Maya Train will link Yucatán’s hottest spots — eventually
Istepped off the platform at the gleaming new Maxcanú, Mexico, train station, eager to see the magnificent Maya archaeological site of Uxmal. All I needed was a taxi to take me there, a trip of about 30 miles.
There are no taxis, said the stationmaster, as we stood on the polished limestone floors of the high-ceilinged station, which was cool and breezy despite the brilliant late-morning sun outside. And I was the third person in two weeks to get off at Maxcanú expecting to reach Uxmal, he said.
I was midway through a five-day trip to explore the brand-new Maya Train and several of its destinations in the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico. Designed to run 965 miles around a loop of 34 stations when completed, the train will whisk passengers in cool comfort through colonial cities, archaeological sites, splashy resorts and tropical forests.
Now I was stunned. Wrangling a taxi has never been a problem in Mexico. But the drivers gathered in the main square of Maxcanú offered only beat-up vans that hopscotch through small towns, where I might or might not find a taxi to Uxmal. The next van was leaving in 45 minutes.
Yucatán’s layers of history have long held me spellbound. During earlier car trips, I have clambered up deserted Maya temples and palaces, stepped into the cool naves of massive 16th century churches and visited restored haciendas, testaments of the ostentation — and hardship — of the peninsula’s 19th century plantation economy. Traveling by train, I thought, would allow me to steep myself in more of that history.
But as I found in Maxcanú, a train won’t necessarily get you to where you want to go.
During my February trip, I traveled on the only route then available, an east-west leg that opened in December and runs from Cancún to Mérida, and then south through the port city of Campeche to the Maya site of Palenque (a short route between Cancún and Playa del Carmen opened last month, with three trains a day). I encountered scheduling confusion, unfinished stations and a dearth of trains — just two operating daily each way between Cancún and Campeche, and only one to Palenque. Overnight sleepers and special dining trains seem years away.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador considers the Maya Train his showcase development project and wants to inaugurate the rest of the train before he leaves office Oct. 1. Based on my experience, that goal seems elusive.
It was during my third day that I found myself stuck in Maxcanú, after a 90-minute train ride from Izamal. The stationmaster, an army captain, offered me a ride to Uxmal, just as he had to the stranded tourists before me. Eying Uxmal’s 4 p.m. final ticket sale, I accepted. My situation made it clear just how distant the Maya Train’s promises are for tourists seeking to explore more of Yucatán. In time, that will change, said Michelle Fridman, the tourism secretary for Yucatán state. “The idea is to have more hotels along the train line,” she said. “That will happen little by little.”
But Uxmal, among the most stunning of the Maya sites, made up for the inconvenience. Uxmal’s grand buildings are faced with intricate decorative masks as well as friezes in which geometry, nature and the divine merge. New plaques at each structure offer detailed information in English and Spanish, part of the government’s investment in improving displays at Maya sites for the train project.