Getting away from it all at Mexico's Riviera Maya

Luckily, the hordes are heading to the high-rise hotels crammed along the beaches of Cancun. I am heading south.

Less than 40 minutes after putting my rental car in gear, I'm at a small resort of palm-thatched structures on a white beach that stretches between the ocean and the jungle on the Yucatan Peninsula.

At sunset, a young man carrying an Olympic-style torch runs barefoot over sand that is turning temporarily pink. He stops every few yards to ignite smaller torches along a path. I feel a lot closer to Tahiti than to Cancun.

"This is fantastic. I can't believe this place," says an arriving guest with wonder in her voice.

Where to stay The easiest way to book at most of these hotels is to go to their Web sites and send an e-mail. Be aware that rates vary by time of year. • KaiLuum II (800-538-6802, www.mexicoholiday.com) offers a luxury "camping" experience 30 miles south of Cancun airport, just off Highway 307. Its parent company, Turquoise Reef Group, specializes in small, unique lodgings in the Yucatan, all of which are listed on the group's Web site. Doubles range from around $100 to $195. • Zamas (www.zamas.com) is on the water in Tulum's hotel zone, just south of the same-named ruins. No TV, and light is by solar power. Doubles begin at around $80-$90. • Cabanas Ana y Jose (www.anayjose.com) in Tulum's hotel zone, is a series of brightly painted stucco buildings grouped around a pool and the beach. Doubles begin under $100. • Las Ranitas (www.lasranitas.com) is the most luxurious property in Tulum's hotel zone, with prices much higher than resorts nearly as nice. Doubles begin at $170-$200. • Maya Tulum (888-515-4580, www.mayatulum.com), a former ashram, has kept the healthy vegetarian menu and yoga classes from its former incarnation. Doubles are $70-$160. • Hotel Lunata (Fifth Avenue, Playa del Carmen, www.lunata.com) is a charming European-style hotel, marred only by music blaring from the bars on the street. Centrally located, about a block from the beach. Doubles begin at about $90. • Deseo (Fifth Avenue and 12th Street, Playa del Carmen, www.hoteldeseo.com) features a pool that glows purple after dark and an entrance modeled on a Mayan temple. Doubles begin at $118. • Villa Arqueologica Coba (800-258-2633, www.clubmed.com) less than a half-mile from the Coba ruins, is serene and lovely. The Club Med property overlooks a lake, and lobby areas have Mexican tile mosaics. Doubles are around $80. Ruins Tulum was once a great city on the ocean; Coba is about 40 miles inland, on a good road that's easy to drive. Entrance to each is a few dollars. Few visitors get as far south as Muyil, but the ruins there are among the best in the Yucatan. Tours The area is a Mecca of water sports. Locals at the dock at Puerto Morales will take you on their own boats to a natural underwater preserve. For unique tours that can include snorkeling in underground caves, trips to villages and ocean kayaking, contact Alltournatives at hotel desks, or through the tourism office (see below). Natural preserve Sian Ka'an — Mayan for "where the sky was born" — is a 2,800-square-mile bio preserve south of Tulum. The UNESCO World Heritage Site is home to monkeys, jaguars, pumas, ocelots, rays, crocodiles and 400 bird species. Consider a boating/walking tour with EcoColors (www.ecotravelmexico.com). Avoid tour operators who are tearing up the jungle with four-wheel-drive tours. More information Riviera Maya Resort Reservations: 888-604-6044, www.rivieramaya.com; Mexico Tourism Board, 800-44-MEXICO.

"Don't tell anyone else about it," says a man passing by.

But KaiLuum II is just one of many unique, out-of-the-way resorts nearby. The area south of Cancun is filled with charming treasures waiting to be discovered. They are particularly unexpected because they are so close to densely developed Cancun, one of the top international destinations for U.S. tourists.

Most of these resorts beyond Cancun are tucked a mile or so off the main highway, down bumpy, potholed roads that offer little promise. But the roads end at quiet beaches and small, individually owned hotels that seem preserved from an earlier era of travel.

Not every property in this area between Cancun and Tulum fits that definition. In fact, the area is in danger of one day becoming yet another "little Miami," as some locals derisively call Cancun.

