Traveling in Style : THE MIRACLE OF THE YUCATAN : No, It’s Not the Mayan Ruins, It’s the Line-Stripping, Rod-Bending, Reel-Spinning Mosaic of Color That Is the Caribbean Bonefish

Mention the Yucatan Peninsula and most people will think of the Mayan ruins at Tulum and Coba. On my first visit to the Yucatan, my wife, Adrian, and I spent long days exploring these ancient sites. I found both places beautiful. In the jungle that has swallowed Coba, I went bird-watching and added four gorgeous orioles (the Hooded, the Spot-breasted, the Altimira and the Scott’s) to my life list. I’d consider a trip to anywhere, any day, just to see such birds again. Yet the ruins themselves left me depressed. When Adrian peruses the stone steles and temples, she falls into complex reveries on the mysteries of a lost civilization. Perhaps this is because she majored in anthropology and art in college.

I spent the same years rolling 300- to 700-pound bales of recycled cardboard onto a flatbed truck. So when I sit atop a 250-foot-tall stone pyramid at Coba, amid 40 square miles of ancient stone development, including miles of stone aqueducts, viaducts and a 62-mile-long stone road, I see not the mystique of a lost civilization but the utter non-mystique of a delicate people hand-chipping stone cubes out of hellhole quarries, then schlepping them miles down molar-loosening stone roads on contraptions that looked like sight gags out of “The Flintstones.” I see surly soldiers sitting in the shade with a leer and a spear, asking if anybody was tired enough to volunteer as tomorrow’s sacrifice. I see half-mad kings, disgruntled with the progress on their mountains, ordering the arbitrary lopping of heads. I see the beauty of the contemporary Mayas’ featherweight hammocks and thatch-roofed palapa huts. And I see a glaring, not at all mysterious, reason why these ancient cultural centers were so “mysteriously” abandoned. If life itself is sacred, and meant to be enjoyed, building stone mountains by hand doesn’t cut it.

This is why, given a second chance to ponder Tulum, I beep and wave at the taxis and tour buses, and gun my VW on past without a hint of regret. I’m headed for Bahia de la Ascencion, a beautiful bay named after the final, gravity-defying disappearance of Jesus Christ. I’m going fishing.

I’d like to be able to rear back and declare this auspiciously named bay a “sacred place.” The truth is, though, that when it comes to declaring things sacred, I feel a little underqualified. The sacred, as I understand it, is any word, song, creature, thing, place or situation that puts a person in touch with the Undying, the Ever-True, the Unchanging. That’s a lot to ask of a fishing hole.

I’m also daunted, in trying to locate the sacred, by the mysterious fact that one person’s hell can be another person’s paradise. Mahatma Gandhi said he liked being thrown in prison because it gave him a chance to talk to God. Some of my friends even claim to like church! Me, I like to thrash around in water with a fly-rod in my hand. But sacred? As a mortal, ever-changing, oft-swearing fly-fisherman, I feel my expertise lies more along the lines of declaring whether the fishing is any good.

WITH A SIMPLE LEFT TURN OFF THE CANCUN-TO-Tulum highway onto the Tulum-to-Bahia byway, the adventure begins. You don’t realize this at first. You pass a cinder-block barrio called Tulum City, a couple of hotels, several quaint ranchos, and for a mile or two the road is so inviting that you merely smile when you run out of pavement. The Caribbean sparkles on your left. Quaint palapa villages hide in the palms on your right. Asian-looking cattle forage by the road. Mayan kids wave as you pass. You’re charmed. You’re sucked onward. And within another mile you’ve left all human habitation behind, your grin has become a skull’s leer, your knuckles are bone-white, and you’re bottoming-out your uninsured rental car on potholes, piles of palm fronds, countless coconuts, fallen logs.

The First Great Wonder of the Tulum-to-Bahia byway is the first 50-yard-long, road-wide mud puddle. Puddles that size, up till this one, meant “Road Closed” to me. This is the first puddle I’ve ever traversed that splashes over my hood in waves, the first that leaks through the bottoms of both doors and the first that throws my car into wallowing sideways spins. As my Bug slows to a hippo’s pace, clouds of mosquitoes bred by the puddle swarm in the windows. I roll the windows up. The car grows insufferably hot. I roll them back down. More clouds. That 50-yarder turns out to be the first of scores of such puddles. After the first half-dozen, my brakes drown and stop working. When the VW starts making strange guttural noises, I fall into a reverie on language barriers. I think, specifically, about how difficult communication must have been in the Mexican factory where German auto experts first tried to teach Mexican workers how to manufacture cars like the one upon which my life now depends.

