True, Cancun’s year-round tourism economy also depends on conventions,
cruise ships and middle-class Disney families, but it has happily (if
unofficially) allowed itself to be known as a besotted weeklong party for
American college students. Throw in honeymooners and the eco-adventure crowd,
and you have a tourism juggernaut, with more than 51,000 hotel rooms from Cancun
to the Mayan ruins of Tulum—a 75-mile coastline called the “Riviera
Maya”—attracting an astounding 38 percent of Mexico’s international
tourists. Yet somehow, they did it all without any I-must-go-before-I-die
golf. Nobody ever confused Cancun for Cabo.
But now that’s all changing with
the speed of a Caribbean storm. The Riviera Maya boasts six quality courses,
notably a $20 million Greg Norman creation, El Camaleon, that will host Mexico’s
first official PGA Tour event in February, and in the next two years another six
to 10 name-designer joints are supposed to open or break ground.
In most
cases, the courses will be the jeweled centerpieces of sprawling multihotel
resorts owned by Spanish, Canadian, Asian and U.S. firms that are cutting
down the Yucatan’s mangrove jungle so quickly that it all resembles the
remaking of south Florida.
In fact, the two regions hold a lot of
similarities. They’re both flat and humid, and if the ocean breeze isn’t
blowing, a bit buggy. Like much of south Florida, the Yucatan is really a slab
of limestone laced with caves and sinkholes, some of which make fascinating
features on the better golf courses. Culturally, Cancun, like Miami, can be both
charming and oppressively tacky, but you can still head down the coast and
immerse yourself in small fishing villages or head inland to the incomparable
Mayan ruins of Chichen Itza and Uxmal.
The other similarity—hurricanes—has
gotten a bit too much press
lately. On the afternoon of October 20, 2005, Doug
Goubault,
general
manager of El Camaleon, stared into the dark churning water
off the
coast and wondered how he would survive Hurricane
Wilma, once gauged at
175 m.p.h., the strongest hurricane ever recorded
in the Atlantic.
“We
boarded up all the windows and I sent my wife to Acapulco,” says
Goubault, whose
invigorating course is 30 miles south of
Cancun at
Fairmont’s Mayakoba resort,
which opened in June.
“I knew how bad it would be when I saw the ocean surge
over those
dunes.” Goubault continues, waving a 5-iron at a tranquil but
depleted
beachfront. The local economy lost an estimated $800
million and
thousands of hotel workers lost their homes and
jobs for months.
But like
many Cancun properties that remodeled and reinvented
themselves after Wilma, El
Camaleon found a silver lining in
the
hurricane’s destruction. On the dreamy
par-3 15th, the
obliteration of
those sugar-white dunes opened up a full view of
the turquoise
Caribbean that previously had been obscured. The
enticing
palm-lined
hole is now arguably El Camaleon’s most
memorable hole.
Norman’s
first design in Mexico, El Camaleon is the Yucatan’s most
impressive course,
for now. At 7,067 yards and usually windy,
it has
immediate brain-imprinting
holes, ample fairways,
harmless rough and
easily moves from mangrove forest to
jungle
to beachfront—hence the
name, chameleon.
El Camaleon’s clubhouse lures
you with striking Mexican art, golden
onyx walls, a gentle outside waterfall
and, on the top floor,
an
Argentinean steak house. But here’s the sizzle: The
lush,
salt-tolerant
paspalum fairways are surrounded by six miles of
high-walled
lagoons
dynamited from the ancient limestone
Mayans used for their temples.
Seven years of work. A half
million cubic yards of debris.
As planned, the
lagoons naturally filled with clear subterranean
water, which Mayakoba guests
navigate (no swimming please) by
lanchitas, or electric-powered boats. The
canals are also
attracting
turtles, great egrets, cormorants and crocodiles. But
Goubault, a
Canadian wit, assures us that were a hotel guest
actually eaten
by a
crocodile, his party would be allowed a
late checkout.
