Nature Gets Top Billing in Yucatan’s Sian Ka’an

YUCATAN PENINSULA, Mexico — We were floating on our backs in a swift current toward the sea, treading water lazily as the canal carried us through a bulrush marsh that stretched as far as the eye could see.

The turquoise shoals of the Caribbean lay six miles east, while an equal distance behind us the marsh turned first to mangroves and then to the dense, steaming rain forest where our journey had begun.

In between, the crystalline waters of this remarkable system of lagoons and canals, carved into the limestone shelf that forms the entire Yucatan Peninsula, carried us along its ancient wetland course--exactly as it carried the Mayan traders who dug the canals a millennium or more ago.

Rounding a bend, my fantasies of a time warp were shattered by a call from the boatmen 30 feet behind us. He was frantically pointing to a spot along the canal just ahead of me, flapping his arms and speaking in a rush of Spanish too fast for any of us to understand. “Jabiru, jabiru, jabiru!” he seemed to say.

Jabiru? No comprendo.

An ear-shattering screech from an overhanging tree not five feet above my head provided the answer. Scrambling to stand against the current, we looked up to see two huge, gaping, screaming beaks attached to balls of downy brown feathers, both leaning out from their nest in a hissing, screaming, spitting display of indignation.

Vaulting into the boat for a camera, we managed to snap off a few shots before the current carried us away. The birds, the boatman explained, were very rare baby jabiru--storks--and the mother has a wingspan of eight to 10 feet (hence the flapping of arms).

Hearing this, we decided that the better part of valor was to put some distance between us and the little ones before mom decided to pay us a visit.

They call it Sian Ka’an--which is variously translated from the Mayan as “Gateway to Heaven” or “Birth of the Sky.” What it is is a miracle by any definition--a 1.3-million-acre “biosphere” that contains a richness of archeological, cultural and ecological treasures that would have made the conquistadors’ unfound pot of gold appear silvery pale in comparison.

More than 30 Mayan archeological sites have been officially identified here, including numerous pyramids, temples, canals, highways and entire cities. Experts believe some of the best finds might yet remain hidden under the forest canopy.

Some 350 species of birds--including the endangered stork, a variety of rare parrots, keel-billed toucans, ibises, flamingoes, pelicans and great blue herons--call Sian Ka’an home at various times of the year, as do four of the world’s eight species of endangered sea turtle.

Sea manatees and spiny lobster thrive along Sian Ka’an’s two big coastal bays and inside its coral reef, the longest in the Western Hemisphere. And the forest and mangrove swamps shelter a menagerie of rare and wondrous wildlife--jaguars, howler monkeys, miniature deer, tapirs, ocelots and crocodiles.

Unfortunately, of course, the 16th-Century conquistadors did find Sian Ka’an and its once magnificent cities. But they lacked the vision to see the real treasures here, and they settled for merely conquering, converting and infecting the peoples they found before repairing to their fortresses to the north.

For the next 400 years or so, Sian Ka’an and the other centers of Mayan culture to the west and the south were left much to their own devices, carrying on their ancient, if Christian-influenced, traditions, speaking their own language, eking out a miserable but independent existence through subsistence agriculture and fishing.

It wasn’t until the early years of this century that the Mexican government even attempted to exert its influence in this part of the Yucatan.

Today, only about a thousand Mayans remain in Sian Ka’an, scattered in tiny, inaccessible villages in the dense jungle of the interior and a few coastal centers, where they have formed farming and fishing cooperatives.

But thanks to their own wisdom and the dedicated efforts of environmentalists who have won limited protections for Sian Ka’an and other Mayan centers, it now appears that these mysterious people and their beautiful, rich land may survive, and even accommodate, the latest and most threatening incarnation of the conquistadors: the 20th-Century variety known as tourists.

The threat is real, and it grows closer every day. It comes from the inexorable pressure for raw materials, cheap labor and untouched expanses of glittering Caribbean beachfront emanating from neighboring Cancun, just 80 miles north of the northern boundary of Sian Ka’an.

