Cancún is one of the most visited tourist points of Mexico.

There’s more to Cancún than high-rise resort hotels on a beautiful Caribbean beach. Unfortunately, that’s all that too many visitors see:

Also Most Cancún restaurants I visited accept plastic, but most Mercado vendors do not. Either U.S. or Mexican money works fine..

Cancun and its surrounding area of the Riviera Maya are Mexico’s top destination for international travelers, drawing more than 3.5 million visitors a year. The beach was the lure for the first visit my wife and I took six years ago. But since then, we’ve returned to explore the Northern Hemisphere’s largest barrier reef, natural springs pocking the Yucatan, mangrove swamps, salt marshes and thick jungle.

Much of the Yucatan is a flat limestone slab, topped with low jungle and scrub. There are no real rivers; the heavy seasonal rain seeps into sinkholes, known locally as cenotes, that have eroded over the millennia into the porous stone. The fresh water travels underground and percolates into the sea from natural springs.

The woods, cenotes and waters off the coast host a riot of colorful animals. Great blue herons, anteaters, the Yucatan rust rump tarantula, giant iguanas, ocelots, manatees and other animals make their home in the region.

Families or other travelers who want to heed the call of the wild can check out the eco-parks of Xcaret and Xel-Ha. They are just a short ride away from the resorts at Cancun, Playa del Carmen and the rest of the Riviera Maya.

Xcaret is the more developed of the two. It’s a bit like a U.S. water park — but with a walk-through butterfly pavilion. You can also follow a narrow river from a spring out to the Caribbean and swim with dolphins and manatee (a practice that quite a few biologists frown upon as stressful for the animals).

Xel-Ha feels less engineered and is centered on a huge lagoon where fresh spring water mingles with the saltwater. The water teems with schools of electric-colored fish. There are bike trails and a spring-fed river to swim or float down in an innertube. Xel-Ha also offers chances to swim with dolphins.

More adventurous tourists stray a bit farther, to visit the gem of the Sian Ka’an Biosphere Refuge. The UNESCO World Heritage Site sprawls across about 1.3 million acres and includes such things as offshore coral reefs, as well as the beaches, lagoons, cenotes and low tropical forests.

CONSIDERING all the recent speculation about hostility between blacks and Latinos, you have to cringe when you hear what happened to historian Christopher West on a working trip south of the border four years ago. The African American academic was helping research the influence of tourism on children in Isla Mujeres, an idyllic island near Cancun, when a local boy on the street threw a piece of pan dulce at him.

The insult (not the first he had encountered) might be seen as more evidence of that racial animosity, currently fueling the notion that some Latinos are cool to Sen. Barack Obama because he’s black. But West considered the gesture an anomaly and went on to shoot some hoops with his Mexican friends and colleagues.

In fact, the historian says he’s been accepted as family in some parts of Mexico, thanks to his wife, Ilda Jimenez, a Mexican American anthropologist he met when they were students at USC. The union of the two communities is reflected in their surname, which they changed to Jimenez y West. Today, as history curator at the California African American Museum, Christopher Jimenez y West continues to explore the often overlooked cultural connections between the country’s two largest minorities. This week, he was busy preparing for the opening of a groundbreaking exhibition, “The African Presence in México: From Yanga to the Present,” which celebrates what is called the Third Root of Mexican culture, adding African to the mix of European and native Indian.

[latimes.com]