Adopted from Conde Nast Traveler- April 2007 - Sarah Kerr

Seven centuries after the collapse of the Mayan civilization, a new kingdom of high-end hospitality- is rising in Mexico's far east

Beyond the jungle and the ruins and the powdery beaches, there is the eerie light that suffuses this part of the world in the off-hours. Wanting to see more, I trade in amenities one evening to watch the drama that plays out in the sky above Mexico's Sian Ka'an Biosphere Reserve. My humble hotel room will be a box-shaped tent mounted on a wooden platform and protected by a palapa roof whose damp scent of thatch sweetens the salt air. I lie swinging in a hammock near the tent, a football toss from the Caribbean Sea.

Later tonight, I'll walk uphill to the eco-lodge restaurant to eat a dinner of cilantro-slathered shrimp tacos and admire the eager yet dignified mutt, Sombra, who seems to be this place's mascot. But at this hour, in a 1.3-million-acre preserve whose name is said to mean Where the Sky Is Born, fading light is the main event. Looking east, I track a ghostly streak of orange-pink as it glides across the water. This is the sunset's reflection. To the west is the sun itself, red and sinking over a chain of lagoons. Soon the sky will darken. The minimal use of electricity around these parts shows off the galaxy, delineating the brightness and relative depth of the stars like a telescope. This glimpse of the universe is as moving as any I have had since one night, long ago, when I was camped high up in the Rocky Mountains.

Development is occurring on multiple levels, from the eco-minded to the opulent to the all-inclusive. Because the attractions here tend to be more varied and more intense than those offered by the typical quick getaway, the area beckons splurging honeymooners, focused yoga devotees, American retirees in search of a second home. You can explore (gently, carefully) the great coral reef just offshore, or snorkel in a brisk cenote, one of the freshwater sinkholes formed on land when a cave collapses; you can bike around the jungle-sheltered remains of a classical Mayan city, or float down a mangrove canal dug a millennium ago by traders who needed to carry goods out to sea. Or you can do nothing but sit on a beach – a beach that outside the peak of high season remains reliably quiet, and which is not man-made but formed courtesy of fish that bite into the reef looking for algae and then pass through their system granules of soft calcium.

This notion of a Riviera is, of course– let's get this out of the way– a smart marketer's handle. Riviera lends an aura of imported chic that has nothing to do with the Yucatán's unique environment or its tough, riveting history. The idea that the region is Mayan is especially poignant, since hotel owners have tended to be foreign while many employees have journeyed here from distant, non-Mayan corners of Mexico seeking jobs..... Still, the name Riviera Maya has at least served to distinguish the area from nearby Cancún.

Cancún was planned– in a massive, hubristic effort by the Mexican government that started in the late 1960s– as a destination catering mostly to American visitors. ... By contrast, Playa del Carmen, the flagship town of the Riviera Maya, for a long time tended to grow piecemeal, by dint of individual, often European business owners. One environmentalist, originally from Mexico City, told me, "I used to party in Playa del Carmen in 1989– Fifth Avenue was a sand street of five blocks! There was only one bar or disco at night, and everybody knew one another."

Seaside Playa has mostly hung on to its not-Cancún character, with relatively few behemoth buildings once you exit the highway, a still-strong European contingent, and a tradition of public promenading down the shop– and café-lined pedestrians-only thoroughfare of Fifth Avenue.

The caves and the modest wildlife exhibit at Aktun Chen natural Park are easily reached on my first full day– a brief drive down a gravel path into the jungle off Highway 307, thirty-five minutes south of Playa. But at this quiet, lightly drizzling hour, the place has the slightly fantastic air of a separate world. KEEP CARS LOCKED, reads a sign as I pull into the parking lot: MONKEYS AT PLAY. A few minutes later, a guide is pointing a group of us visitors forward an ocelot. The site's caretakers discovered the boldly spotted cat after it had spent weeks killing the chickens they raise to feed the rattlesnakes and yellow-beard and coral snakes on display in glass cases. Uphill from the snakes, the cat lounges on a bench in its large cage, amber-eyed and serenely mysterious.

With what strikes me as a very Mexican, macabre sense of humor (it is part of his shtick to warn visitors about lurking jaguars), the guide then walks us through the backstory of what we're about to see. Many millions of years ago, the Peninsula rose up out of the sea, formed of what until then had been coral reef. The result is land that is basically a brittle limestone shelf. It is extremely rich in calcium and magnesium and generally poor in other nutrients. This northern portion of the Yucatán must survive without anything like what we traditionally understand as a river. Instead, the peninsula depends upon freshwater that flows down from the highlands into an elaborate network of underground channels.

The guide leads us on a six-hundred-yard walk through a series of atmospherically lit underground chambers, some dry, some with a planked path over a floor pooled with water. From above, tender tree-root tendrils poke with touching persistence through the caves' roofs in search of freshwater. Stalactites also hang from the ceiling; where stalagmites rise up from the ground, they join with one another in a crusty pillar. To demonstrate the water's high calcium content, the guide touches his nose, then bends down to dip his finger in a shallow pool. The oil on his skin makes the water fizz. "Like Tums," he jokes.