Mexican officials have built a smooth highway and have given the area a spiffy name: Riviera Maya. Developers, primarily from Spain and the United States, have been rushing in to build huge, all-inclusive resorts along the highway (and passengers disembark from cruise ships at some small ports).

The resorts have names like the Mayan Palace, but the only Mayan you'll ever see near the walled-off properties will almost surely be in a staff uniform. The resorts offer no sense of place. In fact, the Coco Cabana looks like something that aliens tried to spirit out of Las Vegas in one piece, but mistakenly dropped from the sky onto this patch of Mexican soil.

If anonymous high-rise resorts divorced from the locals are your thing, then stay in Cancun. There is much to be said for the place: Cancun was chosen for development specifically because its beaches are so fine. I've enjoyed myself there several times, each time going for the resorts at the outer edge of central Cancun.

There simply would be no point to traveling down the coast to yet another high-rise resort, this time along a highway, often some distance from the beach. And while some beaches along this stretch of coastline offer the perfection of Cancun's beaches, others have rocks at the water's edge.

But if intimate, authentic, unexpected and even funky little properties are your thing, then the Riviera Maya is your place. You need only leave the highway and travel just slightly off the beaten path.

Escape to KaiLuum

KaiLuum is about 30 miles south of Cancun and six miles north of Playa del Carmen. There is no sign for it from the highway. Instead, you turn at a sign for Capitan Lafitte's and follow a bumpy country road for about a mile until it ends at the beach.

A few hundred yards to the right is KaiLuum, built in 1999 by Mayan craftsmen who remembered the old ways for constructing simple but elegant buildings, called palapas, from wooden poles and palm leaves.

The bar and adjoining restaurant sit directly on the beach, with a floor of sand and a soaring, cathedral-style ceiling. The bar is open 24 hours a day; soda and beer are stored in an old-fashioned ice box filled with giant ice blocks.

A waiter points to a pegboard that has a sheet of paper with the names of guests written down the side and a series of squares running across the paper next to each name. He explains that you pay when your stay is over and use an honor system to keep track.

"You move your peg over one square for a soda, two for a beer and three for a mixed drink," he explains. "Every day we put up a new sheet of paper. If you get to the end of the squares in a single day, we get you some aspirin and take you to bed."

I mix my own rum and Coke and order a fantastic ceviche — fish, shrimp, onion, tomato, cilantro and lime juice, with guacamole on the side — for about $6.

Only one building on the property has electricity, and there is only one telephone, for emergencies. Yet the place exudes luxury; it's simply the luxury of another century. Dinner, for example, is served by the light of gas lanterns hanging from the restaurant's high ceiling. The place screams out "honeymoon," except the lodgings aren't quite as private as a new couple might wish.

Each couple — no children under 16 are allowed — has a separate palapa, a sort of open cabana with a palm-leaf roof. A large tent with giant mesh windows is erected under the roof of the palapa. Each palapa overlooks the ocean and has a platform bed with a mattress and Mexican blankets, side tables with candles and hammocks hanging just outside the room.

You walk a short distance to shared bathrooms. "People are leery of communal bathrooms; they associate them with a gas station or something," says manager/owner Clayton Ball. But these are something quite different.

Shower rooms with bright tiles on the walls and floors are immaculate, as are separate toilet facilities with scented candles. Sinks surrounded by tile mosaics are outside, sheltered only by a roof. Above the bath facility, on an open porch overlooking the jungle and the beach, you can get a massage, then relax in a hammock.

"We use the fridge to store blocks of ice," says Ball. "We buy everything we're making fresh each day," he says, which explains why restaurant patrons must reserve a place at dinner by 1 p.m. each day, before the chef goes shopping.

From KaiLuum you can walk along the beach all the way to Playa del Carmen, then miles beyond. You can arrange sightseeing tours of the area, or diving and snorkeling trips either in the ocean or in one of the caves that honeycomb the area. KaiLuum also offers Spanish classes on the beach.

Or, you can just sit on the beach in an oversize chair made of logs, with a big rock as a footrest. That happens to be my choice for what's left of my first day.

"The main product we sell is peace and quiet," says Ball.

