The third floor view from the hotel room in downtown Cancun is of the stained walls and peeling paintwork of third grade buildings across the road. Aerials randomly spike the skyline, connecting the population to third-rate television channels. A third of all cars disport chipped paint on rustwork. A third of all advertisements is for American sodas and snack foods. This is indeed a Third World landscape. Bougainvilleas, bright orange jacarandas and wind-stooped palms struggle to persuade the onlooker that there is some elemental force stronger than this crumbling breezeblock landscape, trying to reclaim it and define it once again as an exotic sub-tropical paradise.

Two miles further east, the other side of the roundabout, there are signs to 'La Zona Hotelera'. Soon one comes to a narrow spit of coral sand, some seven or eight miles long, a few hundred metres wide, in the shape of a lucky figure seven. It thrusts east south-east into the sea and then cuts back sharply, south south-west to regain landfall not far from the busy international airport. It encloses the Laguna de Nichupte and looks out over the Caribbean Sea. This is to Yucatan what Nice is to the south of France, what the Gold Coast is to Queensland and what the Costa Brava is to Spain. It is the tourism planner's ideal vision of Shangri-La, an earthly utopia; a parade of palaces, cheek-by-jowl, two thousand rooms apiece, a hotelier's heaven, the full litany, Hyatt, Hilton, Holiday Inn, Marriott and Miramar, Sheraton and Solymar. Goliaths of the industry, separated only by air-conditioned shopping malls, restaurants and bars. Planeloads of tourists are flown in, stripped of their assets, and sent home again, suntanned, with sand in their suitcases, often all in just the space of a single weekend.

By midday on Friday we had hired a car, a Dodge Ram, a dirty great beast of a thing. Soon we were cruisin' through 'la Zona Hoteleria' and headin' down south along the coast road whistlin' Dixie, a hundred and thirty miles to the sacred Mayan ruins of Tulum, perched on the cliffs, bathed in the rays of the setting sun.

Tulum, the 'city of discovery' or the 'city of the dawn', must, in its time, have been a haven for the Toltec priests -- a sort of medieval precursor to Club Med. I rather liked the temple of the descending god, with its squat bas-relief of inverted, rectilinear legs thrust skyward and clad -- as far as I could tell -- in a stout pair of galoshes. Who knows? Perhaps he was cast down from the company of the heavenly host right in the middle of the hurricane season.

The Lonely Planet guide describes the setting thus: "The gray-black buildings of the past sit on a palm-fringed beach, lapped by the turquoise waters of the Caribbean". Somehow that does not quite do it justice. There is no mention of the upside-down god, or the huge iguanas sunning themselves on the ramparts, or evening shadows stretching out across the greensward. At sunset, there is an absolute stillness that captures the majesty of this once proud place, now largely reclaimed by nature.

It is our first real taste of the ancient civilisations of Central America.