The contrasts between the two regions couldn’t be greater--modern versus ancient, congestion versus solitude, glass and concrete versus marsh and forest, wealth versus poverty. But for all its glitzy artificiality, Cancun is no less “alive” than Sian Ka’an, and it is expanding at the rate of 25% to 30% a year, consuming thousands of acres of forest and mile after mile of some of the most magnificent sandy beach in the world.

Fifteen years ago, Cancun (appropriately, “nest of serpents” in Mayan) was a tiny seaside resort, a mere glint in the eyes of government tourism officials. Today it is Mexico’s fastest growing city, an instant metropolis of more than 300,000 permanent residents, most of whom live off the more than 20,000 luxury hotel rooms that line its white, talcum-like beaches.

Already, the so-called “Cancun-to-Tulum corridor,” the 80-mile strip of developed coast that reaches to the northern edge of Sian Ka’an at the ancient Mayan seaport of Tulum, provides more tourist accommodations than any place in the entire Caribbean, including all of Puerto Rico, according to the proud boast of a government tourist official.

It attracts an estimated 2 million visitors a year from throughout the world.

According to worst-case estimates (or best-case, depending on one’s perspective), as many as 65,000 more hotel rooms will be constructed along the corridor during the next three decades.

Given the tragedies of Mayan history, the people of Sian Ka’an and those who would protect it are given to taking worst-case estimates seriously. Which is why Mayan farmers and fishermen who have never heard of national parks and who have practiced ruinous “slash and burn” agriculture for centuries have suddenly become ardent conservationists.

“For them,” said Adela Samper, a representative of a private, nongovernmental organization called the Amigos de Sian Ka’an, “conservation isn’t an abstract or elite idea at all. It’s a matter of the life and death of their own communities and their way of life.”

In 1986, after years of local and outside environmentalist pressure, the government of Mexico declared the entire Sian Ka’an region a Biosphere Reserve, thus extending limited but important safeguards against inappropriate development.

The following year, the United Nations included Sian Ka’an in its international network of Biosphere Reserves, mandating that “nucleus” regions be set aside for unadulterated conservation and limited scientific studies.

Around those zones, a broader “buffer zone” has been defined in which indigenous populations may continue to live and exploit natural and touristic resources, but only in a highly regulated manner that emphasizes sustainable development.

The concept, explained Samper, is relatively new to the conservation movement. It differs from national parks in that it recognizes that pure conservation is often an inappropriate, if not impossible, option in poverty-stricken Third World regions where local tribes have a stake in the land that reaches back centuries--or, in the case of Sian Ka’an, millennia.

“If we were to come in here and tell the people they can’t live over there anymore, or hunt in that swamp or fish in that bay, they’d just ignore us--as they should,” Samper said. “So the idea of a biosphere is to work very closely with the local people, to gain their trust and help them find ways to survive and even improve their lot without doing further damage to the land.”

At Sian Ka’an, this approach has led to the establishment of a demonstration farm that teaches intensive methods of cultivation and crop rotation as an alternative to slash-and-burn, and the creation of marketing co-ops in the fishing communities, along with strict monitoring and regulation of the lobster harvest.

Last year, an even larger Mayan region, known as Calakmul, was declared a biosphere in the southern Yucatan on the Guatemalan border. It adjoins Guatemala’s first biosphere, and the two may soon be joined by a small biosphere candidate in northern Belize.

Together, they would comprise a much-hoped-for, three-nation “Mayan Peace Park” totaling some five million acres . . . twice the size of Yellowstone.

Advocates of this union of the Mayan biospheres--a plan known as La Ruta Maya--hope that parts of El Salvador and Honduras will also join in the preservation effort.

They envision a futuristic system of “eco-tourism” for the entire Mayan region that would allow thousands of visitors to pass through the fragile forests and major archeological sites via a carefully regulated network of guided bus tours and monorails that would leave the environment relatively unscathed.

Until then, unguided tourist incursions into the Mayan reserves remain difficult and hazardous at best, given the lack of paved roads or accommodations. Even backpacking is out of the question for most of Sian Ka’an, where the rain forest is virtually impenetrable.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that the determined bird watcher, amateur archeologist, anthropologist, or just plain rabid, must-see-everything tourist can’t enjoy Sian Ka’an.

“Part of the biosphere concept is to promote limited tourism for the benefit of the reserve itself,” said Sampan, noting that the Friends of Sian Ka’an, with financial support from the World Wildlife Fund and the Nature Conservancy, even has a director of “ecotourism.”

