THE LOST WORLD OF QUINTANA ROO by Michel Peissel
BOOK REVIEW: FIVE STARS
This is a true story by the young Frenchman Michel Peissel of his journey to the Mexican Caribbean before it became the Riviera Maya. It is an exciting story and a “must read” for anyone who is inquisitive about what life was like in Quintana Roo before the All-Inclusive resorts transformed the jungle into a tourist mecca.
This classic book warranted me reading it for a third time. My wife and I are very familiar with the area, published a book on it and know people who verify the author’s chronicles..
At the end of this review I have a great surprise on where you can check out a digital copy.
EXCERPTS:
Through an introduction scribbled on a small, dirty piece of paper I had met some friends who rather reluctantly, as is often the case when a foreigner crashes into the privacy of a home, had invited me on a picnic. We drove down the Paseo de la Reforma, whose modern buildings and bordering parks recalled the fact that Mexico City is not only capital of the nation but a mighty city of four million inhabitants and international fame. We then sped on through Lomas de Chapultepec, the fashionable residential district whose flowered villas shelter thousands of wealthy foreigners who seek asylum, often eitlier political or matrimonial, in Mexico. I was off to Tepoztlan, a place whose strange name was to be the first of many I was to learn while in Mexico, and which, like such names as Coatzacoalcos and Teotihuacan, suggests a strange poetical beauty hidden under a harsh and complicated Indian origin.
I had come to Mexico with no particular purpose save to spend pleasantly the six months that lay between my entering graduate school and my completion of a dreary six months as trainee in a bank on Wall Street.
The only good highway in Mexico, instead of joining major cities or industrial centers, serves Mexico's two largest luxury resorts, Cuernavaca and Acapulco.
Mexico is entirely composed of innumerable different worlds which really meet only in the green or gray smudges of international atlases. It was in Tepoztlan that I fully realized that Mexico was a country yet to be fully explored.
Gustav Regler, the writer we had come to visit in Tepoztlan. Gustav Regler, well known as a cynic and for his profane and ironical books on the sixteenth century, is also one of the men who know Mexico the most thoroughly. His book The Three Faces of Mexico has acquired world fame.
He had, through involved circumstances, been banished from his paradise and now lived beyond its gate.
The Mayan civilization, I found out, was probably the most sophisticated culture of pre-Columbian America.
Mayas were probably the greatest builders of the ancient inhabitants of Central America. They left thousands of temples and palaces spread all over what was their domain, the principal cities being Palenque, Tikal, Copan, Uxmal, and Chichen-Itza, strange places whose pyramids, towers, and palaces still stand today as silent testimonial of the great Mayan civilization.
Mayan is more widely spoken in Yucatan than Spanish, and many books are written, in modern characters, in Mayan, which is also taught in schools.
The Yucatecans take good advantage of their god-sent gift which goes well with their lazy character, and hammocks are strung up everywhere and the majority of the population sleeps all day and all night. Hammocks are found under railroad cars, between trees, and in all the houses, which have hooks on the walls of every room. This allows the Indians to live in comfort in their small huts, with more living space by day. Since mosquitoes are the plague of Quintana Roo and I presumed also of the so-called Mosquito Coast, I bought a large, fragile-looking mosquito net, a cocoon affair that could be fastened around my hammock.
The hammock, mosquito net, Antiviperine, and medical kit, plus twenty rolls of assorted film, cameras and lenses, and a pair of sandals, were all neatly thrown into a large henequen bag. Besides this, I carried a small bluish bag, a cross between a flight bag and a briefcase, for my shaving and toilet articles.
How much modern Yucatan could envy the ancient Mayas. What had once been a thriving coast, with innumerable ports such as Yochac, Puha, Puerto Chile, and Ak, was now nothing more than jungle and occasional isolated palm huts. Being curious about the lives of chicleros, men began telling of the deeds of chicleros and of their own experiences, of murders committed by their colleagues, and of the bloody orgies at the great chicle camps such as Leona Vicario (the god-forsaken corrugated-iron inferno I had passed through on my way by bus to Puerto Juarez). To my horror I was soon to realize that the worst tales told about the chicleros were true. Apparently the chicle areas of Quintana Roo, which are situated behind the coast from Tulum up to Cape Catoche, are exploited by several companies, but for the chicleros the two most important companies are two clans of chicleros who are constantly at war with each other.
Curious and want to read the book.
It is available free to borrow from Internet Archives. Follow this link:
https://archive.org/details/lostworldofquint00peis
Although the book is no longer in print, you can obtain a used copy at Amazon. com. Follow link: The Lost World of Quintana Roo.
It is also available through Abes Books. Follow link: The Lost World of Quintana Roo
Also read: Yucatan for Travelers by John M. Grimsrud
