# Mexico´s Lost Coast



## Hound Dog (Jan 18, 2009)

We had a lot of fun visiting the Puuc Ruins in Yucatán from Uxmal to Kabah to Sayil to Labná and, while we had intended to drive from those places to Mérida and then along the northern Gulf Coast to Dzilam de Bravo and then over to Isla Holbox and down to Tulum and Calakmul, here at the first of March, it was becoming too steamy and miserably hot to proceed with tempertures typically exceeding 35C and humidity at 80% which is a bit much for old goobers who have spent the last 40 plus years in San Francisco and the Mexican Highlands so we decided to head back to our home in the Chiapas Highlands to cool off at 2,000 meters and also to explore the Campeche Coast from Campeche City down through Champotón and Ciudad Del Carmen and on to Frontera and Villahermosa and home. As a Gulf Coast boy having been raised in South Alabama and having spent every summer in the 1950s at Destin, Florida, then a small fishing village with the single most beautiful pure White sand beaches and crystal clear aquamarine waters to be found anywhere on the planet, I had to visit this coast hugging highway from Champotón through Ciudad Del Carmen to Villahermosa and so off we drove to discover perhaps one of the strangest and most perplexing beachfront communities in North America along the gulf in its manifestation as the Bay of Campeche from Campeche City south to the incredibly ugly but prosperous industrial city of Ciudad Del Carmen to Frontera, Tabasco and then on into Villahermosa and home in Chiapas and I have some good stories about this "lost coast" to tell you starting tomorrow. 

The Gulf Coast is many things from the Florida Panhandle to Veracruz to Northern Yucatán from Progreso to Isla Holbox but this territory is unique.

More tomorrow.


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## Hound Dog (Jan 18, 2009)

What attracted me to the Gulf Coast between Campeche City and Frontera, Tabasco (Highway 180) was the fact that most of it hugged the coast which from the Eastern shore of Mobile Bay to Panama City along the Gulf there where I was raised as a child, meant endless miles of stunningly beautiful beaches and cristal, aquamarine waters so I was curious as to why this coastal route was virtually ignored by all travel writers and simply had to drive that route on my way home to Chiapas from Yucatán just to ascertain as to why it was so unremarkable. 

We had intended to stay in some beachfront hotel near Ciudad Del Carmen as it seemed only logical that there would be some tourist oriented places there offering bedding plus a decent seafood meal but, man, were we wrong about that. The beaches approaching Ciudad Del Carmen are universally industrial sewer ratholes and, although it was a Sunday afternoon, the traffic getting into and out of the city was chaotic and one long and miserable traffic jam for kilometers between the two major bridges there spanning the Laguna de Terminos, we found ourselves wishing we had driven inland at Sabanquy and taken Highway 186 south of the laguna toward Palenque but by the time we discovered what a hell hole Ciudad Del Carmen was, it was too late to turn back so onward we drove to Frontera through some of the most poverty-stricken villages we have seen in Mexico or anywhere else. Frontera, on the other hand, offered some decent accomodations and a nice meal for a late lunch so we did not find it necessary to spend the night in the car.

As for the beaches along this stretch of approximately 150 kilometers from Champotón to Ciudad Del Carmen, they were a mixed offering. The gulf waters along that stretch were typically an attractive aquamarine color although a bit murky in general yet calm when we were there and seemingly good places to stop for a dip in the sea but the beaches themselves were narrow to non-existent although many kilometers of beachfront contained attractive white sands. The peculiar thing is that almost all of this endless beachfront was deserted on a Sunday afternoon and beach access was limited at best with virtually no structures of any kind on the seafront. No seaside motels or restaurants, no visitors except for the occasional, rare group of fishermen. The whole coast was in a somewhat surreal and mostly deserted plain except for that Ciudad Del Carmen urban disaster zone. While it was exhilarating for me to be back on the gulf coast and enjoying those beautiful, if somewhat murky, aquamarine waters, the narrow, deserted beaches were a bit depressing and I was pleased to head back inland at Frontera.

When one enters this surreal coast at Campeche City, which is an interesting town in the historic quarter but is otherwise an ugly urban hodgepodge with a notably ugly beachfront, one soon passes Champotón, a small city with nothing to recommend it and, then, about 15 kilometers south of there, one runs across something called Aak Bal and the atmosphere becomes even more surreal. Curiosity got the best of us so we had to exit the highway and visit this beachfront development for some lunch at the beachfront restaurant there that is part of an incongruous luxury hotel development on the gulf in the middle of nowhere. There, we had lunch at this luxurious restaurant in the luxurious beachfront hotel/condo resort with but a few guests lounging on the beach and, on a Sunday afternoon at about 3:00PM, We were the only customers eating in the grand beachfront restaurant while being served by smartly dressed wait staff as if we were at the captain´s table on the Queen Mary and I got the feeling that this was all a dream until my seafood cocktail arrived at the table and contained previously frozen shrimp, a blasphemous error in civility when one is dining directly on the gulf so the realization came upon me that this place was not what it seemed so it was time to move on. Upon exiting this seaside anomaly, I noted that the beaches seemed contrived of imported sand and the myriad palm trees imported as well to give the impression of the tropics for the few guests bothering to spend time there. 

An overall strange and fun experience but to be left behind as unworthy of revisiting.


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