Travel Weekly’s Gay Nagle Myers is at the Iberostar Grand Paraiso in Mexico’s Riviera Maya. Her first dispatch follows. Click to read her second and third dispatches and view a slideshow from the trip.
I’m in the Riviera Maya, south of Cancun, as a first-time visitor to this region on Mexico‘s Caribbean coast.
In my first two hours here, I met seven Arturos, four Joses, three Rickys and one coati — a raccoon-like animal that sometimes roams the halls of the five-resort Iberostar complex looking for leftovers from room service trays.
I was going to try flying under the radar as a normal hotel guest, but my meeting this afternoon with Alfonso Lopez, general manager of the Iberostar Grand Paraiso, blew my cover.
Lopez knew who I was and who I worked for, so that ended that.
No problem, I’m still going to do what normal tourists do over the next three days and hope to discover just what it is that draws millions of travelers annually to this resort region of Mexico.
I’ve seen some of these tourists already. They filled chaise lounges under palapas at the beach this afternoon, heads buried deep in their Kindles, occasionally glancing passersby.
I dined at Iberostar Grande’s Japanese restaurant tonight (sushi is terrific) while mentally calculating how I could sample dishes at that complex’s other 25 restaurants, each one ringing with praise from Tricia, who manned the concierge desk in the main lobby.
So many choices, so little time. Leave it to the Iberostar properties to put such culinary enticements on my plate.
However, between breakfast and dinner tomorrow night is a day-long tour of Chichen Itza, the Mayan pyramid wonder.