Cancun bounces back from hurricane

Seemingly, all is bueno here on Mexico’s sunny, sinny Caribbean coast, a year after Hurricane Wilma bore down for a three-day weekend like some party girl who wouldn’t leave.

In the Hotel Zone, the ribbon of resorts along Cancun’s beachfront, innkeepers have been on a spending spree, adding presidential suites and tennis courts, flat-screen TVs and more shore than ever before to its world-renowned beaches.

Along Kukulcan Avenue, 6,000 freshly planted trees sway to the billowy tropical breezes that seldom rest. (Think Rachel Ward wrestling with her hair and skirt in the movie “Against All Odds.”)

And diners are again ordering pork chop Milanese at La Dolce Vita or the buttery broiled grouper at Lorenzillo’s, where customers pause on their way out to feed the 10-foot crocodile that swings by almost every night for a little late-night bite.

For decades, travelers have come to this glitzy peninsula, 640 miles due south of New Orleans, for its guilty pleasures and remarkable setting, the Yucatan jutting out so far into the gin-clear Caribbean that you can almost smell Castro’s cigar.

And a year after a Class 4 hurricane swallowed the beaches and tore open some of the nation’s priciest hotel rooms, all is well here in Cancun and the sprawling resorts to the south and east.

Or is it?

There is no heat like a tropical heat. Roman de la Cruz melts a little as he describes cowering for three days in a cottage as Wilma skidded to a halt, held in check as if by the devil’s thumb.

“It got here and just stopped,” recalls De la Cruz, 46, who has seen other hurricanes come and go, usually in 12 hours. “All I could do is stay in my cottage.”

Remarkably, no one died in the storm that caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage. But when it finally left, so had those magical beaches and something else vital: As they were with New Orleans after Katrina, tourists were wary of visiting during the next hurricane season, June through November.

It left tour promoters such as De la Cruz in dire straits and the little vendors at Market 28 in the city’s core suffering for customers.

“It was the worst summer I can remember,” De la Cruz says.

The cabbies, tour promoters and bellhops are now sweating the prospects for the coming tourist season, which begins in earnest in late December. Will the uber-rich return to the luxe shopping malls and five-star resorts that line Kukulcan Avenue? Will the college kids guzzle their way through Dady’O, Bulldog and the other steamy clubs at the north end of the island, where parties once lasted till dawn?

Indications, so far, are yes. Innkeepers say that winter bookings are encouraging and that once the threat of hurricanes eases, guests will return, unfazed by the little things forever changed by the 145-mph winds.

Like the sand. Wilma washed away most of the sand on the east-facing beaches, leaving hotels and timeshare owners with an empty feeling. Cancun has plenty to offer, but without a beach, it’s like Switzerland without the Alps.

In came Belgian company Jan de Nul. A half-mile at a time, it replenished the shoreline with 96 million cubic feet of sand from the ocean floor. In some places, the size of the beach doubled.

That would seem great news, but Cancun now has a dirty little secret: The new sand isn’t as powdery as the stuff it replaced. The eight-mile stretch is grainy and full of the sort of shell fragments and broken coral found at the bottom of the ocean.

“It’s sharp, not what I expected,” says Rocky Shepherd, here for the first time from Mauston, Wis., with his wife, Kathy. “I thought I was going to cut my foot.”

Then there’s the issue of all the big-ticket changes. The 371 rooms in the glassy Fiesta Americana’s Grand Aqua remain shuttered, as do the 560-room Sun Palace and the 300-room Caribbean Village.

But those that have reopened – most of the area’s 100 hotels – have used the post-hurricane repair period to upgrade their facilities in luxurious ways.

High-end guests will no doubt love the Ritz-Carlton’s new culinary school (opening Dec. 1) or appreciate the new family-friendly programs at Club Med, including cultural tours of the region.

This makeover is clearly a push for an even more sophisticated Cancun, one that appeals to conventiongoers and spend-happy jet-setters, possibly at the expense of midrange travelers, particularly the college revelers.

Who cares, you ask? After all, Cancun is hardly a cultural treasure – more like Mexico’s version of Miami Beach. Cancun is probably younger than you are, born in 1970 after developers determined that this bubbly barrier island was perfectly suited for big hotels, shoulder to shoulder.

Cancun grew from a sandbar. Today, it is a sometimes-maddening 17-mile concrete jungle of fortress-like resorts, with the occasional wet-T-shirt contest to spice up the long, languid evenings. Mothers everywhere would likely rejoice if this tequila-soaked temptation just washed away.

Here’s why Cancun matters. Nearly 40 percent of the money spent by foreign tourists in Mexico pours into Cancun and the Riviera Maya, the 80-mile stretch of beach and resorts immediately to the south. Cancun and its neighbors represent 15 percent of Mexico’s total revenue.

Cancun is also the gateway to ruins and historical sites to the west – Chichen Itza, Valladolid, Coba – which remind the world of the remarkable Mayan society of great architecture, astronomy and art.

So Cancun counts, even if mostly what it counts is money.

If you go…

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