are shuttered. Palm trees are bare. Much of the white sand is washed away. The main drag is dark at night.
And Cancún sounds worse than it looks. Mostly, it's dead quiet. Clubs' rap/reggae/electronic thunder has been silenced. Loud chatter – fueled by flowing liquor – is gone. All that's left is the wind whistling through the new palm trees that have been planted.
But the Caribbean retreat remains "on its feet," as government advertising reassures, and tourists are slowly returning as hotels reopen and discounts are promoted along a coastal strip nearly 100 miles long.
Nearby Playa del Carmen was not damaged nearly as badly, and the island of Cozumel received its first cruise ship this week since the hurricane struck Oct. 21. Christmas – maybe even Thanksgiving – at the beach is looking better.
A Long Recovery
Still, it won't be the same Cancún for a while. The government does not have a date yet for the costly and time-consuming process of returning sand to the beaches. Not all clubs, restaurants and stores had insurance, making reconstruction problematic. At least one Cancún icon, the 426-room Hilton Cancún Golf & Spa Resort, won't reopen until Feb. 28 or later.
American tourists visiting recently said they were surprised at the extent of the damage. But they also said that a toned-down Cancún is still worth the visit.
"The Cancún we love needs to be visited by Texans in order to return to what it once was," said Christy Fichtner, a former Miss USA and longtime Dallasite who was staying at the newly reopened Riu Palace.
Ms. Fichtner and Steve Mobley, who run Forest & Crane Properties together, enjoyed having the run of the place given that only a few dozen tourists were on hand last weekend. "What we needed in this three-night stay was tranquility," she said.
Mike Cotroneo, who is with Dallas' Sewell Cadillac, originally was supposed to arrive on the day the hurricane hit, as a birthday surprise from his wife, Tonia. Instead, the couple rescheduled to last weekend and became pioneers in repopulating the resort.
"I've never been in a catastrophe, so I didn't know what to expect, but it looked like a war zone," said Mr. Cotroneo. But not everywhere. At the Riu, he said, guests were treated like royalty. A hotel bus took them to one of the few open clubs, and hotel employees were invited, too.
"They hung out with us, and they just kind of brought the party to us," said Ms. Cotroneo. "It's really sad, the destruction, but Cancún is going to bounce back."
The return of Cancún loyalists has Mexican officials insisting that dire predictions of a six-month tourism hiatus are not even close.
In an interview, Tourism Minister Rodolfo Elizondo predicted that 80 percent of Cancún's 25,000 rooms would be available by Dec. 23.
And for the entire Mayan Riviera, which runs 70 miles from the Cancún airport to the Mayan ruins in Tulum, that percentage will be reached by the end of November, he said.
"It's not 100 percent, but it's not desolate. It's operating," said Mr. Elizondo.
Pouring in Money
The federal government, insurance companies and tourism groups are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the area for a quick turnaround.
"Who are the people most interested in taking care [of their town]? The people who live there," Mr. Elizondo said, adding that residents poured into the streets with brooms and shovels to clear the debris, and the government offered them temporary jobs.
With a little luck, Mr. Elizondo added, Mexico will receive the same number of foreign tourists as last year – 10.5 million. Before Wilma, tourism was growing at double-digit rates, and the prediction for 2005 was 12 million foreign visitors.
High Costs for Tourism
Costs to the tourism industry from Wilma are high, the minister said, because the region accounts for more than a third of Mexico's income from foreign visitors. Insurance companies are expected to pay out more than $1 billion, he said, and the loss to hotels, restaurants and other businesses is $10 million to $12 million dollars a day.
Perhaps the only bright spot in the disaster is that Wilma chose Mexico's tourism low season to hit, allowing significant recuperation before the high season, which begins in mid-December.
For some who find Cancún too depressing for a winter vacation, Playa del Carmen is just down the highway.
Along its walking-only Quinta Avenida, or Fifth Avenue, Germans and Italians and even some Americans shopped and drank and sang along with a Mexican rock band doing covers of U2, AC/DC and Chicago.
"It looks not so clean, but it's all right, and I think they have made a lot of progress," said Ines Messmer from the Swiss textile town of St. Galan. "At the beginning, when [the hurricane] was in the news, we were thinking we would cancel, but then we thought that we would come because they need the help."
Although many water parks and other attractions along the Mayan Riviera are closed, Ms. Messmer said her tour of Mayan ruins and other sites revealed them to be in good shape.
One reason Playa del Carmen was less affected is that its older, traditional downtown has buildings that are limited to a few floors and mostly set back from the beach. That creates a buffer from hurricane-force winds, compared with the upscale Playacar resort nearby, where Wilma broke windows and flooded rooms.
Likewise, Cozumel's tidy downtown hotels fared much better than the mega-resorts on its beachfront, said Pedro Hermosillo, who works for the island's parks and museums foundation.
Wilma damaged parks, he said, but the storm also did some good, such as transforming some beaches by creating new sand dunes. And Cozumel's famous deep-water reefs escaped serious damage, he said, although some shallow points did break apart.
The hurricane also sparked a debate over the nonstop beachfront construction that has turned Cancún into a massive resort and, critics say, damaged its rich and delicate ecology.
"It's said that you should not build your castle on the sand," said David Baqueiro, a scuba instructor. "There are too many hotels, and they are too big. They damage the beach, and when the ocean becomes violent, it extracts its price."
Man vs. Nature?
Hotel operators insist that no damage is done to Cancún beaches by their resort developments. Rather, storms are storms and the damage is generated by nature, not by man, they say.
But Mr. Elizondo, the tourism minister, said it is obvious that government corruption over the decades has allowed Cancún to grow uncontrolled.
For example, hotel footprints have taken over so much of the beach that there are no natural reserves of sand that you would find in less developed areas. "The sand banks don't exist because they've have been built upon," he said.
And so the Mexican government will have to hire an international firm to gather sand from banks on the ocean floor – at great cost.
"The sand does return by itself, but not in sufficient quantities," the minister said.
Still, the entire region has recovered from many a hurricane in the past, including the Wilma-like Hurricane Gilberto of 1989 and Hurricane Emily earlier this year.
"The recovery has been very rapid, water, electricity, cleaning the beaches," said María Dzul, a Playacar shopkeeper. "People are coming back, not a lot, but they are coming back."
Email liliff@dallasnews.com and lsamuels@dallasnews.com |
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