Mind the Gap

For the first time in recent memory I found significant empty spaces — retail and restaurant — on almost every block along Quinta Avenida in Playa....gaps which are less Madonna than Mike Tyson.

One has to presume that the economy is now facing challenges from the sargassum inflow, plus the wider international awareness of it.

Nowadays Playa is a city of over 300,000 inhabitants. Coming in from the NW one gets a sense of just how vast the place has become on that side of the 307 highway.

Tourism may not be the essence of all these people's daily lives, but like the sun's rays on planet Earth, it is certainly the starting point of everything.

When I first came Playa was little more than a collection of thatched huts around the dock. in my lifetime I have had no other experience of such a place becoming a major urban sprawl.

V has compared it to a game we used to play in the noughties called Tropico in which, as a bemedalled dictator, one was tasked with developing an palm-lined island as fast as possible without creating the sort of unrest which would likely lead to one's downfall. The rounds were set to a background audio track of the endless TAP TAP TAP of construction work, and for years that was the essential soundtrack of PDC.

Around the turn of the millennium Playa had around 40,000 inhabitants. This, in my opinion, was probably the ideal moment to visit, an insight which cohanits with the more general notion I hold that in general the five years either side of 2000 were the best time to be an independent traveller in one's twenties in Central America.

The earlier period of my own experience had some obvious downsides of its own. For a start, below the Yucatan most areas were an active war zone until the mid to late nineties.

But perhaps the greater inconvenience was one of communications. There were hardly any phones — and I mean landlines, let alone mainstream online connections — so keeping in any kind of touch with the outside world was a complete chore.

I loved Antigua back then, but it would be fair to say that there was not much on offer in terms of basic entertainment and catering infrastructure for foreign visitors around town.

By the turn of the century this had hit something of a sweet spot, not just here, but also up in Playa, which was entering its heyday as the Saint Tropez analogue of the 'Mayan Riviera'. It was hard to imagine just how badly over-commercialisation would subsequently bodge things up. There really are but a handful of destinations in the region which have continued to improve in terms of overall experience since around 2010. (Mérida being the most obvious one.)

And if one wanted to get from place to place, the ADO network (and related terminals) was starting to take proper shape. Transportation had generally been a lot more iffy in the previous era.

The problem Playa now faces is that the annual sargazo plague is worsening year on year and it coincides neatly with the traditional peak periods, such as Spring Break.