The Riviera Maya has a number of major attractions, many of them built to attract day-trippers from Cancun. I elect to visit the Mayan village of Pac Chen, a tour that also includes a visit to the once-great Mayan city of Coba.
The village of Pac Chen, three miles into the jungle on a narrow dirt road, is a strange blend of authentic and touristy. Until a few years ago, the villagers eked out a subsistence living six miles inside the jungle. A tour operator persuaded them to move three miles closer to the main road and to establish a new village, with the understanding that they would allow visitors. At the time, the village had 60 people living in it.
Young people routinely moved to town to get jobs. Today, the young people stay, because the jobs come to them. The women cook traditional foods for the visitors and make crafts to sell. The men conduct tours through the jungle and assist tourists who skim above a lake on a harness attached to a zip line. There are also jobs lowering tourists into and raising them out of the cenotes, or underground caves, using pulleys, ropes and harnesses.
The young people tend to take the jobs shooting digital pictures of tourists who want proof that they ventured far beneath the earth to swim in a cenote. Each adult villager shares a tourism-related job with a second person, working alternating weeks. The villagers, who live in traditional huts, share their wages and are saving to buy a concrete community center where they will go during hurricanes.
I zip across the lake, enjoy some of the best wood-roasted chicken I've ever tasted, and pity the two strong men assigned to haul me out of the cenote, where we swim and float on inner tubes beneath rock and stalactites. I chat briefly with an 8-year-old boy named Santos, who had greeted me in English.
When we are about to leave the village, Santos jumps in the van with us.
"He's from a village closer to the road," explains the tour guide. "The people in that village always send one of the children to Pac Chen and tell him to get a ride home, because they know we'll have to stop near the village to let him out. They're hoping you'll all buy honey when we stop."
Sure enough, up the road a woman is waiting with baskets of honey. Santos touts its qualities and collects the money before getting out of the van to fetch and distribute Coke bottles filled with the golden liquid.
We continue farther inland to Coba, a highly advanced Mayan city built around the eighth century and home at one time to 55,000 Mayans. The city once covered 42 square miles and had hundreds of miles of roads that reached to other Mayan towns and cities. One of the temples left from this vanished civilization is 138 feet high and is as mysterious and impressive as an Egyptian pyramid.
It was even more mysterious nearly two decades ago, when most of the ruins were still largely covered by jungle and you felt a little like Indiana Jones, exploring without another person in sight. Today, while far from crowded, there are enough people around to remind you that you're a tourist, not an explorer.