Mexico Tourism

Cutting through a drab, industrial outskirt, my driver reaches Puebla’s historical district as the sun drifts below the buildings, the evening skyline of Baroque domes lighted in gold. We wind along the cobbled streets, the centuries-old churches rising up on either side. Until the car stops suddenly outside the hotel, I’m speechless.

I mean, I’m here to throw down some good mole sauce. No one mentioned the place looked like Rome.

Go looking for a good mole, and sooner or later a Mexican sends you to Puebla. Though not as popular with American foodies as Oaxaca, Puebla is considered by many to be the gastronomic capital of Mexico. And its most famous culinary creation is mole poblano — that complex brown chili sauce, traditionally served over poultry, that involves dozens of ingredients and carries hints of its unsweetened chocolate.

When most Americans hear the word mole (pronounced MOH-lay), they often think specifically of mole poblano, but there are several types of moles, in a variety of colors and flavors — and not all of them include chocolate.

I had just witnessed this diversity firsthand at the annual October Mole Festival in San Pedro Atocpan, a tiny farming town on the outskirts of Mexico City. In the kiosks there, women slapped at big balls of dough, shaping fresh tortillas to scoop up mole from steaming pots. Local suppliers waved their hands magicianlike over fat slabs of mole paste — varying shades of rich brown mole poblanos; bright green cilantro-infused mole verdes; orangey-red pipián moles made with pumpkin seeds; peanut-butterlike cacahuate moles; and mole almendrado, a dark almond mole that’s the local pride of San Pedro Atocpan.

For years, mole was a special-occasion dish only, the preparation notoriously time-consuming. But all of these powders and pastes were ready to roll — add a dash of oil and chicken broth, and you’ve got a delicious mole in minutes. This was good news for hardworking homemakers, but I wanted to get back to the beginning of mole. I needed to find Puebla.

To say that there is competition in Puebla over where to eat your mole poblano is an understatement. Almost every restaurant in town promotes the dish, and many hosts stand outside beckoning to passers-by. Signs everywhere shout “Típico!” — a reassurance to customers that yes — yes — here, you will find the authentic food of Puebla. But many Poblanos still cook the best moles at home, and it can be difficult to find a great one among the masses.

PUEBLA is a two-hour drive southeast of Mexico City, past the sugarcane farms and cactus rows, and out onto a long stretch of highway. The Crayola colors of Mexico’s heartland in autumn are so bright you need sunglasses, but it’s tempting to peel them off to soak in the russet-red gravel and bright green squares of pasture, set against a high-altitude sky.

WHEN you do, though, prepare to be dazzled. At the Mesón Sacristía de Compañía, a boutique hotel-restaurant in a 250-year-old building with a noted chef, Alonso Hernández, a mole sampler included by far the best mole poblano I tasted. But it was the Sacristía mole, a smoky house recipe passed down from the owner Leobardo Espinosa’s grandmother, that sent me. Nodding, Mr. Espinosa said, “If the sauce is not good, the plate is not good.”

The comida, or lunch, is still the biggest meal of the day here. As night falls, the Poblanos zip up their sweaters and head down to the main square, bright with twinkling lights and lined with Parisian-style cafes. On a Saturday night, there was a live pop concert on one side of the square: on another, a handful of locals stared transfixed at a glowing television playing a Michael Jackson concert, a little girl tugging at her sister to dance. At nearby 3 Oriente, hipsters lounged at Las Brujas cafe — students, perhaps, from the university next door. In the Barrio del Artista, young men smoked cigarettes and listened to two men play double basses, like something out of an old Beat flick.

Let yourself be directed by the friendly Poblanos, and you open yourself up to a city teeming with fantastic regional food. Behind each specialty is a nugget of history: the greasy, yet superb, chalupas began here, but Puebla’s version, fried tortillas with sauce and shredded meat, bears little resemblance to its Taco Bell namesake. When Puebla was a smaller town, Mr. Espinosa explained, people would serve them out of their garages so workers could eat standing up.