I could use more peace and quiet but unfortunately have promises to keep. The next morning, I head out to find alternatives for travelers who can't imagine luxury involving a tent, but prefer stars to street lights, and are tired of elevators, crowds and brand names.

Funky comfort near Tulum

I travel down the lightly traveled highway, just past the Mayan ruins of Tulum, and turn left off the highway to the "hotel zone" in the town of Tulum. The two-lane paved street dead-ends after 1-½ miles, and a road of packed dirt and macadam stretches to the right and left. Along this country road, about 20 small hotels are nestled between the jungle and the beach.

Before my trip is over, I will stay in, or visit, every one that seems to have promise. I come away with several favorites, each distinctive, ranging from funky-cool to simply luxurious.

	CHRIS NISKANEN / KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS South of Cancun, along a stretch of Mexico's Yucatan coastline, a tourist and a guide fish in Chetuaml Bay.

Hotel Zamas falls into the former category: funky in a good way, not in the moldy sense of the word.

Owner Dan Vellejo McGettigan saw this property, then an abandoned coconut plantation, when he came to Tulum for his honeymoon in 1993. He went home to San Francisco and returned a few days later to buy it.

I first fell in love with this area several years before McGettigan did, and wondered at the time if it was possible to buy property here. It kills me to hear him say he bought 2.5 acres for $6,000. He first built the restaurant, living above it for a time, and since then has added eight wood and painted-concrete buildings with palapa-style, palm-leaf roofs. Most are two stories, with 15 rooms in all.

"I built from inspiration," says McGettigan. He drew outlines of what he wanted in the sand, and Mayan builders followed his plans. My room, on the second floor, is a huge rectangular affair, with a wide porch all around. The giant bathroom has three corners and one rounded side. An open shower is built in the rounded, turretlike area and has long skinny windows overlooking the jungle. The floors in the bathroom are tiled; in the bedroom, they are concrete. Mosquito netting hangs over the bed.

I need a flashlight to get from the restaurant to my room, which is dimly lit since the hotel uses solar power. But I don't want any lights this night in the hotel about a mile from the Mayan ruins of Tulum. I lie in the darkness in a hammock on the porch, watching the stars and listening to the ocean's roar, thinking that Mayan royalty had it so much better than the kings and queens of Europe in their drafty old castles.

Beach hideaway

The following day, I move on to Maya Tulum, a beachfront property that was once an ashram and still offers yoga, reflexology, massage, facials and "other treatments for the body and soul."

Each guest room is in a separate building made of stone and stucco. Most have stone floors, and all but one is round. Maya Tulum also gets its electricity from a solar-powered generator, and lights are turned off from midnight to 6 a.m. Television? Forget about it. A couple of young entrepreneurs, however, operate an Internet cafe in the hotel zone, and you can go there to rent and watch a video if you need a fix.

Just down the road, Cabanas Ana y Jose is more traditional and luxurious, with 15 rooms in a thatched-roofed building of stucco painted bright blue, green, red and white. Las Ranitas is a bit more upscale still, but with a price tag significantly higher: Doubles at Cabanas Ana y Jose, for example, start under $100; at Las Ranitas, it's closer to $200.

The weather is perfect every day. The entire Yucatan Peninsula is warm year-round, with average daytime temperatures in the 80s. Like everywhere in the Caribbean, hurricanes are a threat in late summer and early fall, and hit every five to 10 years.

Brighter lights

After one more night of quiet and solitude, I'm in the mood for bright lights, loud music and tourist shops. So the next afternoon, I head to Playa del Carmen. The town is something of a compromise between the serenity of hotels close to Tulum and the metropolitan feel of Cancun.

I'm invigorated by the blasting trumpets of mariachi bands. I enjoy the rock-and-roll oldies being played in a bar across the street from the Hotel Lunata, a gracious, European-style hotel with a lovely interior courtyard. But by midnight, I'm ready for everyone to stop playing. They don't.

The beaches of Playa del Carmen are comparable to those of Cancun, and the town has a very Mexican feel. Good restaurants, nice shops, plenty of entertainment. But after one night, I'm already missing the solitude of the simpler beach hideaways.

On my way back to Cancun, I drive along the narrow, bumpy road when I'm suddenly stopped by bulldozers. They are widening the road, and clearing a space in the jungle.