Cancún probably isn't the first place you'd think of for an unforgettable golfing holiday, but the sometimes raucous Mexican resort has upped its game, writes Bruce Selcraig
For at least a decade Cancún has been synonymous with partying Americans students - which is to say too much tequila, missing bikinis and holiday videos that might turn up on Girls Gone Wild. The Mexican resort's year-round tourism economy also depends on conventions, cruise ships and middle-class Disney families. Throw in honeymooners and the eco-adventure crowd and you have a tourism juggernaut that has built more than 50,000 hotel rooms from Cancún to the Mayan ruins of Tulum - a 120km coastline called the Riviera Maya - and attracts almost 40 per cent of Mexico's international tourists.
Somehow they did it all without any I-must-go-before-I-die golf. But that's all changing. The Riviera Maya boasts six quality courses - notably El Camaleón, a €15 million Greg Norman creation that hosted Mexico's first official PGA Tour event in February - and in the next two years another six to 10 big-name courses are supposed to open or break ground on this ribbon of sand at the southern tip of the Gulf of Mexico.
In most cases they are the jewelled centrepieces of sprawling multihotel resorts owned by Spanish, Canadian, Asian and US firms that are cutting down the mangrove jungle of the Yucatán peninsula so quickly that it all resembles the remaking of south Florida.
In fact, the two regions hold a lot of similarities. They're both flat, humid and, if the ocean breeze isn't blowing, a bit buggy. Like much of south Florida, Yucatán is really a slab of limestone laced with caves and sinkholes, some of which make fascinating features on the better golf courses.
Culturally, Cancún, like Miami, can be both charming and oppressively tacky, but you can still head down the coast and immerse yourself in small fishing villages or head inland to the incomparable Mayan ruins of Chichén-Itzá and Uxmal.
The other similarity may have got a bit too much press lately. Hurricanes. On the afternoon of October 20th, 2005, Doug Goubault, general manager of El Camaleón, stared into the dark, churning Caribbean off the coast of Cancún and wondered how he would survive Hurricane Wilma, once gauged at 280km/h (175mph), the strongest hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic.
"We boarded up all the windows, and I sent my wife to Acapulco," says Goubault, whose invigorating course is 50km south of Cancún at Fairmont's Mayakoba resort, which opened this time last year. "I knew how bad it would be when I saw the ocean surge over those dunes," he adds, waving a five-iron at a tranquil but depleted beachfront. The local economy lost an estimated €600 million, one golf course lost 5,000 trees and thousands of hotel workers lost their homes and jobs for months.
Like many Cancún properties that remodelled and reinvented themselves after the storm, Goubault also found a silver lining in Wilma's destruction. The obliteration of those sugar-white dunes opened up a full view of the turquoise Caribbean on his dreamy par-three 15th; the sea had previously been obscured.
He had to completely rebuild the 15th once and the seaside seventh twice - "not even a sprinkler head was left" - but the enticing palm-lined 15th became arguably El Camaleón's most memorable hole.
Greg Norman's first design in Mexico is Yucatán's most impressive course, for now. At 6,400m (7,000yd) and usually windy, it has brain-imprinting holes, ample fairways and harmless rough, and it easily moves from mangrove forest to jungle to beachfront - hence the chameleon name. Compared with rates elsewhere, the €165 green fee (€133 for guests) seems almost reasonable.
The Camaleón clubhouse lures you with striking Mexican art, golden onyx walls, a gentle outside waterfall and, on the top floor, an Argentinian steak house. But here's the sizzle: the lush, salt- tolerant paspalum fairways are surrounded by 10km of high-walled lagoons dynamited from the ancient limestone Mayans used for their temples. Seven years of work. Half a million cubic metres of debris. As planned, the lagoons filled naturally with clear subterranean water, which Mayakoba guests navigate (no swimming, please) by lanchitas, or electric boats. The canals are also attracting turtles, great egrets, cormorants and crocodiles.
Tired of plain-vanilla resort golf? Just 15 minutes north of Mayakoba is a daring and rambunctious creation at the Iberostar resort, called Playa Paraíso Golf Club, that should not be missed. You will either love playing from five- metre-deep, 18-metre-wide grassed fairway "craters" or you won't. You'll delight in the 1,200sq m, three-tier, oceanic seventh green, and the palm-in-a-bunker fronting fifth green and the 155-metre lava flow of limestone down the middle of the ninth fairway - or you'll think that Paul Burke Dye, its creator (and son of Pete Dye) is an architectural loon. But you'll definitely remember your day. (Bring a 60-degree wedge.)