Maroma’s Sian Nah suites

A five-minute ride down an unpaved road through dense jungle might leave a visitor worried that the Maroma Resort and Spa may be more of a back-to-nature campground than the luxury escape promised by the travel agent. Yet when the taxi suddenly emerges from the dense green into a classic hacienda courtyard with a reflecting pool and a bevy of white-clad staff members in attendance, that worry evaporates. Maroma, a 65-room hotel and a four-bedroom villa set on 25 acres on a mile-long stretch of beach in Mexico’s Riviera Maya, is made up of a series of brilliant white stucco buildings and palapas — huts with thatched roofs made of local palm leaves. Initially, Maroma was a boutique hotel with just 32 rooms clustered around an indoor-outdoor restaurant. Then five years ago, Orient Express took control of Maroma and added new rooms as well as two new swimming pools and the Kinan Spa. After Hurricane Wilma in 2005, the company spent $16 million to finish the upgrade and make repairs.

LOCATION

Ideal. The hotel is just a 20 minute taxi ride from the Cancún airport, and the trip to the ancient Mayan site of Tulum takes an hour. (Chichén Itzá, the best known ancient site, is three hours away.) Playa del Carmen, with its myriad shops and restaurants is a 15-minute ride.

THE SCENE

Despite its upscale surroundings (and an equally upscale pricetag), Maroma’s atmosphere is surprisingly casual. The hotel attracts a relatively young crowd: largely American but with a sprinkling of Britons, Europeans and a handful of South Americans. Even when the hotel is full (as it was on a recent visit), there always seem be ample chairs and futons on the beach where one can order either breakfast or lunch. (Children under 16 are allowed only May to Dec. 22.)

THE ROOMS

The rooms feature local materials, like hand-painted Mexican floor tiles and mahogany bedroom cabinets. Beds are enveloped with soft white netting, and new guests find their beds covered in elaborate designs of local flowers. Though some of the older rooms are small, most rooms have terraces or balconies. There are eight new Sian Nah suites (Mayan for House of Heaven) with private gyms, massage areas and plunge pools. Any seaside room — new or old — is more expensive than a comparable room facing the gardens, but the views are mesmerizing. (Couch potatoes beware: TVs are provided in the rooms only if requested, and then can only play DVDs; there is TV signal and no cable.)

AMENITIES

Maroma’s 7,000-square-foot spa, with treatment rooms that are both elegant and spacious, offers more than 30 treatments, many based on what the hotel calls “ancient Mayan healing.” (The hotel’s Website also points out that the treatment rooms point directly east and west, “representing the balance of the day and night.”)

ROOM SERVICE

Steaming pots of coffee are delivered every morning to any guests not quite ready to face a full breakfast. We picked several different times during our stay and found our coffee arrived like clockwork every time. And our waiter actually returned to see if we wanted a second pot. The single morning we ordered breakfast in our room, it, too, arrived a shade ahead of schedule. It must be the lure of the dawn light on the water: but our 6:30 order was far from the first. We noticed a number of waiters scurrying to drop off trays.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Maroma is expensive. Rooms, with breakfast, start at $480 a day, plus 22 percent for taxes and the service charge. Still the price seemed well worth it: not just for the setting and the service, but for the feeling of immersion in a totally foreign culture that is just a few hours away from the United States. Maroma Resort and Spa, Carretera 307, Riviera Maya, Solidaridad, Quintana Roo; www.maromahotel.com; (866) 454-9351 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              (866) 454-9351 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              (866) 454-9351      end_of_the_skype_highlighting      end_of_the_skype_highlighting.

I am facing a golden-sugar beach, a low pink hotel, a thatched palapa baking in the heat. To my left, a long crescent stretch of bay, a cradling arm around a basket of blue. To my right, a stone jetty. Beyond it, a port full of oceangoing tankers and the cliff-hugging city of Manzanillo. Behind me, the limitless Pacific. All around, pelicans loitering in the swells, which lift and gently drop me, my arms out, toes brushing velvet sand.

I said I was doing nothing, but I’m actually trying to summon somebody: Ken Kesey, novelist, psychedelic prophet, leader of the Merry Pranksters, hero of “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.” It was here, on this beach, that he took to the waves as I did, back in 1966. He was a hunted man then, on the run from the F.B.I. and Mexican federales, but even he, a man of great aplomb, found time for thoughtful bobbing.

“He’s working on his wave theory. This morning for breakfast he brewed and drank enough weed to put a horse in orbit. He’s been out there for three hours with his eyes closed … imagining that he’s a piece of kelp or a jellyfish.”