The Second Great Wonder of the Tulum-to-Bahia byway: the snake. This is a multiply-run-over snake, which my VW and I also run over since I fail to recognize its snakiness till I am already on top of it. There are three reasons for this failure. One is the flatness problems the snake is having due to its afterlife there on the road. One is the nautical ropes that residents of the byway use as speed-bumps. But the biggest reason is that I’m from garter and rattlesnake country--1- to 3-foot snake country--and this Yucatecan specimen, which I walk back to measure with a 9-foot fly-rod, is 11 feet, 5 inches long! A bushmaster, I realize as I climb back into my wheezing, brakeless Bug. Deadly, of course, I recall as I contemplate breakdown, a night hike out, no moon, no flashlight.

A few years ago, a blight attacked the palm trees here. On miles-long stretches of the beach to my left, the fronds of every palm tree have fallen, leaving a thousand trunks standing nude and dead. Beaches that once looked like postcard paradise now bring to mind the naked shins you see lined up below the stalls in a crowded airport lavatory, the once-natty trousers heaped abjectly around all the ankles. A thundershower hits as I splash my way through this extended lavatory--and down come the Third Great Wonder of the byway: the vultures.

I’ve been peripherally aware, despite a necessarily fevered focus on the road, that I’ve been seeing quite a few vultures. Not till the rain grounds them do I realize that there are literally hundreds. The rain hasn’t quite grounded them, actually. The vultures have all chosen to perch on the tips of the blighted palm stumps, their wings spread high and wide. This strange sight puts a merciful end to my trousers-around-the-ankles image. What a great way to start a movie, I think as the sun bursts out and steam begins to rise from hundreds of spread vulture wings. But what a crummy movie in which to star as the solitary edible American rube.

THE FIRST SPANIARDS TO ARRIVE, PALE AND SHIPWRECKED, on the shores of the Yucatan back in 1511 were summarily sacrificed by the Mayas. When I arrive in my mud-covered Bug, equally pale but unwrecked, on the shores of Bahia de la Ascencion, a Mayan man in a panga , a skiff, promptly veers in to the dock.

“Hello,” he says, over his 40-horse Evinrude.

“Madison River, Ennis, Montana,” says his T-shirt.

I point at the shirt, point at myself, and say, “I’m from Montana!”

The Maya peers at me quizzically, shakes his head, points again at his T-shirt, and says, “I’m Josef!”

I’M STAYING AT CUZAN, A FISHING RESORT IN PUNTA ALLEN, A MAYAN VILLAGE at the end of the Tulum-to-Bahia byway. Punta Allen consists of 100 lobster fishermen and their families, about 500 people in all. The bahia is everyone’s livelihood, and the livelihoods are ancient. Though mine are the undoubtedly naive eyes of an outsider, I’m moved at the sight of young boys going out to catch lobsters with their fathers at dawn.

I love staying right in the village. The children are very friendly--one of the reliable signs of health in a small community. It is the holiday season, and the kids who interrupt dinner to sing Christmas carols only try for tips the first night. Encores are gratis. On beach walks, I strike up halting conversations with kids at will. There’s no fear of the lone stranger, little shyness, and I never feel them jerking me around. At nearby Boca Paila--another fishing resort--some of the Yankee fly-fishermen knock off early to join a pickup soccer game with local kids. The kids are kicking butt.

Punta Allen sits at the tip of a long, thin peninsula in the heart of the 2-million-acre Sian Ka’An Biosphere Reserve. The reserve is a bird-watcher’s paradise. Frigate birds, brown pelicans, ospreys, egrets, spoonbills, flamingos. A lepidopterist’s paradise, too. During my week there, I see so many stunning butterflies, sailing like doomed galleons on the bay, that fanatic though I am, I find it difficult to concentrate on fishing. I want to save them all from drowning. There are rumors--tracks on quiet mud banks and beaches--of ocelots, crocodiles, jaguars. I see coatimundis, many spritely foxes (a half-sized species known as the sora ) and deer not much bigger than our red foxes. I hear that the coral reefs are spectacular for snorkling. I find the beaches beautiful, and almost completely abandoned.

