Dawn was breaking over the lagoon when I looked down and saw one of the oldest life forms on earth.
It didn’t look very good. The cauliflower-like object was white, lumpy and just below water’s surface. But its appearance notwithstanding, this was one of the most remarkable objects I had ever encountered.
Edwin Ruiz – my ebullient and burly guide – explained that it was a “stomatolite” as he sipped on his morning coffee. This one was around 12,000-years-old, he said. The planet was formed 3.5 billion years before the first stromatolites.
Ruiz was leading me on a sunrise kayaking tour of Lake Bacalar, a long, finger-like lagoon in southern Mexico The border with Belize is just a short distance away. In the sun, it is known as “the lagoon with seven colors” because in that part of the spectrum where turquoise turns into teal and cerulean becomes cyan. Stromatolites, formed by colonies that metabolize the carbon and nitrogen within the water, keep the lagoon in pristine condition. It was so clear the next morning that it felt as if you were floating on a Saran sheet.
Bacalar was our southernmost stop during a 10-day tour around the Yucatán Peninsula Organize by Journey Mexico. At that early time, Charlie and Leo, our 18-month old son, were both sleeping in the hotel by the lake. Boca de Agua. Bacalar is a peaceful alternative to more popular and busier places such as Tulum. Now, the lake and its nearby town are about to undergo a major transformation.
Jake Naughton
The arrival of the Tren MayaA vast new railway system with 34 stations along nearly 1,000 miles of track. The route circles the Yucatán and connects the peninsula to the neighboring states of Chiapas Tabasco. Built at a cost of $29 billion, the railway is meant to help lure visitors away from coastal hot spots like Cancún and to create jobs and development opportunities in a region that has long been one of the poorest in Mexico. It was designed to carry as many as 30,000 people a day, ferrying them between the Yucatán’s colonial towns, Mayan ruins, nature reserves, and white-sand beaches.
The project’s launch has elicited controversy and excitement. Detractors of the project have been concerned about its impact on archaeological sites and delicate ecosystems that had escaped tourism’s heavy footfall. Of all those ecosystems, Bacalar is arguably the most beautiful—and vulnerable. Arrival of the railway in Bacalar (Bacalar’s Tren Maya Station opened only a few weeks prior to our arrival) is both an opportunity for economic growth and a challenge for the environment. Tourists are known to use stromatolites as stepping-stones. These ancient life-forms are susceptible to death if they’re broken by clumsy shoes.
New development is also a threat. After heavy rains, the runoff from construction areas turned the water murky brown a few decades ago. Around the same period, thousands of endemic sand snails that are a vital part of the food chain of the lagoon washed ashore dead. The migratory bird species that consume them vanished and did not return until the snail populations rebounded in the following years.
Jake Naughton
As we paddled along, the shoreline started to come to life. Frigates began to glide by us. Their spearlike beaks with thin, angular, angled wings gave them the appearance of prehistoric pterodactyls. Birdsong filled the mangrove forests: high trills of swallows, and guttural croaks of snail kites. As the new railway brings an influx of tourists to Bacalar, the question is whether the area’s growing popularity can be balanced with conservation.
I had ridden the Tren Maya myself a few days earlier, when I took it from Izamal, a 16th-century colonial city known for its egg-yolk-yellow buildings, to Mérida, the grand capital of Yucatán state. Charlie and Leo, who had traveled from Washington, D.C., decided to relax at our hotel after the long journey. Chablé Yucatán, a beautiful and sprawling 18th-century hacienda outside Mérida. While they rested, I set out to explore with a local guide, Victor Hugo Lizama Morales, a man of Falstaffian scale and bonhomie who owes his name to his Francophile mother.
Lizama morales decided I would benefit from a refreshment. I spent the first part of the day swimming alone in a cathedral like underground chamber, pillared and adorned with stalactites. Then we drove to Acanceh and found ourselves the only people in the small Mayan temple dating back to A.D. 500. It was most likely dedicated for the sun-god Kinich Ahuau. We climbed up to the top of the temple and communed with an enormous face made out of stucco. It had glaring eyeballs and huge earlobes. The cenotes and Mayan ruins along the coast between Cancún and Tulum have long been overrun with Instagrammers, but elsewhere the Yucatán is peppered with overlooked treasures like these. Far from the madding crowd, we had them all to ourselves.
Jake Naughton
By the time our driver had deposited us at the Izamal train station for our return trip to Mérida, it was dusk. It was so brand new, they were still painting its walls. There were few passengers and guards waiting to ride the service, which was still in a “soft launch”. One guard was watching YouTube videos on his smartphone, while another man was canoodling in a quiet corner with his girlfriend.
