Cancun has never been high on my list of travel destinations.  The setting for countless Girls Gone Wild videos, the city always seemed to me like a seaside Vegas – tawdry, artificial, dependent for its survival on a steady stream of spring breakers and package holiday buyers wooed by the promise of white sand and an endless supply of $2 margaritas.  But I was surprised to discover that just south of Cancun, along the less developed Riviera Maya, the region’s natural and cultural beauty endures.  I wrote about crumbling pyramids, Mayan rites and oceanfront nature reserves for the Canadian magazine alive.

The Greening of the Yucatan

Remy Scalza; Special to alive

They’re knee-high, bad-tempered, and given to mischief. Aluxes—think leprechauns with a tan—are the jungle spirits of Maya lore. And, for better or worse, I’m poised at their front door, peering into the inky black of a Mexican cave with a local eco-guide and 12 other travellers.

A Maya shaman, dressed in white and carrying a smoking chalice filled with sacred incense, offers up a blessing for the group. We’re about to descend into a cenote, one of the underground caverns that riddle the soft limestone bedrock here in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.

Purified, protected from the aluxes—we hope—we file down into the dark, heading for a crystalline pool that beckons from the depths of the cave.

Click here for the full article on alive.