Maya Echo - A Cultural Voyage
by Mary Locke

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We seem to have a bipolar fascination with Mexico -- we long for the quaint culture but are lured in by the commercialism of Cancun. While there are some people who find the "sun and sand" atmosphere of the Cancun hotel zone exactly what they want, there are many tourists who find that there is something missing. They long for a taste of b.h. (before hotel zone) Yucatecan life. Maya Echo satisfies this cultural yearning.

Maya Echo is one of the dreams of Sandra Dayton, who has lived in Mexico for many years. About five years ago she attended a conference in Canada that discussed sustainable tourism. She knew she needed to start Maya Echo, a business that helps both the Alfredo-Barrera-Marin Botanical Garden and the traditional village of Central Vallarta.

Based in Puerto Morelos, just 32 kilometers south of Cancun, Maya Echo has delighted visitors for four years. Sandra hosts a day trip that begins with a walk through the Botanical Garden, the largest natural style garden in Mexico. It consists of sixty-five hectares (one hectare equals a little more than 2 acres), some of which includes the mangrove, a marshy terrain that is vital to the continued well-being of the ocean and shoreline.

She points out plants that are labeled in both Spanish and Mayan. She readily shares her increasing knowledge of their uses and abuses. In addition to medicinal plants, there is a Mayan herb garden, an orchid display, and the ruins of an altar where Mayans paid homage to their gods.

Visitors enter a reproduction of a typical Mayan wooden house with a palapa (palm leaf roof) and a traditional kitchen. These structures are capable of enduring hurricanes and are naturally cool in the hottest weather. The endangered Mayan stingless bees fly to and from their log hives in their search for the five specific flowers that they adore.

Animals abound from spider monkeys to iguanas to foxes. Striped and other brightly decorated butterflies partake of the flowering trees and plants. Sometimes it appears that the animals derive as much pleasure watching the people as the individuals have watching them.

Participants may meet Sylvia, the director of the Garden. She and her five staff people rely solely on admission receipts and donations to continue their work. They are all Mayan and regard themselves as caretakers of the land, not just employees. Sylvia herself was raised in the jungle and learned about the uses of the plants before she ever received her biology degree.

They are putting the finishing touches on the new educational center, funded primarily by visiting schoolteachers from Santa Fe, New Mexico. The International School Peace Garden held an inauguration there in May. The Garden receives no governmental subsidy of any kind.

The Nature Conservancy has become interested in the Alfredo-Barrera-Mar!n Botanical Garden; it is sending a representative to learn firsthand about the Garden' struggles. However, international hotel developers have also taken a tremendous interest in this particular sector, since it lies halfway between Cancun and Playa del Carmen. The developers envision a luxury resort complex, obliterating the reef-sustaining mangrove, hectares of natural habitat, and Mayan altar ruins.

As a result, the Garden' territory has been decreased through governmental intervention. Over the past three years it has faced the threat of dissolution several times. It needs to become a protected natural area.

After the Botanical Garden, Sandra takes everyone on the slow half hour or so ride inland to Central Vallarta. It is a small village of about twenty-five inhabitants, and was started due to the chiclero trade, the work of extracting chickle from chicle zapote trees, boiling it, and rendering it into rubbery balls to be used as the basis of chewing gum. The call for chickle has diminished because over ninety percent of the chewing gum produced today has a petroleum base.

These villagers want to stay in their homes. They have seen others leave to go to the cities to work in hotels and restaurants. In order to maintain themselves, they coordinate with Maya Echo excursions.

Do a Julia, a long time resident, invites Sandra and the day travelers into her household as part of a living cultural experience. She points out the useful trees and bushes growing outside her dwelling, including tamarind and papaya trees. Chickens and children caper across the yard; there is no need of fences in this thickly foliaged setting.

Inside her home, visitors are offered sweet Mayan fruit and fried chaya. The green chaya leaves supply a great deal of protein and other nutrients. Chaya leaves can be stir fried, added to sauces, or blended into a healthful fruit drink. Restoring chaya to the Mayan diet would result in better health and improved nutrition naturally. While native to this area, chaya plants are now being cultivated in Florida.

