How a Mexican town became paradise for thousands fleeing soul-destroying lockdowns
Do you ever feel like you're locked in one of those moments where you're watching a world that's far away in time or distance unfurl through a screen, as though you're somehow not there? As Smooth Operator blares out of big speakers, Sade's inimitable 1984 lines – “we move in space with minimum waste and maximum joy” – seem like the mantra of the assembled. Close your eyes and you could almost be at a Balkan festival or on a Mediterranean beach, with sweat and seduction closing in fast.
Tekio, a beach bar next to the Pocna Hotel, has a few dozen denizens on the chosen side of the rope drinking sparkling wine from ice buckets while on Playa Paraiso in front, 100-odd souls sit or sway, their Oxxo convenience store-branded coolers dipped into on occasions to pluck out a chilly Modelo. It's not really a crowd, there's plenty of distance between them all, strung out along the sand.
The beach is called Paradise, certainly for the twenty-somethings here that's exactly where they've landed. A ragtag army of Canadians, Poles, Russians, Brazilians, Argentinians, Mexicans, Brits, Germans and, of course, Americans have all escaped. Their destination on the eastern side of the Yucatan Peninsula, with the Caribbean sea lapping, doesn't look like the freezing and depressing lockdown many left behind.
Things are different here, but Covid has, as with everywhere else, changed everything. You can keep on dancing but that's just papering over the cracks. Certainly the last time I was in Mexico, swaying through Jalisco from Tequila to Guadalajara, my Spanish better but my manners and journalism far worse, what struck me was the carefree attitude – the smashed truckers stopping for implausible roadside margaritas, the pulsing clubs rammed, the people always so chilled.
What Mexicans and the rest of us – shall we call them travellers, tourists, remote workers? – have in common in this: the more time I spend in Tulum watching and listening the more apparent it becomes that everyone is suffering differing levels of trauma. The hotel duty manager tells me when Tulum was locked down in spring 2020 and tourism banned he turned to his previous job, getting by as a jobbing mechanic to make ends meet. Cleaners tell me they couldn't feed their children. Taxi drivers and hospitality staffers have come from Tabasco, Campeche, Mexico City. They miss their families, but they need to earn, they say. Tulum's holiday pesos ripple through the entire country's economy. Mexican tourism was worth ￡18bn in 2019; that income halved in 2020.
And the foreigners, well they've been traumatised too. The New Yorkers tell me about being so alone in their apartments they thought they were going mad; a Briton sounded like she was on the brink when she chose to come out to Tulum as a last resort. While I'm here reporting, the pile-on against tourists and influencers intensifies. I'm working, yet I've barely told anyone I'm in Mexico, and haven't posted on social media. I'm taking photos on autopilot, thinking how good they'd look on Instagram, realising no-one will ever see them.
The balance between physical health on one hand and mental health and the economy on the other sure is delicate and Mexico has received stick for going too far one way. Its capital is a Covid hotspot and its vaccination programme is a shambles. But there are also scant furlough payments. In Tulum, your employer is everything – some hotels like Casa Malca (the villa where Pablo Escobar used to sun himself) and Nest kept all their staff on full pay during the shutdown. But many Mexicans went hungry. I wonder whether richer countries like the UK and US might consider sharing their vaccines and their knowledge, rather than blaming travellers.
Of course I think too about the stressed health workers, and worry that tourists are spreading Covid – there are certainly enough boorish types, waving banknotes around and not seeming to give a toss. Back in December, the resort's Art With Me festival acted as a superspreader event and suddenly Tulum was persona non grata. Quintana Roo state moved to Orange on the national alert system, meaning restaurants and bars can only be 30% full. Some look fuller than that, the cops sometimes arrive dressed like soldiers to break up the party. But at the Costamed Hospital by the side of the main highway out to Cancun a doctor tells me he hasn't had a Covid case for two weeks. The youth of the population keeps people out of hospital, and rates are not as high as you might think, he explains. Business is conducted outside and on 20 miles of beaches there's plenty of room to socially distance. Testing stations are everywhere, althought it's only foreigners who can really afford to get tested.
In Downtown Tulum the tourists are fewer, younger, less spoilt. At Super Aki and Chedraui, the local supermarkets, compulsory temperature check guns are fired at your arm by an attendant with one hand; with the other he sprays sanitiser on your hands. You don't get that at Tesco. Inside you can buy beautiful fruits you've never seen before in every tropical colour and tortillas of every size and shape.
The sine qua non of Mexican life continues – the taco street stands blow the smell of burnt beef into the air, men with massive bellies blast pick-up trucks down crumbly streets (there's always a few more of them slumped in the back), lines of people wait patiently outside Spanish-run banks as if colonialism was still a thing, the clouds skirt across a skyline of tall phone masts and blinking lights and buildings that never look finished, songs which always talk about 'mi corazon' blast from bodegas as if the owners feel the heartbreak. The Mexicans seem wearier than I remember. Yet they will bounce back. There's always plenty of laughter around.
While marvelling like a kid at the iguanas which look like mini dinosaurs scuttling through Tulum's Mayan ruins I'm struck by the circularity of history, by the sense that time is so very long yet we're so obsessed by what's happening this week at the exclusion of everything else; our stay on this spinning rock briefer than a blink of a God's eye. The ruins, so old and so stockily impressive, look out across turquoise waves, from which one Spanish man-of-war once brought one smallpox sufferer into Mexico – the disease eventually decimated an entire population. Exactly half a millennium later are today's travellers doing the same? Or is it something different – is it more that history flings its slings and arrows at us and we simply have to get through that strife? Here at the ruins, small houses were packed with offerings to the Gods. Now as then we live in hope that our futures will be bright, the powerful people we look to work in offices and labs. But when the prayers are said, life continues. It has to, doesn't it?
Read more: The best hotels in Tulum