The observer is Mountain Girl, one of several Merry Pranksters who followed Kesey to Manzanillo. She watches from the beach while pondering his oracular musings.

“It isn’t by getting out of the world that we become enlightened, but by getting into the world … by getting so tuned in that we can ride the waves of our existence and never get tossed because we become the waves.”

Manzanillo now is not nearly as metaphysical as that account, from a trippy Kesey volume called “Over the Border,” would suggest. It’s a tourist town, a cruise destination, one gem in the resort strand of Mexico’s Pacific coast, cousin to Acapulco, Ixtapa, Puerto Vallarta. It’s a city of strip malls and cineplexes, dive shops and all-inclusive resorts where the help wears uniforms.

But Manzanillo then was jungle outpost, a nowhere port town on a two-lane road from Guadalajara. It was a place where a gringo — even a famous novelist gringo accompanied by family and friends, an abundant supply of drugs and an International Harvester school bus covered in Day-Glo paint and blaring music from a sophisticated loudspeaker system — could reasonably expect to hide out for a while.

You probably know most of the back story. Kesey is a promising writer at Stanford, publishes “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” his first novel, in 1962, and a huge deal is made of it. A circle forms in Palo Alto, bound by Kesey’s charisma and brightened by psychoactive chemicals and Day-Glo paint. It moves to the woods of La Honda, Calif., and roams the country in an old school bus. Kesey and the Merry Pranksters stage a journey into life, art, rock-and-roll and experimental drug use that attracts hangers-on, Hell’s Angels, Tom Wolfe and, inevitably, cops.

Kesey is busted for marijuana possession once, twice. Now he faces real time: a bad trip he does not want to take. He parks a truck on a coastal bluff, writes a fake suicide note — Ocean, Ocean, I’ll beat you in the end — then slips into Mexico in a car trunk.

The headline: “LSD GURU SUICIDE!”

He hides in Puerto Vallarta, then Mazatlán, has B-movie escapes from undercover agents, and ends up in dead-end Manzanillo.

There the circle reconnects. Kesey is joined by his wife, Faye, their young children and a squad of Pranksters, including Mountain Girl, a k a Carolyn Adams; Ken Babbs; Mike Hagen; Gretchen Fetchin the Slime Queen; and the Beat legend Neal Cassady, with his parrot, Rubiaco.

Kesey and family and Mountain Girl take a little rented house on the beach. The others hang their hammocks across the road, in an abandoned pet-food factory they called La Casa Purina.

The sun pours off the mountains. The Pranksters soak in it, melting in heat so thick they call it Manzanillo mucus. They swim, they fish, they do laundry, they get stoned. They wait for family and lawyers to wire money. Mountain Girl gives birth to Sunshine, her daughter with Kesey, in the charity ward at the Hospital Civil.

The idyll lasted only into the fall. Kesey went home, did his five months in jail, and got right back to being an author and counterculture icon. His was a well-lived, well-loved, well-documented life, and it ended in rural Oregon in 2001.

I flew into Mexico at the end of August, a late arrival to the Kesey fan club, looking to unearth whatever traces remained of the Manzanillo episode.

I brought my 20-year-old stepson, Zak, who came well qualified because of his skill with a camera and fondness for the Grateful Dead, the Pranksters’ house band. I brought my battered undergraduate copy of “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” and “Mexico on 5 Dollars a Day,” the 1963-64 edition, which reported that Manzanillo’s “prettiest senorita” could be found, along with aspirin and diarrhea treatments, behind the counter of the Farmacia America on Avenida Mexico. I also brought a Hermes 3000 portable typewriter, at which I planned to sit and write in the heat and moonlight, with cold, sweaty beers.

I’m sorry, reader. I did not become a wave and did not find many physical traces of the Kesey interlude, though I came close, much closer than I thought I would.

You can, too, if you go as the Pranksters did, poor and open-minded, and look in the right places. Spend as little money as possible and stick to the far, far southern end of Manzanillo Bay, away from the high-end resorts and close to the jetty and pelicans.

Before I left New York, I had lucked upon Bart Varelmann, who had owned the little Hotel La Posada, one of Manzanillo’s only hotels back then. It’s still there, steps from the beach and that jetty, which borders a channel leading into Mexico’s biggest Pacific port.