The railway was designed to carry as many as 30,000 people a day, ferrying them between the Yucatán’s colonial towns, Mayan ruins, nature reserves, and white-sand beaches.
Our train finally arrived after a short delay. We climbed on board. Lizama Morales was a bit grumpy as we settled into the spacious seats in green. He had criticized the Tren Maya. As construction of the railway got under way, he was interviewed for a Canadian television news show and called the project “a huge waste” that cost too much money to build. Since then, he has taken a stand on principle: he never stepped foot in a Tren Maya Station, nor had he ever boarded a train.
He began to relax as we drank a couple of cold beers from the dining cars. After several hours cooped up in a car on hot, dusty roads, it was frankly a relief to be whisked along in an electric hush, with generous legroom, cool air-conditioning, and a well-stocked café.
Lizama said: “It’s pretty nice.”
Jake Naughton
The Tren Maya was the flagship project of Mexico’s former president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or AMLO for short. It was a central pillar of his so-called Fourth Transformation, which included a government-investment program aimed at reducing inequality in the poorer regions of Mexico. Southern states like Yucatán have long been economically sidelined. A large portion of the population lives under the poverty level away from the busy tourist centers. This is particularly true for Indigenous Mayans.
The following morning we drove south from our hotel in Mérida into the countryside, which was populated with hardscrabble communities. We were headed to a project that could be beneficial for the founders as tourism spreads across the peninsula. We pulled up under a tree in the dusty courtyard of Xcanchacán, a hacienda in the village of the same name that was founded in the 18th century to farm corn and cattle. The owners of the hacienda began to grow henequen in the 19th century. This is a type of agave, whose fibers are used for rope and shoes. At its height, Xcanchacán was one of the largest henequen estates in Mexico, employing more than 700 indentured workers.
In 1985, the hacienda ceased to be a working henequen farming operation. Rosalba Guadalupe Dzul Pam is a petite woman of mid-thirties who runs a small crafts business with her cousin Soledad. Rosalba guided us to the workshop of the hacienda, where Soledad sat on a low stools in a billowing, white dress embroided with blue flowers. All around her, baskets, plates, and ornaments made with henequen were displayed on shelves and walls.
Soledad was born in the 1960s at Xcanchacán, where her father worked as a laborer. She began working at the hacienda when she was still a child, but when it closed she was forced to find work as a housekeeper in Mérida, a two-hour trip away. Then, in 2016, she took a training course with the Fundación Haciendas del Mundo Maya, an organization that supports and promotes traditional Mayan craft. She learned how to work with henequen and the logistics needed to establish her own business.
Jake Naughton
Soledad walked us through the basics of the art in her studio. She started by separating the tangled fibres by dragging across an apparatus with six-inch metal spikes. She then rolled a few of the fibers across her thigh, twisting them into a cord that would later be woven into products for sale. One of the pieces made at Xcanchacán, a small henequen bird, is sold at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The workshop supplies the Four Seasons hotel in Mexico. Soledad explained that despite having such high-end clientele, the business is still difficult to sustain. Of the 35 women who took the FHMM course with her, only six are still working with henequen. “Not enough people come here to make the money to employ more,” she said.
After the demonstration we piled into the car to drive the short distance back to Rosalba’s home, where we met up with her mother Ady and grandmother Norma. Also, Genesis was there. Rosalba guided us into the garden to see the trunk of the plum tree painted in white lime as a protection against termites. As Leo chased Genesis around the kitchen, Rosalba and her mother prepared lunch—a delicious meal of chicken cooked in a broth of cinnamon, clove, laurel, and sour orange.
We continued driving south that afternoon in the direction Bacalar. We turned off the highway five hours later onto a deep-rutted, long track that led into the forest. After a bone-shaking mile we saw our hotel, Boca de Agua, glowing in the trees.
Opened in late 2023, it is one of several new hotels in the Yucatán whose launch has coincided with the arrival of the train. Frida Escobedo, a Mexico City-based architect and award-winning designer whose previous commissions include the new wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art scheduled to open in New York in 2030. Escobedo took into account the surrounding environment when designing the hotel. Escobedo built a series wooden treehouses on stilts to maintain the woodland and minimize the impact of the hotel on the environment.
Jake Naughton
The new wave of attractions does not stop at accommodations. Matteo Luthi is the managing director of Journey Mexico and he was also staying at Boca de Agua. He had some spare time that day, so we decided to go to Ichkabal to see a Mayan site dating back to about 400 B.C. This was a new attraction that opened just a few days earlier.
We parked in the impressive new visitor’s center at Ichkabal and walked along a path bordering a large, Mayan-built rectangular reservoir. In 1996, a rancher from the locality reported that there were traces of temples in stone to archaeologists of Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History. In 1997, the first excavations were conducted.