He leads us farther on, past a family of mosquito bats roosting on the ceiling and an ancient fossil of a spiral-shelled conch on the wall. Impressively, he claims to be able to read the terrain above– the trees, and the dips and swells in ground elevation– from the roots and the dripping water and the encrusted minerals below. The final chamber is a huge, craggy bowl of beautiful bright-blue water, the sight of which causes the group to hush, and turns us for a second into delighted children.

As we walk, my body starts to loosen up and relax, as if someone had oiled my tin Man joints. Partly it's a matter of welcome exercise after travel. But I wonder if the place itself, with its warm and humid and mineral-dense air, could be acting like a mild, naturally occurring spa.

I continue south on Highway 307, passing some of the big all-inclusives. I'm headed to the ruins at Tulum. Post-classical Mayan, they are memorable less for their design than for their magnificent setting on a cliff above the sea.

As I stand just beyond the Temple of the Wind and look down at the pale swimming-pool-blue water, it is quiet enough to appreciate its quality of tropical Shangri-la.

The Spaniard Juan de Grijalva, having set out from Cuba, sailed by in 1518 and concluded from the size of the formidable Castillo temple at the cliff's edge that this was a city to compare with seville. The world at large forgot about the ruins, however, until 1842, when Tulum was rediscovered, half-hidden amid overgroth, by the American explorer John L. Stephens and his English illustrator, Frederick Catherwood, a fascinating figure who was a close friend of the poet John Keat's.

At Punta Allen, I find unrestrained sun, one-story houses painted in bright pastels, and the starkest quiet in a week of quiet. The place looks more classically Caribbean than any yet on this trip. A man enters town along the sandy main street on a buzzing all-terrain vehicle, which he drives as slowly as a golf cart; on this morning, at least, a pervasive mellowness controls the tempo. After a bite of tart, limey nachos, I meet up with the fishermen for a snorkel. I see up close elegant, golden globes of seaweed growing on top of off-white coral– the substance and sustenance of so much life here. A swimmer darts past me, heading for the sea floor; it's one of the fishermen, in flippers, executing the kind of graceful twist I have seen only cartoon mermaids perform. He picks up a conch shell, and from the rustle he creates there emerges a school of small brown fish. Back in the boat, we pass a group of women in exercise clothes who form a long, earnestly power-strolling line of humanity along the beach. it strikes me that most of us visitors, arriving here with our individual goals and interests, are not unlike the fish– members of one school gliding past other schools, seeking shelter and depending on the tolerance and resources of this beautiful place.

On my last morning, I drive inland.... I stopped not far north at Punta Laguna, a village and nature preserve inhabited by some thirty Mayan families, to get a sense of the jungle as you move inland from the sea. A teenager in rolled jeans and flip-flops led me on a walk into the forest of twisting trunks, past a butterfly as wide as the spread fingers of a human hand a family of flying monkeys– three adults and a baby–that lay half-asleep in the treetops. ...The walk ended at the village dock on a pastoral lake. This was in the afternoon; on some nights, he said, you can look out at the glowing green eyes of freshwater crocodiles.

On this, my last drive of the trip, I venture a bit farther north. The classic colonial stone church and busy arcades around the central plaza of dusty Valladolid are not as hard to locate on a conventional time-line of human history as much of what I've seen this week. The Mayan landmarks along the coast are far older, but they can seem young, too, in the sense of being not yet settled, their surroundings still in play. Fifteen minutes north of Valladolid I reach my last stop, the ruins of Ek Balam. The land as you approach the site is flat and verdant, and if the vegetation were different, it would resemble a plot of Midwestern farmland. The ruins are wrapped in a sublime quiet that even a most unexpected school of human "fish"– hundreds of middle-aged BMW motorcyclists here for their annual convention – cannot disrupt.

At the far end of what has been excavated to date sits a structure of startlingly monumental width. Along its base is a series of chambers. A central staircase leads, near the top, to a surveyor's view of the jungle and to two walls of carvings that appear to symbolize the jawlike entrance to another world. Under the late-day sky, the fine details and unblemished, faintly rosy surface of the carvings make it hard to believe that they are not a counterfeit crafted a week ago. Instead, they were preserved for centuries by having been buried under earth. It is amazing how different in architecture and mood this place is from the ruins I have visited earlier in the week. I would love to begin to understand why – to learn more about what it was like here a millennium ago, and for that matter a century ago, when a caste war between the Mayans and a stunned Mexican Army flamed in the Yucatán, an on-and-off battle that represents the longest colonial uprising ever in the Western Hemisphere. Beyond history, I want to see the tortoises that crawl along the beach in the summer. And could I learn to dive in a cave? It's the last day, and already I want to come back.