Playa

I'm not as big a traveller as many in my generation, but I get about probably as much as my conscience/earnings/priorities allow. When I started this post, I was sat on a beach in Playa del Carmen, which it turns out is not my favourite bit of Mexico. Based on my week's worth of knowledge of Mexico, I'd probably say this is my least favourite bit. Not that it isn't lovely: our hotel is beautiful, the weather is amazing, the beach is nice and the sea...well, I'll come back to the sea. 
My problem with Playa del Carmen is that it doesn't feel as Mexican as any other place I've been; it just feels like any North American or European resort town I've ever been to (which to be fair isn't very many*), and I don't just mean in Europe or North America: these places are the same all over the world, in that they are predominantly populated by Europeans** or Americans. The local colour in these places is provided by themed restaurants and local wares customised for the lack of imagination/cultural sensitivity of the buyer (I saw Mayan carved masks with the logos of American baseball teams carved into their foreheads last night). In defence of Playa del Carmen, there are at least restaurants and businesses owned by local people here, and Mexico's laws mean that the resorts can't keep the locals off the beach. I imagine it is a sort of half-way-house between the homogenised banality of Cancun and the rest of the Yucatan peninsular, which is a beautiful, fascinating and exhilarating place. 
However, the main problem that afflicts Playa del Carmen seems to be endemic all along the Rivera Maya from Cancun in the north to Tulum in the south: seaweed. Every beach we have been to has a thick black tide line of mouldering seaweed, and here, as in many other places, much of the sea next to the beach is a dark soup of scratchy seaweed. The owner of the hotel we stayed in in Tulum said that this is a recent phenomenon. The seaweed has always been washed into the warm waters inside the reef that sits a few hundred meters out from the coast, but recent shifts in the ocean currents  due to global warming mean that it is no longer washed out again. The seaweed is here to stay. 

This is a massive problem for this part of Mexico, as almost all of its economy is based on tourism. If the sea isn't good for swimming, the Europeans and North Americans will quickly go elsewhere, leaving resorts and apartment blocks half built: the carrion of a dead industry. I would imagine that even now, the state of Quintana Roo and possibly even the Mexican government are considering ways to combat the seaweed problem without exacerbating the ecological damage already wrought on the world's second largest coral reef. For the time being, some resorts have taken to raking up the seaweed and burying it in holes in the beach, which I can't help but see as a metaphor for the way we all deal with so many of the problems we've caused in the world. So much of the tourist industry causes many of the issues from which it suffers: aeroplane emissions contribute to global warming, overdevelopment wrecks local ecosystems and simply the number of bottles of water one gets through in a country that doesn't have drinking water on tap is a massive waste problem, some of which is likely to come bobbing past you in the sea. Holidays make us massively wasteful, we want convenience and we're willing to pay for it: I am certainly much more likely to buy something that I know I won't reuse or keep whilst on holiday, because well, it's just the once isn't it. There are ways round these the things: our hotel in Playa del Carmen filled a large glass bottle with drinking water from a water cooler each day so there was no waste plastic created; many hotels these days ask if you want your towels washing every day (if not they save water and energy). This is progress, but these are small concessions: not washing a towel or two is not going to stop ocean currents changing. Yet with the economies of scale of such large resorts, these things do eventually add up to a sizeable difference and if we all consider/encourage/make use of them, we could considerably reduce the impact of our holiday. 

Are we going to see our holiday habits changing as the environmental degradation they cause makes the currently desirable destinations increasingly undesirable? Most likely we will just change destination to somewhere as yet untouched or newly tropical. What will that leave for the people of the Mayan Rivera? Will they attempt large scale agriculture, deforesting much larger areas of the peninsular than the relatively small coastal strip of the resorts? Maybe they'll go for large scale livestock farming and really help accelerate the production of greenhouse gasses. Who knows, perhaps a spate of Lido building will save the tourist industry and life can go on as normal, hopefully with more and more hotels and resorts making a greater effort to reduce their environmental impact. Maybe the wonderful people of the Yucatan peninsula will be able to continue to earn a decent living from an increasingly ecologically sustainable industry. Perhaps. But given everyone will still fly to get there I think the likelihood of their environment remaining sustainable for long is pretty slim. Most likely we will all move our problems somewhere else until that too is wrecked. There's no evidence that in our holidaying we will stray far from our everyday habits. We simply magnify the worst ones. 

* my parents were a certain kind of aspiring middle class that meant that I've seen a healthy portion of the world's museums and cathedrals. 
** I'm including white Australians in this particular generalisation, just so we've got all the South East Asian resorts covered too.