BRAVO, Local Football Review

Ancient temples, tropical jungles and deserted beaches — the dazzling Yucatan peninsula has it all

Through the jungle towards the sea, on a day of intense sunshine and tropical rain. A mosaic of fallen leaves decorates our path and, somewhere, a peacock is cawing. All is cloaked in an agreeable humidity. Britain is a 12-hour flight away — and hurrah for that.

We come upon a clearing of neat lawn, beyond which a thatched hut is offering refreshments. We pause to examine the menu at this simple wayside halt. Yes, they really are serving Kobe beef cheeseburgers at £34 a bun and a bottle of Domaine de la romanee-Conti for £21,329.

A ragged youth with a rucksack passed this way once. More than a quarter of a century ago, I spent a couple of months travelling down Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula, through Belize and into guatemala.

My budget was tight, and the rooms in which I stayed were often squalid stalls. I dined on rice and beans at roadside shacks, swam in forest rivers, glimpsed guatemala’s civil war and watched the volcanoes above Antigua bubble and spit.

Altogether, a thrilling adventure. Then I had to go home and work.

recently, I returned to Central America to retrace the first part of that trek. This time, I went with my wife and two teenage daughters, and the budget and itinerary were adjusted accordingly.

While my wife quickly grows restless on tropical island beach holidays, our daughters adore them. The Mexican Caribbean presented a compromise: beautiful seascapes with a hinterland that offers millennia of history and culture and a sophisticated cuisine.

But would the former youth recognise his old pathways? With difficulty, at times. New temples, devoted to all-inclusive hedonism, rather than the old gods, have since risen along the shoreline, which has even gained a new name: the riviera Maya. Not without reason.

The riviera pivots upon Playa del Carmen, 44 miles to the south of the concrete touristopolis of Cancun, with its ever- expanding international airport. When I last came this way, Playa was a fishing port of 15,000 inhabitants; a hippy-traveller stopover with a couple of bars — or so my romantic memory claimed.

Today, it is sprawling home to 200,000 and the nightlife is varied and full-on. Spring break — when thousands of u.S. students descend on the riviera to drink, dance and mate — is something to behold.

Throughout the year, the cruise