The Sunday Times December 19, 2021 13Travel Mexico
50 milesPlaya del CarmenCancunTorres de la PazMerida
ValladolidTixhualactun
Los Siete
CenotesTulumI
n an illegal settlement
under the power lines
in the jungles west of
Playa del Carmen,
13-year-old LetiziaRamírez Pérez is preparing
for her first day ever at school.
Three hours west, in a bare
room in a village called
Tixhualactun, 51-year-old
María Dominga Cen makes
her living weaving, and in the
flatlands outside Merida,
sixtysomething stone carver
Carlos Nabte is getting used
to having a steady income for
the first time in his life.
If you’ve been on holiday
with the travel giant Tui
anytime recently, all of the
above and much more has
been made possible by the
£1 per adult and the 50p per
child you never knew you’d
donated. It’s not an added
extra, but a tiny portion of
your holiday cost that’s
siphoned off by the Tui
Care Foundation (TCF),
a Berlin-based not-for-
profit whose mission is to
transform tourism into a
“force for good”.
Founded in 2016, TCF
provides financial assistance,
mentoring and advice to 565
enterprises in 27 countries.
In Mexico the foundation
supports 170 projects, ranging
from a children’s cancer
treatment centre and a coral
nursery to a jungle cookery
school and three brothers
offering tours of the Mexican
Underworld. It’s all a long
way from the strip-mall glitz
of the Riviera Maya.
If you’ve never been to
Mexico’s Caribbean coast, you
should know only that when
the local labourers who built
its resort city were invited to
name it, they decided on
Cancun: the Mayan word for
“nest of snakes”.
Local culture in this
Mexican Magaluf is summed
up by the Mad Max show at
the Coco Bongo mega-club.
Environmental awareness is
limited to bus trips to see
incarcerated dolphins. It’s a
model created in the 1970s
that, 50 years later, looks as
fashionable as a fur coat.
“Cancun knows it needs to
change,” says Carlos Ibarra,
a local tour operator.
“Otherwise it will become
another lost city — and we’ve
got enough of those.”
That the world’s biggest
tour operator and an
important source of revenue
to Cancun is providing
practical and financial aid
to some of Mexico’s most
forward-thinking start-ups is
odder still when you realise
that while all are open to the
public, few, if any, of these
ventures are yet offered as
Tui excursions, although you
can visit them independently.
That’s partly because
German law forbids the TCF
to contribute to Tui’s bottom
line, and partly because the
projects are thought too
niche, too hard to reach or
too raw for Tui’s clientele.
But it seems clear that there’s
an aspiration within the
corporation to transform
the package holiday from
a product based purely on
profit into an experience that
has a positive effect on the
local population. And they’ve
picked some true wonders.
At Los Siete Cenotes, a former
cattle farm an hour east of
Merida, seven huge holes in
Yucatan’s limestone crust
reveal pools of blue water
150ft deep (los7cenotes.com).
They’re just a few of an
estimated 6,000 cenotes on
the peninsula that, to the
ancient Mayans, were not
only the main source of fresh
water in a land where all the
rivers are underground, but
also sacred entrances to
Xibalba, or the place of fear.
These days the most
accessible are Instagram
tourist traps, but here,
down a broken dirt track
in the world’s second-
largest tropical forest,
there’s still mystery.
The roof of the
seventh cenote is
intact, and after
a blessing from
a shaman whose
eyes warn me to
take it seriously,
I descend a jungle-
fringed stone staircase
into darkness so denseYUZIS/ALAMY; CHRISTIANE FLECHTNER/ TUI CARE FOUNDATIONI can feel it. As I drop into cool
water I can’t see, there’s a
sense of deepest peace. Then
the guide pulls me onto a raft,
tilts my head back so my eyes
are level with the surface and
gently propels me across the
pool. That’s when the lights
come on and I realise I’m
gliding under a liquid sky,
looking up while gazing down
on an inverted forest of
Gaudíesque stalactites. I could
be soaring over Cappadocia,
or Grand Tsingy, or high above
the surface of another planet.
It’s an out-of-world experience
in the Underworld. “There are
so many natural, cultural and
historical resources in this
wilderness,” says Ricardo
Medina Rodriguez, the owner
of Los Siete Cenotes, “and yet
the villages around here are
among the poorest places to
live. Attractions like this could
transform the rural economy.”
The Camino del Mayab aims
to do the same. Mexico’s first
and only long-distance
footpath follows 60 miles of
ancient byways — tracks from
the henequen plantations; old
Mayan rutas blancas — through
forests and fields, past faded
haciendas and hidden cenotes.
The four-night hike costs
£615pp for two, including bed,
breakfast, dinner and luggage
transfers, and, says Alberto
Gutierrez of the sustainable
tour operator EcoGuerreros,
“80 per cent of the earnings
will go to the community”
(ecoguerreros.com).
Mexico’s sustainable
revolution continues in
Merida, where the gift shop
La Casa de Donia Way has
brought fair trade to the
souvenir industry (doniaway.
com). Traditionally, craftsmen
such as Carlos Nabte went
store-to-store and hand-to-
mouth, focused only on
earning enough to feed his
family each night.
That trickle-down has
reached Maria Dominga Cen
too. In her tiny house she
sits on the floor using a
backstrap loom that’s
pretty much unchangedsince the Mayans were
building Chichen Itza. In
a plastic world demand for
her hand-woven bags had
died, but TCF support for an
ethnic clothing museum and
gift shop in Valladolid revived
it, giving the 52-year-old a
livelihood (murem.org).
On the northern coast,
Henry Pat runs low-carbon
boat tours and has a clear view
of the future. “The pandemic
has given tourism an
opportunity to focus not just
on profit but on environment
and culture,” he says.
In 2023, all being well, the
Tren Maya, or Mayan Train,
will open. A legacy project by
the Mexican president Andrés
López Obrador, the 948-mile,
£7 billion track will link Tulum,
Cancun, Valladolid and Merida
to Campeche and Palenque,
enabling tourism to migrate
away from the coast. It has the
potential to open a region as
culturally rich and naturally
spectacular as Rajasthan in
India, and to let those who
live there redefine tourism’s
economic model. By then,
some might be on Tui’s
excursion programme.
In Torres de la Paz, 13-year-
old Letizia is enjoying what
she calls the happiest day of
her life. About 450 families
live here. They’re the people
we don’t notice: the people
who sweep the beaches,
wash the dishes and clean the
toilets at the luxury resorts.
Because their jungle shanty
is unauthorised, they receive
no services from the Mexican
state. When the pandemic hit,
says volunteer teacher Marijtje
van Duuren, most lost their
jobs, but the TCF-funded
school, which has no upper
age limit, has turned fear of
losing everything into hope.
Reina, with four children and
an unemployed husband, has
learnt how to make and sell
doughnuts, allowing her to
establish a small business.
A sewing workshop attracted
40 women from the village
— 15 of them got jobs. And
Letizia, when she has learnt
to read, write and count, has
big plans — plans as ambitious
as this new outlook for travel.Chris Haslam was a guest of the
Tui Care Foundation (tui.co.uk)Start-ups and schools in Mexico are being funded by mass tourism, reveals Chris Haslam
Tourism to
Mexico’s premier
sights, such as
Tulum, top, is now
benefiting localsTRANSFORMS
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