But I’ve come for the bonefish.

IN DISCUSSING THE ART OF BONEFISHING, I DON’T FEEL THE NEED TO MAKE anything up: a Yucatecan bonefish flat looks imaginary enough as is. The quarry itself doesn’t add much believability to the situation. Known to fishermen as “the ghosts of the flats,” bonefish are difficult to spot, they vanish in an instant, and when you do catch one, you haven’t caught it for long: they’re protected by law. The sole purpose of this fishing is the fishing itself.

The game begins with stalking. Though bones are first located by boat--they hate boats, or at least stop feeding in their presence--they’re best approached on foot. Wading’s more fun anyway. You keep cool. Because bonefish are skittish and possess amazingly good vision, bonefishing favors keen eyes, tall bodies (for angle of vision) and long casts. In quiet conditions (my first day on the bahia is dead calm), I find hooking fish is impossible if I cast less than 80 feet. Even at that distance, I have to tiptoe with the stealth of a churchgoer sneaking out for a smoke. Bonefishing is frustrating for oafs, and for impatient beginners. It is, like surgery, one human pursuit in which skill still matters. Unlike surgery, if you botch the job no one sues, or even cares and your patients get off scot-free.

Because a clearly seen bonefish is a spooked bonefish, a fisherman is peering constantly toward the very edge of his vision. When the fish aren’t tailing, a subtle but moving gray shadow is about all he ever sees. Over the course of a long, bright, silver-watered, blue-skyed day, this straining for perceptual distance has interesting side effects. I have made beautiful, delicate and repeated casts to recalcitrant bonefish, only to discover that I’d been casting to sunken driftwood, to patches of turtle weed or, like Pooh and Piglet, to shadow-filled footprints I myself made earlier in the day. I have watched what I thought were bonefish turn into 20- to 30-pound permit fish, have quickly changed to a permit fly, have made a perfect cast, and have watched my permit transmogrify into a big, bored stingray. Add wind or passing clouds to these difficulties and even the moving shadows that reliably mean fish become fraught with hallucinatory properties.

Because bonefishing takes place at the far edge of anything the eye can authoritatively see, many of the fish one so painstakingly stalks do turn out to be mere conjecture. But this is nothing to complain about: The water is so warm, the spoonbills and flamingos so dazzling, the pelicans and egrets and cruising barracuda so focused on their fishing, and the mangroves, distant palms, the bay and sky so beautiful that you forget why you ever preferred reality to conjecture anyway.

At the end of the day, when the water reflects the sky and becomes impossible to see into, you must give up on cruising fish and search instead for tailing fish. This is a great gig for old peaceniks, in that what one sees, when one finally locates feeding bonefish, are one or more translucent, finger-length, V-shaped tails that are literally, shimmeringly flashing the peace sign over the top of the tiny waves. Even these tails can be hallucinated. Bits of weed sticking up out of the water. Shiny sticks lapped by little waves. But what shame is there in hallucinating peace? Real or unreal, you stalk every symbol of peace happily. Real or unreal, you cast to them all. And once in a while, to your amazement, the symbol vanishes and the thing itself takes your fly.

Once you set the hook, everything changes: the speed with which this species of peace departs is legendary. Bonefish make even baritone fly reels sing soprano. They start ungreased reels on fire. They run the line and, backing off your reel, give you eight or 10 minutes to painstakingly regain it, then run it all off again. And again. And maybe again. But sometimes you do capture them, and hold them in your hands. And what no one has ever told me, what no photograph can possibly reveal, is the shine and colors. It’s indescribable, of course. All wonders are. Yet with a simple prop, I can begin to describe this wonder.

