An adventure through Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula mixes swimming in cenotes, spirituality, ancient ruins and home-cooked meals while helping transform lives.
“For the Maya, there were 13 gods in the celestial level and nine gods in the underworld, and those can be vicious,” says Ricardo Fernandez, our local guide. Like the ancient Maya people themselves, the gods of the underworld play the ball game called pok-ta-pok. “But they don’t play with rubber balls,” Ricardo says, eyes widening. “They play with skulls.”
At lunch, we eschew the mass-tourist restaurants and contrived performances, instead pulling up to a village house. G Adventures supports many small-scale local businesses and helped Claudia and Beto Noh Balam set up an in-home restaurant. Alexander shows us the community rehabilitation project that is repairing mangroves obliterated in 1988 by Hurricane Gilbert. There’s a petrified forest, where salty water has preserved the dead trees and a pink lake filled with shrimp that give colour to flamingos that visit here seasonally.
Today we’re seated on the deck of a mule-drawn carriage that runs along train tracks, the original sisal transport. Our destination is the property’s private cenote, where we descend steps into an underground cavern for a surreal swimming experience. Emerging from the cenote, we find mezcal margaritas, made from agave and served from an old hacienda carriage.
“The first Maya man and woman were created when the god blew on the corn dough and turned it into people,” Ricardo said.
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