Sometimes the simplest things are the most memorable. Four delicious days of rising with the sun, swimming naked in translucent waters; three nights in a wooden shack on the beach with no electricity, running water or lavatories (it was the sea or the bushes): this was Tulum, the hippy hang out on Mexico's Caribbean coast, the Mayan resort of good karma, where the ancient ruins on the clifftop mark the place the ley lines supposedly cross. It was a fantastic time, but by the end of it our bodies were so caked in layers of salt, sand, suntan lotion and after-sun cream that we thought we'd never be clean again. And it was making us irritable. We needed to move on.
Two hours ride inland on an air-conditioned coach brought us to the dusty village of Coba and the five-star splendour of Villas Archaeologicas. (Such is the prerogative of the budget traveller with healthy plastic back-up. Mind you, at £40 a night, it was hardly a splurge).
The name conjured up an image of faded colonial grandeur. I imagined a rambling Spanish mansion, with cool interiors and peeling plaster. Maybe an overgrown courtyard with a mucky pool, with dark green fronds lapping at dark green water.
In fact, it was a thoroughly modern 40-room Club Med hotel, luxurious yet slightly characterless in a white and terracotta Seventies style. The aesthetics were not uppermost in our minds, though. What we cared about was a shower, a shave and a lavatory.
The guidebook told us Coba was a little-visited place, and the hotel was nearly empty. A group of eight Europeans checked in after us, but the only other guests we saw were a French couple, who constantly played Travel Scrabble and a family of American evangelists. After lunch we watched the evangelist father lead the three gleaming children in Bible study in the restaurant. The hotel is not a reason in itself to come to Coba. People come to see the ruins of the ancient city of the same name, which spread out through the rainforest for about 50 square miles. The entire site is a national park. The road into the village leads to a crocodile-infested lake, then skirts round it to the park entrance and heads off into the rainforest to somewhere bigger, grander.
The buildings in Coba are mainly low-rise concrete. On one side are grubby tourist shops and restaurants. With few customers the waiters spend their days sweeping the spotless floors and watching Mexican soap operas. On the other side are mainly houses, a tortilleria (where we saw a whole family pounding, kneading, rolling and slapping thin circles of dough on to a conveyor belt into the oven) and a concrete basketball court, where the town's teenagers were hanging out.
The heat is so relentless that it seems as though everything is done at half speed. Even shooting a few hoops is apparently done in slow motion.
In the lake lazed a single crocodile: none of the thrashing about I had hoped for, with a tourist or a small animal in its jaws; rather it snoozed languidly in the shallows, seemingly aching for shade.
The crocodiles may seem uninterested, but the dogs are even more listless. When you walk by they stand in the middle of the road staring at you. But they don't bark and run up to you like most dogs. Instead the mangy mutts just yawn and pad lazily away, glassy-eyed, bored. The children, on the other hand, are the most animated I have ever seen. And the place is overrun with them - scrawny, grinning bundles of energy, laughing and chasing you down the road. The dogs are like rats. This place could be where the Pied Piper stopped and set up home. That the children and the dogs are tiny and undernourished is a sure sign that the trickle-down effects of the Mexican eco nomic miracle or the direct benefits of tourism haven't reached the townspeople. It made us feel slightly awkward, knowing that little of the money we spent in the hotel would stay in Coba.
However, such thoughts were far off as we ate dinner by the pool and got slowly drunk. Around us the Bible family were giving thanks for each tortilla, the French couple were running out of Scrabble letters (how many points for 'ennui'?) and the tour group were playing drinking games with tequila, creme de menthe and cheap white wine.
We wandered out of that sanitised environment in search of a bit of air and walked straight into Coba's carnival. Some Mexican towns celebrate the week before Lent in good Catholic tradition, with parades, dances and concerts. Here, everyone gets involved. Excited children were parading through town, dressed in colourful home-made costumes: ballet dancers, ancient Egyptians, Mayan chiefs, even a rabbit. There were six or seven makeshift floats, decorated bicycles and carts mainly pushed along by adults or the bigger children. Like some toothless reptile the parade lumbered through the dark ness, lurching out of the shadows into the startling buzz of a street lamp or the headlights of an accompanying car. One float was a warrior's chariot, with Termenator [sic] written on the side in pen. On another, a brown and yellow tower resembled a giraffe's head, leaning sadly to one side. A cart covered in blue and gold painted cardboard was a royal landau. In it sat the carnival king and queen, he holding a cardboard sceptre and she with a silver foil key to the town. A single mangy pony pulled the cart. So, this really was a one-horse town.
Yes, it was low-key and childish. Yes, it was cheap and makeshift, but the point is that it was something real and alive. It belonged to the town. Unlike the ruined city which is the only Coba that visitors want to know about, unlike our fancy hotel which took from the town but gave little back, this parade was on the town's own terms.
The children were loving it, their round faces shining, mouths wide open, coughing with laughter. The adults were dressed in their finest clothes, proud of their collective efforts and, best of all, we were part of it. It wasn't put on for our benefit, they got nothing from us being there, but they were so friendly towards us that we felt welcome immediately. The children squealed with delight as we took photographs and called out 'ola' one after the other, as though one of them doing it gave courage to the next.
I spoke - if that's how you can describe my faltering juxtaposition of Spanish words - to some of them and they told me what everyone around them was called. I asked when that night's dance started and they told me nine o'clock.
'Pero es muy tarde!' I joked, and when I said they would have to be in bed by then they laughed even more.
The parade ended in the car park, where it had begun, and I smugly thought of the other guests in the hotel: they had no idea what was going on just a few yards from where they were tucking into dessert. They probably weren't interested - most of them were on a one-night stopover as part of an organised archaeological tour, and would be conserv ing their energies for the next day's exploring. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to preach. It's fine to admire majestic ruins, but why not also celebrate something full of life which is happening around the corner?
Much later, we went to the 'park' where the town dance was taking place. It was a concrete circle with four concrete paths radiating outwards. A mediocre band played something between mariachi and calypso on a small wooden stage. Disco lights throbbed out of time. About a dozen young couples danced, just as lazily as they went about their daily business, the girls dressed in frills and the boys in smart trousers and shirts. In the shadows around the dancefloor were more people, mainly older. Some were seated at tables drinking and talking, perhaps remembering dances past. Others were just lurking, unsure how to join in. The smaller children - whose enthusiasm and excitement had driven the parade earlier - had gone to bed and had taken their energy with them. The town had worn itself out. There was no more fun to be had.
We got up early the next morning, before the sun was on the lake and headed to the national park. We hired bikes and cycled round the thousand-year-old ruins. They were awe-inspiring. We climbed the main pyramid, Nohoch Mul, which, at 120ft, is the tallest Mayan structure in the the Yucatan peninsula. The top rises elegantly above the rainforest canopy. From up there we could see the lake glinting in the morning sun, the town lying sleepily under a low cloud of dust and the road snaking off into the distance. A few hours later we were there, on a bus heading through the jungle to somewhere bigger, livelier.
The imperious majesty of ancient Coba, dead but not forgotten, was what we imagined before we came; what we took with us was the humanity of a Coba forgotten but not dead, its people existing in the shadow of their predecessors, sluggishly beating out a life under the sun with a sad and gentle grace.
Sometimes the simplest things are the most memorable.
