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La Ruta Maya (cont.)

YUCATÁN, MEXIO
Five days and 1,786 miles south of Austin, I find myself digesting lunch in a hammock suspended above a turquoise pool. Our destination was a campsite near Chunchucmil, a Maya ruin about 50 miles southwest of Mérida, where we planned to meet up with archaeologists mapping the unexcavated site. But we were temporarily sidetracked by the lure of lunch and a siesta at Hacienda Santa Rosa, a 19th-century sisal plantation turned swank hotel.

Washed in blinding shades of lavender, yellow, and scarlet, Hacienda Santa Rosa glitters like a desert mirage in The-Middle-of-Nowhere, Yucatán. It isn't a stretch of the imagination to picture Gabriel García Márquez dreaming up One Hundred Years of Solitude from a rocking chair on the veranda outside his own Maya-themed casita, which comes complete with its own reflecting pool.

This orgy of carnivalistic religiosity is wreaking havoc on my Lutheran sensibilities.

Lunch was fresh guacamole, homemade tortillas, and lemonade in the ballroom-size dining room. We feasted while a more well-mannered Museum of Natural History tour group (here, no doubt, to tour Jaina and the half-dozen other major Maya ruins nearby) wandered the grounds, gaping at strolling peacocks and gardens of scarlet bougainvillaea. After lunch I made a beeline for the hammock and let the sun bake my Nordic skin to a cancerous shade of scarlet, but I was too comatose to notice. The previous night I had whiled away the hours gazing at the stars from under my mummy bag atop a 20-foot limestone mound at Oxkintoc, a 2,000-year-old Maya ruin just outside the village of Maxcanú.

Taking advantage of the staff's preoccupation with the Museum of Natural History visitors, the eight of us snuck a dip in the pool, then wavered for a few minutes, debating whether we should spring for a casita. "Nah," we decided, and shoved off before our dripping bodies betrayed our bad manners.

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