Signature Luxury Travel & Style
MEXICO
Boasting pristine beaches, ancient ruins and an inimitable national cuisine, Mexico is a destination to tempt every traveller.
There’s a moment, around dawn, when the earlymorning mist begins to burn off with the first of the sun’s rays. Sensing the new day, howler monkeys start whooping in chorus, setting off an orchestra of birds, from parrots to toucans.
Sitting at the top of the pyramidlike Temple of the Inscriptions, and gazing over the leaves of steamy verdant jungle dotted with cedars and sapodilla, I feel like I’m on the set of an Indiana Jones movie.
It’s my third morning at Palenque, a vast archaeological zone in the Mexican state of Chiapas. And if I could come back daily for another week, it wouldn’t be enough. Offering a glimpse into one of the most powerful Mayan civilisations in history, Palenque has an almost spiritual allure.
While the site is not as big as other ruins I’ve visited in my travels across Mexico – including the pre-Columbian city of Chichen Itza and the jawdropping Aztec pyramids of Teotihuacan – it’s still incredibly beautiful, featuring ruins covered in intricate bas-reliefs dating back thousands of years.
I’m coming to the end of my threemonth visit to the country, an eyeopening, tequila-fuelled journey that has taken me from the ridiculously pretty Pacific Ocean beaches of Baja California in the north to the equally
“Offering a glimpse into one of the most powerful Mayan civilisations in history, Palenque has an almost spiritual allure.”
alluring Caribbean-facing stretches of sand along the Yucatán Peninsula in the southeast. From the moment I flew over the country’s sprawling capital, I knew I would find it very hard to leave.
Love at first sight
Mexico City is a place that assaults your senses in a clamorous union of smells and sounds: street vendors selling
antojitos (‘little cravings’), from corn on the cob with chilli-mayo to warm pulled-pork tacos with fiery salsa and lime; and mariachi music echoing across leafy parks and grand squares.
And then there are the bazaars. It soon becomes a Sunday tradition to visit La Lagunilla, a dizzying labyrinth of antiques stalls. Most of the things here I have absolutely no need for but I want everything: the vintage sunglasses, the pressed lithographs, the preloved strands of turquoise and coral.
To steel myself for intense bartering, I head to a small bar on the edge of the market and order a takeaway Michelada, a Mexican beer mixed with lime,
Tabasco, Worcestershire sauce, fresh chilli and tomato juice, served in a saltrimmed glass. It’s like liquid courage.
The other place that becomes something of an addiction is the Museo Frida Kahlo, affectionately known as Casa Azul (Blue House) for its eye-popping cobalt exterior. This is where the painter was born and where she died, and where she lived many years in between with her artist-husband Diego Rivera.
It’s home to some of Kahlo’s most important pieces of work, and the rooms are stocked with her curios and beloved possessions. It almost feels as though she has just popped out to the shops.
Flavour infatuation
It’s hard to leave the capital, but I have four weeks of Spanish language classes ahead of me in Guanajuato, about 300 kilometres to the northwest. It’s one of those places that regularly appears in ‘listicles’ of the world’s most colourful cities thanks to its candyhued houses, which tier down a hill to the atmospheric streets of the UNESCO World Heritage-listed old town.
I’m staying in a boutique hotel – once a private family mansion – and when not in class, I put my new language skills to the test ordering chilaquiles (fried corn tortilla strips topped with salsa, eggs, refried beans and pulled chicken) for breakfast, tamales (pockets of corn dough stuffed with meats and veggies before being steamed in banana leaves) for lunch, and mole (a stew of more than 20 ingredients including chocolate, chilli and cinnamon) for dinner.
It’s debatable whether my Spanish is any better when I leave, but what is not in question is my complete infatuation with Mexican cuisine. I head for the Caribbean coast with a growing appetite for pollo pibil.
This fabled dish sees chicken marinated in achiote, a type of bitter orange, and seasoned with a generous amount of chilli. It’s a flavour bomb that becomes a daily habit when I land in Tulum, near Cancún. While Tulum city itself is unremarkable, its World Heritage ruins are not. Here, shrines to Mayan civilisation are perched atop dramatic limestone cliffs, which fall straight down to a stretch of powderwhite sand known as Paradise Beach.
Just offshore is Mesoamerican Reef, the second largest of its kind in the world behind the Great Barrier Reef. When I’m not scrambling over jungle-laced pyramids, this incredible biosphere reserve is where I can be found. Some days I don a snorkel and kick from shore over incredibly shallow bommies; other days I head out on dive expeditions to dramatic coral caves, which count green turtles and migrating whale sharks among their bounty of more than 500 marine species.
The other reason to come to the Riviera Maya is for the extravagant resorts, such as Azulik. The perfect union of style and sustainability, this incredible beachside eco-retreat is without electricity or Wi-Fi, but there’s plenty of eye candy in the individually styled villas, crafted from reclaimed timber and with free-form pools.
Instead of area tours, Azulik offers Mystical Wanders, designed to take guests to extraordinary places that they will likely have entirely to themselves: a hidden cave for a massage, perhaps, or a hard-toreach cenote (natural underground reservoir) for an otherworldly swim.
Crystal-clear natural pools, cenote are like massive, freshwater opals in the middle of the jungle. I dive down to snorkel through a tunnel that reaches an immense cavern enveloped by vines and moss, apparently an ancient sinkhole for human sacrifices to the rain god, Chac. Drifting here, I’m faintly aware of water trickling off limestone stalactites into the inky water. If Zen had a sound, this would be it.
Travel file
Getting there
Airlines including Qantas, Virgin and Delta fly daily from Australian capitals to Los Angeles, with regular connections on to Mexico City.
Accommodation
azulik.com
Information
visitmexico.com