There are places you visit. There are places you remember. And then there are places that enter your bloodstream and refuse to leave.
Cancún, Mexico, is one of those places.
I went to Cancún to celebrate my wife, Mrs Olubukola Awoyinfa, who recently turned 70. Seventy! But if you tell that to the mirror, the mirror may laugh at you. If you tell it to some of the people who met her on this trip, they may ask you to repeat yourself. My wife, as many people have observed, simply does not look her age.
So we decided to celebrate the woman, the mother, the wife, the friend—and the seven decades she has spent becoming the woman we know and love.
But there was a problem.
How do you surprise a woman with a birthday celebration involving people flying in from different countries?
The answer was: keep your mouth shut.
And that was exactly what we did.
A whole lot of the planning was kept secret from the birthday girl. Friends were coming from the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States and Nigeria. The conspiracy was international. The conspirators were family and friends. And the headquarters of the conspiracy was Cancún.
The idea of Cancún came from the Mike Awoyinfa twins, Taiwo and Kehinde, with the support of their big brother, Jide. They apparently looked at the map of the world and decided that if their mother was going to turn 70, she was not going to celebrate it sitting at home in Lagos.
They chose Mexico.
And what a choice!
Cancún sits on Mexico’s Caribbean coast, on the Yucatán Peninsula, in the state of Quintana Roo. Today it is one of the world’s great holiday destinations, famous for its white-sand beaches, astonishing turquoise sea, Mayan heritage, water sports, restaurants, shopping and nightlife.
But let me tell you what they don’t always put in the tourist brochures.
Cancún is hot.
Hotter than Lagos? That may be debatable. But there were moments when I looked at the sun and wondered whether Lagos had exported its heat to Mexico.
Yet this was a different kind of heat. It came with the Caribbean Sea. It came with white sand. It came with palm trees bending lazily in the breeze. It came with the sound of waves doing what waves have done since creation—arriving, withdrawing, arriving again.
And every morning, I had front-row seats.
I would wake up and look towards the sea. There it was—the morning sun gradually illuminating the water, turning what had been a dark expanse into a glittering sheet of blue and silver.
It was one of the great pleasures of the trip.
You wake up in Lagos and the first thing you may hear is a generator, a horn, a neighbour, a motorcycle or somebody shouting “Oga!”
In Cancún, I woke up to the sea.
Give me that any morning.
Our home for this celebration was the Royalton Riviera Cancún, a beautiful luxury resort facing the Caribbean. The resort describes itself as an all-inclusive property with suites overlooking the Caribbean, multiple restaurants, pools and a range of activities.
But descriptions are one thing. Seeing it is another.
Royalton was not merely a hotel to me. It was a temporary little world.
Breakfast, lunch, dinner, swimming, the sea, the pool, the beach, conversations, laughter—and everywhere you turned, somebody seemed to be enjoying a holiday.
And then there was the international dimension of our little family gathering.
Nigerians. Britons. Canadians.Americans.
Different accents. Different passports. Different weather experiences. Different ideas about food.
But one birthday.
That is one thing travel teaches you: the world may be divided by borders, languages, currencies and politics, but celebration has a universal language.
Everybody understands joy. And the Mexicans understand joy particularly well.
The Mexican people I encountered seemed warm, courteous and service-minded, especially those working in the hospitality industry. Their culture is a rich mixture of Indigenous, particularly Mayan, and Spanish influences, expressed through food, music, colour, family life and an obvious pride in their heritage.
And perhaps this is why Cancún works so well.
It knows how to sell pleasure without selling its soul completely.
Behind the luxury hotels is an ancient civilisation. Behind the cocktails and swimming pools is the Maya. Behind the modern tourist city is a history stretching back centuries.
Cancún itself is surprisingly young as a modern tourist city. Its spectacular transformation began in the 1970s, when Mexico deliberately developed the area as a major tourism destination. What was once a sparsely populated stretch of beaches, lagoons, mangroves and jungle became an international holiday capital.
There is even something intriguing about the name.
Cancún is generally associated with the Maya words kaan kun, commonly translated as “nest of snakes.” There are competing interpretations, however, and some sources give other possible meanings.
A “nest of snakes”!
And yet what we found was no nest of snakes but a nest of happiness.
Perhaps the Maya knew something we didn’t. Perhaps they were naming the land for what it was before the hotels arrived. Or perhaps, as with many ancient names, the exact meaning has become blurred by time.
Whatever the etymology, modern Cancún has become synonymous with paradise.
And there is plenty to see beyond the hotel.
There is Isla Mujeres, the beautiful island just off the coast, famous for its calm waters, coral reefs, snorkelling and diving. Mexico’s tourism authorities recommend it for everything from underwater exploration to simply relaxing beside the Caribbean.
There are the ancient Mayan ruins.
There is Chichén Itzá, one of the great archaeological treasures of Mexico.
There are the cenotes—those extraordinary natural pools formed in the limestone landscape of the Yucatán.
There is the MUSA underwater museum, where art and the sea meet in a most unusual marriage.
There is the Hotel Zone, with its restaurants, shops, bars and nightlife.
And there is simply the beach.
Sometimes you don’t need an itinerary. You need a chair. You need the sea. You need the sun.
You need somebody you love sitting beside you.
That was the beauty of this particular journey.
It was not really about Cancún.
Cancún was the stage. The real story was Olubukola. Seventy years of life deserved more than a cake and a few birthday cards. It deserved a gathering of people whose lives she had touched. It deserved children who would secretly plot across continents to make their mother happy.
It deserved laughter. It deserved the sea. It deserved the Mexican sun.
And it deserved a husband who could wake up every morning, look at that magnificent Caribbean horizon and say to himself: My wife is 70—and look at where her children have brought us.
Thank you, Taiwo. Thank you, Kehinde. Thank you, Jide.
You boys certainly know how to throw a birthday party.
And thank you, Cancún.
You may have started life as a “nest of snakes,” but for us, you became a nest of love.
The greatest souvenir I brought back from Mexico was not a sombrero, a bottle of tequila or a piece of Mayan art.
It was the memory of my wife at 70, surrounded by family and friends from across the world, under the Mexican sun, with the Caribbean Sea shimmering behind us.
Some birthdays are dates on a calendar. Others become stories.
This one became a story.
And now, dear reader, you have heard it.
Cancún: The city hotter than Lagos, but somehow cool enough to make you want to stay for an enjoyable holiday.
(The Sun)