Mr. Varelmann told me that the Pranksters had spent the summer next to his hotel, parking their bus beside a huge rock. Mr. Varelmann is now retired to Florida. He said he couldn’t remember Kesey very well, but he remembered the Pranksters and their kids, and the bus.

“The interior of Ken’s bus was a grab-bag cornucopia of strange pills, exotic herbs, magic mushrooms, peyote buttons, LSD, uppers, downers, poppers and of course marijuana,” Mr. Varelmann writes in his self-published memoir, “Innkeeper.” “On a windless day one could get stoned just strolling past the bus. A battery-powered tape machine enhanced the scene with a dreamy, pre-rock music by the likes of Mile Davis, Stan Kenton and the Modern Jazz Quartet. We hung a lot at Ken’s magical bus that summer.”

ABOUT 20 miles down the coast from Cancún, sandwiched between the all-inclusive resort hotels that now define what is known as the Mayan Riviera, Puerto Morelos — a scrappy village of perhaps 5,000 people — seems almost out of another time.

Puerto Morelos, Mexico

Thanks to a cadre of local activists, the town has managed to push back against the mega-developers and sustain something that feels, smells and tastes like the real Mexico. Here, you may catch a scent of fish or seaweed as you sunbathe on the uncrowded beach or stroll along the pier. You won’t find a single designer-label outlet selling Prada sunglasses. But you will find Juicy Rosy’s Juice Bar on Rojo Gomez, where you can watch Rosy select herbs from her garden to flavor your Mexican breakfast and drinks.

At the heart of the town is a breezy, palm-treed plaza surrounded by Mexican-handicraft shops and eclectic eateries. At any of these sidewalk cafes, you can take a break from the hot mid-day sun and sip a margarita. Not to be missed is David Lau’s (Avenida Tulum; 52-998-251-2531; www.davidlaus.com), which serves Asian cuisine with a Mexican twist. At the colorful Doña Triny’s practically next door, you’ll find cheap, authentic Mexican dishes like nopales rellenos (stuffed cactus; 50 pesos, or about $3.85 at 13 pesos to the dollar).

More upscale is John Gray’s Kitchen (Avenida Niños Héroes, Lote 6; 52-998-871-0665), with modern, austere décor in a tiny cottage nestled against the jungle, just north of the plaza. Among its specialties: duck breast with chipotle, tequila and honey (275 pesos) or pork loin with Roquefort crust (195 pesos).

Another reason to be charmed by Puerto Morelos is its small, family-run B & B’s. Villas Clarita (Avenida Niños Héroes, 52-998-871-0042; www.villasclaritamexico.com) has a Boston-born owner, John Mastromarino, who is a collector of local art and a gregarious story-teller. His Mexican-style hacienda overflows with gardens of leafy palms, and a wrought-iron staircase winds up to the rooftop, where you can watch the sun set over the Yucatán. Rates for a minimum two-night stay begin at $178 for two people.

At the 12-room Posada El Moro (Avenida Javier Rojo Gomez; 52-998-871-0159; www.posadaelmoro.com), some rooms overlook a neighbor’s backyard clutter of rusty bicycles and kitchen sinks, a vista that, in its own charming way, reminds you that you are not in Cancún anymore. Rooms, colorful and clean, cost between $65 and $90 a night.

When you’re ready to swim or sunbathe, head for the beach club Ixchel. From the pier at the main square, turn left at the lighthouse and follow the beach until you find a small, wooden shack on the white-coral sands. Also known as Sarah’s place, this beach-club bar is a gathering spot for locals and expatriates alike. Here, you can exchange town gossip with Sarah herself, or rent an umbrella and chair for the day (50 pesos each).

At night, everyone seems to head to the family-run Posada Amor (Avenidas Javier Rojo Gomez and Tulum; 52-998-871-0033), which has a breezy, courtyard bar with colored lights and serves the best fish ceviche in town (66 pesos). Next door, Bara Bara has live D.J.’s and draws a more youthful crowd that spills out into the dark, late-night streets.

While so much of the Yucatán coast has been turned into a Latin reprise of Miami Beach, Puerto Morelos reminds you what it used to be like.

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