Take out your VISA or other holographic credit card and place it under the brightest available light. See that dove, or world map, or whatever, in the middle of the silver rectangle? Turn the card in increments. See how the dove changes from orange to peach to yellow to chartreuse to green to turquoise to aquamarine to lavender to purple? That’s the thing I didn’t expect, the visual miracle of these fish. When you stand in warm clear water beneath bright blue sky, when you hold a Yucatecan bonefish in your probably shaking hands, every last scale on its sunlit body is doing exactly what that dove does. A living bonefish, before your own living eyes, is a peace-sign flashing, line-stripping, rod-bending, reel-burning mosaic of color.

Stranger yet, you can feel in the breathing bonefish what some fools think they feel in the dead credit card: the riches; real monetary value. But in the fish it’s living value, inseparable from these shining waters. You can’t get that priceless shine out of this beautiful bahia alive. But if you could--if you could slide that living, holographic bonefish gleam across the marble counter of the finest bank in London, Tokyo or Manhattan and tell the clerk, “I’d like to cash this,” how the clerk’s skin would pale as aquamarine and lavender doves fly across her face! A longing like bright green water would fill her eyes. She’d check her cash drawer, shake her head, call the manager over. And he, too, would pale as the doves--peach and lemon-green now--fly over his pin stripes, his silk tie, over the backs of his manicured hands. “I’m sorry, sir,” he’d say with great reluctance. “But we just don’t have that kind of money.”

So what a joy, kneeling here in the Ascencion flats, what a luxury and privilege, to open your hands and let your living riches go.

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GUIDEBOOK / Hooked on the Yucatan

Telephone numbers and prices: The country code for Mexico is 52. Local area code for Cancun is 988, for Bahia de la Ascencion 983. All prices are approximate and quoted in dollars. Lodge prices are based on double occupancy.

Getting there: Mexicana offers nonstop flights between Los Angeles nd Cancun four days a week. Connecting service is available on American, Continental, Mexicana and Aeromexico airlines. The resorts offer meet-and-greet services, and major car rental agencies service the airport. Those wanting to drive to Bahia de la Ascension are advised to rent Volkswagen Bugs or 4-wheel-drive Suzukis rather than luxury cars. No one should make this drive in the dark; if unable to reach Tulum by early afternoon, you should spend the night in Cancun or Playa del Carmen.

Where to stay: (Mexican fax machines and mail can be slow, and two of the three lodges listed below do not have telephones. For arrangements, see Fishing below.) Cuzan, Apartado 24, Felipe Carrillo Puerto, QROO 77200, Mexico, telephone 40358, fax 40383. Proprietors Sonja Lillvik and Armando Lopez provide a moderate-priced fishing experience in a Mayan fishing village, with rustic palapa -style rooms and outstanding indigenous cuisine in a communal dining room. Rates: $1,299 per person for seven nights, six days guided fishing, accommodations and three meals daily ($459 for a non-fishing companion, who can snorkel, birdwatch or sunbathe); $799 per person for four nights, three days guided fishing ($269 for a non-fishing companion). Casa Blanca offers a more luxurious “international fishing lodge” experience, including round-trip air charter from Cancun to Bahia de la Ascension, spacious and well-appointed rooms, excellent service and beautifully presented food. Rates: $2,695 per person for seven nights, six days guided fishing, three meals daily, March 4-June 3 (rates fall the rest of the year). Boca Paila, a smaller but similar fishing resort, lies 19 miles north of Bahia de la Ascension. Rates: $1,950 per person for seven nights, six days guided fishing, three daily meals (non-fishing companion $1,300). Rates drop 20% during the summer.

Fishing: Excursions range from the luxurious to the do-it-yourself. In tailoring a trip, an American representative familiar with the range of prices and experiences is essential. One such person is Jerry Swanson of Kaufmann’s Fly Fishing Expeditions Inc., P.O. Box 23032, Portland, Ore. 97281-3032, tel. (800) 442-4359, fax (503) 684-7025. He can book excursions at all three lodges. Casa Blanca and Boca Paila can also be booked through Frontiers International Travel, P.O. Box 959, Wexford, Pa. 15090, tel. (800) 245-1950.

At all three lodges, you fish from spacious, flat-bottomed pangas that accommodate two fishermen and a guide. (The guides, excellent fish-finders, are knowledgeable about fishing technique, but most don’t speak much English.)

For more information: The Mexican Government Tourism Office, 10100 Santa Monica Blvd., Suite 224, Los Angeles 90067; (310) 203-8191.