Beginning last year, the organization started conducting one-day tours for up to six people at a time through one of the more accessible and archeologically significant portions of the reserve--a tour I will always remember as the Day of the Screaming Storks.

Setting out from Cancun, our group drove for 1 1/2 hours south to Tulum, past the expanse of oceanfront luxury resorts. A few miles south of Tulum, at the little resort of Chac Mool, we left the paved road and entered the reserve on our way to Chunyaxche (Muyil in Spanish), an inland seaport first settled around the year AD 1, according to the Tulane University archeologists working there with local Mayan helpers.

Even before reaching the main ruins, we could glimpse through openings in the forest the rough outlines of ancient stone structures that have not yet been cleared of centuries of overgrowth.

At the end of the dirt road, we left our van and, after dousing ourselves with insect repellent to ward off the mosquitoes, we set off for a short hike down a narrow path slashed through the dense forest.

Recent excavations have revealed centuries-old structures of varying sizes spaced about every 25 yards along the pathway.

No guards were anywhere to be seen, no rangers, no T-shirt concessionaires, no officials or even signs of any sort to tell us not to scamper to the top of the crumbling pyramid temples and poke our heads into dark recesses, frightening Gila monsters and ourselves. We had only our guide from Amigos and our own sense of what was appropriate to limit our explorations.

From Chunyaxche we drove down a narrow rutted road to Muyil Lagoon, a freshwater lake that begins the old water route to the sea, some 15 miles east. There, at the end of a rickety dock, four Mayan children splashed in the water and played in a dugout canoe--a miniature replica of those their ancestors used centuries ago--while their fathers, our boatmen, patiently waited our arrival.

A quick trip across the lagoon brought us to the entrance to the first of a series of Mayan-built canals--about four feet wide, just enough for the boat to pass through.

These artificial canals, not discovered by Europeans until the 1920s, spill finally into Laguna Chunyaxche, a large lake surrounded by marsh and mangrove. Crossing it, we entered yet another series of canals, known as Xlahpak, these being natural instead of man-made and eight to ten feet wide.

As we coursed closer to the sea, the current grew stronger, allowing us to shut down the outboard and drift, enjoying the silence, interrupted only by the occasional cry of herons or excited exclamations over the sighting of a king vulture or other exotic bird.

Suddenly, looming up out of nowhere in the reeds ahead, a 1,000-year-old building appeared just 15 feet from the canal. Built of massive carved stones, its intricate decorative detail was easily visible from the boat.

The boatman explained that it was nothing more significant than an ordinary guardhouse along a route that once carried thousands of traders from the rich Mayan seaports of Guatemala and Belize to the interior settlements at Muyil and on to Copa, a major Mayan city far inland.

Growing hot, a few of us plunged into the canal, drifting for perhaps a mile downstream until the noisy complaints of the jabiru sent us scampering back into the boat for the remainder of the voyage.

Finally, the last canal empties into Laguna Boca Paia, actually a long narrow bay that opens through a 500-foot-wide barrier reef into the Caribbean.

Leaving the boat at the lagoon side of the reef, we wandered up a well-worn trail to the opposite, ocean-side shore, discovering ourselves smack in the middle of a little fishing resort, served by a dirt road that runs the length of the reef.

A half-dozen small, thatched cabanas were tucked under waving palms 100 feet from the surf, and as many outboard fishing boats were moored at the dock.

The road that runs down the 25-mile reef passes maybe a half-dozen such resorts, as well as a dozen or more private, beachfront homes, before it ends in Punta Allen, a small Mayan fishing port within the reserve that produces about 65 tons of U.S.-bound lobster tails each year.

The properties are private and predate the establishment of the reserve, so they’re permitted to continue to operate under casual supervision.

By evening, we were back amid the comforts of Cancun, and entire world removed from the “Gateway to Heaven.”

Amigos de Sian Ka’an charges $85 per person for the one-day tour in the reserve. Arrangements can be made through most major hotels in Cancun or, better, by writing to Amigos de Sian Ka’an, Apartado Postal 770, Cancun 77500, Quintana Roo, Mexico.