Playa Paraíso, surrounded by the resort's tropical pinks, purples and reds, can be so gnarly from the tips that the director of golf, Greg Bond, deliberately omitted from the scorecard the 18-hole yardage for his tee boxes.
"The back tees play at just under 6,800 yards [ 6,200m] at a slope of 136," Bond says with a chuckle, "but we really don't want the 15 handicapper who played once this winter to know that. It will chew you up and spit you out." A €1 million maintenance budget, with a 42-man crew, keeps Playa Paraíso nearly flawless, which makes the €138 green fee (€85 for hotel guests) a Riviera Maya bargain.
Another Greg Norman project, Playa Mujeres, five kilometres north of Cancún, also opened last June as part of a huge, €1 billion development that boasts a private marina, a six-kilometre private beach, a 1,200-year-old private Mayan ruin and "two security gates [ that] will stand as sentinels of privacy". The Greg Norman Golf Course Design website says: "It seems that the international jet set crowd [ has] been forced to dabble with the merely wealthy and are desirous of an exclusive spot where they can truly relax and be left to themselves." Okey-dokey.
Two other enjoyable Florida-style courses are Playacar Golf Club, a 1994 Robert von Hagge design in touristy Playa del Carmen, an hour south of Cancún, and a big ol' wide, 27-hole, Jack Nicklaus resort track at Moon Palace Spa & Golf Club that beckons the club-renting tourist.
From the appropriately-coloured black and blues, bruising Playacar (€137 all year) plays at 6,532m and 6,070m (7,144 and 6,639yd), with humbling slopes of 148 and 142. The dense jungle thicket is seemingly just a club's length from the cart path all day long, making you wish you had the lost-ball contract. The general manager, Fernando Sandoval, and sweet-swinging head pro, Adan "Nino" Alvarez (who holds the course record of 68), have a friendly bilingual staff, it's well kept and you can nearly touch metre-long iguanas sunning on the rocks.
The Moon Palace resort course offers three benign nines (Lakes, Jungle and Dunes) that are buffed and trimmed like poodles, but at €190 you'd like your pulse to quicken a bit more. Watch for crocodiles and discounts. (The Nicklaus Design group has two other properties nearby: the excellent Cozumel Country Club and the Mayan Palace course, a creative 18-hole par-three with holes from 94m to 252m (103yd to 276yd).
Alas, be wary of Cancún Golf Club at Pok-Ta-Pok, a 1974 Robert Trent Jones jnr layout in the heart of Cancún's hotel district. Fabulously sited between a lagoon and the Caribbean, Pok-Ta-Pok has weathered two hurricanes and years of neglect to become a washed-out, crumbling mess consumed by crabgrass that costs a stupefying €106 to play, though it's a €10 pitch-and-putt at best. "It's an embarrassment to us all," says Greg Bond, who was formerly its general manager and estimates that a complete renovation would cost at least €5 million.
Jones, who has designed more than 200 courses in 38 countries, says he has offered to "thoroughly refresh, restore and, if necessary, redesign Pok-Ta-Pok for expenses only" and that the new owners seemed responsive. "I've not seen the course in 25 years," he says, "but, like the city of Chicago's famous Picasso sculpture, if they were to sell bits and pieces of it for scrap iron it would no longer be a Picasso. I don't think that course can still be called a Robert Trent Jones jnr course."
This lineup of courses will keep you busy for a week, but here's what's coming in the next two years: Puerto Cancún, a Tom Weiskopf course next to Cancún's hotel strip; Cancún Riviera, a Palace Resorts project; and TPC Cancún, with two 18-hole courses separately designed by Tom Fazio and Nick Price. And another half-dozen are reportedly in various stages of planning and permitting. Just remember: Go in the winter. Summers are brutally hot and humid, and the hurricanes are off-putting.
Will the Riviera Maya ever surpass Cabo San Lucas as Mexico's premier golf destination? Not surprisingly, Mayakoba's Doug Goubault says he has "absolutely no doubt that it will", but if or when that happens is less important than today's reality, which is that golfers can finally say with a straight face that they're going to Cancún not for collegiate debauchery but for the golf. Though we hear some do both.
WHERE TO LOOK ONLINE
Mayakoba resort:www.mayakobagolf.com
Moon Palace Spa & Golf Club:www.moonpalace cancun.com
Playacar Golf Club:www.palace-resorts.com/playacar-golf-club
Playa Mujeres Resort:www.playamujeres.com.mx
Playa Paraíso:www.iberostar.com
Cozumel Country Club:www.cozumelcountryclub.com.mx
Local guides:www.docancun.com/ cancun-parks.htm, www.travelyucatan.com and www.rivieramaya.com/eng/index.htm