We continued on the path and passed two smaller pyramids, whose stones were partially exposed by archaeologists. These buildings were dug up, but some of the structure was still covered. This gave them a look of newly discovered work in progress.
We entered a dense forest, and we climbed up an earthen staircase. On reaching the top we were greeted by a huge square framed on all sides by steep temples. Luthi said that it is believed the space was used to make public announcements or for ceremonies. The plaza’s enclosed structure would have amplified sound in the manner of an ancient Greek theater.
Jake Naughton
At Mexico’s most famous ruins—like Chichén Itzá, which receives more than 2.5 million visitors a year—tourists are banned from walking on the temples. At Ichkabal where there are so few tourists, this is permitted for the time being. We saw another stone staircase ahead of us, climbing up the front of one of the three tallest pyramids in the plaza. Luthi and I clambered up the steps, past masks of Mayan gods carved into the stone, to the flat platform at the top.
We could see the flat terrain, marked by an occasional mound covered with trees, for miles. Luthi explained that some of the mounds were likely other structures. I wondered if others, farther into the distance, concealed ancient cities yet to be discovered.
The next step was to travel north along the coast towards Tulum. Sian Ka’an Biosphere Reserve, a 2,000-square-mile span of tropical forest, lagoons, mangroves, and marsh. Unlike Bacalar, which is relatively new to tourism, Tulum has been transformed from a sleepy backwater into a pumping party town. I was curious to see how a nature reserve that has been protected from development since 1986 has managed.
We walked slowly through the rocky terrain to a small dock in Tulum and then took a boat out into the shallow lagoon Sian Ka’an. Charlie protected Leo with her raincoat when the rain began falling as we accelerated. Above us, sea-eagles were gliding on the breeze, their eyes darting in search of prey. At this point, we were speeding in a heavy rain. But Leo, encased in Charlie’s jacket and rocked by the movement of the boat, was unperturbed and quickly fell into a deep sleep.
Jake Naughton
After 40 minutes we arrived at Casa Chablé, which sits on the narrow spit of land that separates the lagoon from the Caribbean Sea. We had a beautiful view from our bungalow on the beach. The palm trees and beach were all in sight. The weather improved shortly after our arrival. We spent the rest of the afternoon sunbathing and introducing Leo to his first waves.
The following day I headed to the pier at Casa Chablé to meet Isiah Ancona, a boatman from Punta Allen, a small town on the peninsula’s tip. Ancona, a boatman from Punta Allen on the tip of the peninsula, is one the few licensed boatmen to transport tourists into the reserve. With private tours starting at $450 or more, it’s no wonder that visitor numbers are low. The outside world is still advancing. For those in charge of protecting the biosphere, keeping the beaches on the peninsula’s eastern side free of trash washed in from the sea is a constant struggle.
Ancona and myself set off into the lagoon. He said that he spent most of his time on fishing trips, and that his boat was decorated by stickers from angling club members from as far away as Idaho and Denmark. I wasn’t there to fish. But I didn’t want to fish. I wanted to spend my afternoon with birds. Sian Ka’an has 379 species.
We headed to the epicenter of the lagoon’s avian life—the aptly named Bird Island. As we neared, I noticed a column of frigatebirds circling the island like they were caught in a storm. Up close, Ancona pointed out the inflatable red sac on the throats of the males, with which they emit the deep clucks that filled the air—the sound of mating season. We passed a colony of brown-colored pelicans as we rounded the edge of the island. Then, we saw a “bowl”, or group of roseate spoonbills. Their bright pink plumage stood out against the pale green waters.
Jake Naughton
We then began to troll the shallow waterways of the lagoon. Everywhere we turned, there was life. A fish is carried by an osprey in its claws. Two cormorants perched in a tree with their wings spread out to dry in sunlight. Ancona noticed a shadow below the surface of the water ahead of us. I rushed to the front to find out what it was. I saw not just one, but three shapes slithering along the shallows. Then they rolled out one by one. The dolphins swim from the sea into the lagoon to spend their afternoon in the calmer waters of Sian Ka’an. The lagoon seemed to be holding on despite the trash that washed up on the nearby beaches.
As we returned to our hotel that evening, I thought about my kayaking trip in the morning on Lake Bacalar. It was still pristine, but it was on the brink of a huge change. Sian Ka’an said that these ecosystems could persist if people like Ancona kept a tight hold on tourism.
By then, the sun had broken through. The water turned blue as the sky did. The horizon between air and liquid started to blur. Sian Ka’an is translated as “where the sky was born” in the Mayan. Looking out at the vast flatness of the lagoon, from which the sky seemed to emerge in one seamless flow of color, I began to understand the name.
