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By Brian Kendall
Toronto Globe & Mail
PLAYA DEL CARMEN, México -- Few golf courses anywhere in the world have been so influenced by the combination of history, mythology and nature as El Camaleón, the new star attraction of México's Mayan Riviera.
Aided by a team of environmentalists, course architect Greg Norman used ancient Mayan forestry techniques in carving a unique jungle layout that will host the Mayakoba Golf Classic, México's first-ever PGA Tour event.
The tournament will showcase both the lavish new Mayakoba resort -- a $2.4-billion project 70 kilometers south of Cancún that will eventually feature five luxury hotels -- and the recovery of this prime stretch of real estate from the devastation of Hurricane Wilma in October of 2005. Since Wilma ripped through, 4,000 hotel rooms (with 3,000 more to come by the end of 2007) have been added to a 140-kilometre stretch of white-sand vacation beaches that wind south of Cancún through the booming resort town of Playa del Carmen to the Mayan ruins of Tulum.
Following in the footsteps of Los Cabos on the Pacific coast, which over the past two decades has built itself into México's premier golf destination, the resorts of the Mayan Riviera are aggressively targeting the estimated 600,000 players from the U.S. and Canada who will come to México to golf in 2007. Right now, there are eight courses operating in the region, but 18 more are in various stages of planning or construction.
 | | The El Camaleón course was built using a Mayan forestry-management philosophy to protect the environmentally sensitive jungle. |
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"Spectacular scenery, great sites for courses, a booming tourism economy -- the Mayan Riviera has everything to become one of the world's great golf destinations," says Norman, the golf legend whose Great White Shark Enterprises will also manage the $4.1 million Mayakoba Golf Classic on a six-year contract.
There are courses in the world that feature towering waterfalls and raging cataracts; others tumble down mountainsides or wind through alligator-infested swamps. But El Camaleón, built at a cost of $23.5-million, surely ranks among the most unique.
Adopting a Mayan forestry-management philosophy called socoleo, Norman and a team of environmental experts learned which trees were expendable, which were not and how to cut each tree differently in weaving the course through the environmentally sensitive jungle and mangrove forest.
Protecting the wildlife routinely encountered by golfers -- ranging from pelicans, toucans and flamingoes to monkeys and the course's namesake chameleons -- was an equally vital concern.
Norman's tight and challenging 7,084-yard design includes two par threes, the 7th and 15th holes, that play right to the edge of Mayakoba's l.6 kilometer beachfront. Just offshore is a coral reef second in size only to Australia's Great Barrier Reef.
At a course that surprises golfers with almost every swing, the biggest shock is found smack in the heart of the opening fairway. Early in the construction, the ground suddenly collapsed, almost swallowing an excavator. Revealed was a cenote, a cavern formed over millennia by rainwater filtering through underground layers of limestone.
Rather than fill in the gash, Norman, a strong proponent of the "least disturbance" philosophy of design, left the cenote (dubbed the Devil's Mouth) in place to rattle golfers on their opening tee shots.
Revered by the Mayans as sacred places, the labyrinth of underground cenotes at Mayakoba (Mayan for "city on the water") provided the inspiration for the overall design of a resort being touted by marketers as Venice on the Caribbean.
Planners for OHL Group, the Spanish developer, saw that by chipping away the top layers of rock, they could tap into the freshwater flowing beneath the surface and build an interconnected system of canals through the jungle to serve as the resort's main transportation system. Guests make their way around the 240 hectare development in thatch-roofed electrically powered boats known as lanchas, as well as by bicycles and golf carts.
When Hurricane Wilma's 240-kilometre-an-hour winds pounded the Yucatan coast in 2005, the most serious damage was seen in Cancún, where much of the city of 400,000 was left under brown, foul-smelling floodwaters. Mayakoba was less severely hit, although progress on the four high-end hotels under construction was delayed by several months.
So far, the only hotel to open is the Fairmont Mayakoba, a Mayan-influenced 401-room complex featuring two infinity pools, nature trails, three restaurants, five bars, a private island suite and a Willow Stream spa. Still to come are Rosewood Mayakoba (September, 2007), Banyan Tree Mayakoba (2008), Viceroy Mayakoba (2008) and a final hotel brand to be determined.
Guests will be encouraged to wander between the properties, dining, bar-hopping and playing golf at El Camaleón and at a second championship course planned for the property.
The Mayans, a sophisticated and mathematically gifted people who closely studied the stars, would have undoubtedly viewed El Camaleón's relatively unscathed emergence from the fury of Hurricane Wilma as the best possible omen. Thanks to the use of seashore paspalum, a revolutionary new hybrid turf that thrives even on a diet of sea spray and brackish water, the course was playable almost from the moment the floodwaters retreated. (In fact, the grass had a lush green color Norman and his crew had never seen before.) El Camaleón, though entering just its second year of play, has emerged as the marquee attraction in one of the world's fastest-growing golf destinations.
Vying for attention are popular nearby courses such as Playa Paraiso Golf Club, a heroically difficult P. B. Dye layout where hazards include a 12-foot-high bunker face and a tee shot over a river of rocks; Moon Spa and Golf Club, a 27-hole Jack Nicklaus signature design surrounded by jungle, lakes and sand dunes; Playacar Spa and Golf Club, a Robert Von Hagge jungle layout booby-trapped by water hazards; and Norman's second Mexican course, the new Playa Mujeres Golf Club, offering a thrilling mix of lagoon and ocean-front holes.
The only cloud over the growing excitement surrounding the launch of the Mayakoba Golf Classic, which will be held from Feb. 22 to 25, is that Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, Mike Weir and most of the game's other top players won't be there. Also scheduled for that week is a more prestigious PGA-sanctioned event, the Accenture Match Play Championship in Tucson, Ariz., which will issue invitations to the top 64 players in the world golf rankings.
Still, major championship winners Mark Calcavecchia, Jeff Sluman and Steve Elkington have all indicated that they plan to be at El Camaleón. And architect Norman, himself the winner of two British Opens, has said he will play if his chronically bad back permits.
Reading the stars, the ancient Mayans would have been well pleased.
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