Do a Julia displays embroidered bags, tee shirts, and cloths that the women of the village produce mostly by hand. Sales help them all generate the income they need to be able to stay on their land. Sandra and the women are instituting a small mail order business of embroidered one of a kind vests, bags, huipiles (Mayan dresses), and altar cloths. The women are proud of their village and their accomplishments. There is mutual respect between the women and Sandra. There are no handouts, only industry and perseverance.

The next stop is a beautiful cenote with lily pads and beautiful birds. There are no rivers in the Yucatan due to the limestone foundation. Water flows underground and occasionally reaches the surface through an actual sinkhole in the limestone. It is this "pond" that is a cenote. Since fresh underground water continually refreshes the liquid of the cenote, it is perfectly clear and chilly. A dip in a cenote is invigorating.

Here Sandra provides "the best sandwiches in the Yucatan Peninsula" and refreshments. Then Don Julio, caretaker of the cenote and a chiclero, discusses his trade and the workings of the chiclero camps. One or two women who were up before dawn did all the cooking for a camp of approximately twenty men. They made thousands of tortillas and mounds of beans and rice.

The men worked at least 12 hour days to coax the white sap out of the magnificent trees. They were often alone in the jungle doing very dangerous work. They literally did not know when they set out in the morning if they would be returning to the camp that night. When each man had collected enough, he would boil the pitch down to a large rubbery ball. These orbs would be taken out of the jungle to the docks where ships would transport the chickle all over the world.

He shows the visitors how to survive overnight in the jungle, getting off the ground to avoid snakes that glide through the undergrowth in their search for mice. Water can be found in a special vine or in a cenote. He demonstrates how to use what is available in the jungle by making a rope and a bucket out of palm fronds. He is a proud man who shares his knowledge and experiences forthrightly. It is a hard life that is intimately intertwined with the pulse of the jungle.

The drive back to Puerto Morelos is full of animated discussion about the day's events. Everyone keeps an eye out for anteaters and other animals that may be sauntering across the road; this old chiclero camp road is used infrequently. All agree that this tour is unique and fully enjoyable.

This is one of the ways Sandra Dayton introduces us gringos to the more traditional Yucatecan culture that is found outside Cancun. She also founded Lu'um K'aa Nab, a non-profit organization involved with helping Mother Earth. It was created with the vision of bringing people together to share in the rich history of the culture, tradition, flora and fauna, wildlife, and native people of the area.

Last year one major project was to help clean the beaches. Through collecting items labeled with cruise ship logos, volunteers helped document that some cruise ships were still dumping refuge at sea. The proof had unerringly washed ashore during hurricane season.

A third way in which she introduces groups to the timelessness of Mayan generational knowledge is through a collaborative endeavor with The Center for Transformation and Healing in Merida. Aspects of Mayan and personal spirituality, of ritual and inner deepening, are brought together in a multiexperiential adventure entitled "Accessing Our Inner Wisdom: A Mayan Goddess Journey of Self Empowerment, Self Knowledge, and Self Expression."

The intention of this week long seminar is to rediscover one's inner goddess wisdom through participation in group educational sessions and the restoration of the tradition of sacred Mayan pilgrimage honoring the Great Mother Goddess Ixchel. Timeless spirituality, like-hearted community, and Mayan ceremony weave a circle celebrating the reawakening of the Goddess and the raising of feminine consciousness.

It starts in Puerto Morelos where thousands of Mayan women and men assembled to prepare themselves to travel to Ixchel's temples on the islands of Cozumel and Isla Mujeres. Some of the activities include learning rituals, songs, and prehispanic dances, gathering medicinal plants for purification, preparing huipils (ritual Mayan dresses), working with meditation and sound, participating in a temazcal (Mayan sweat lodge), doing a Maya Echo day tour, and journeying to both sacred temples.

Ixchel is the principal Mayan goddess of heaven and earth, love, healing, fertility, art, weaving, and the partner of the principal Mayan god, Itzamn . However, she has remained relatively unknown in North America. The observance of Ixchel's sacred day was eradicated through religious fervor and replaced with the December 8 Feast of the Immaculate Conception. Yet some villages still celebrate Ixchel on that date.

Sandra believes that reinstituting these sacred ceremonies will unite women in the reemergence of the divine feminine. Women are being called to do their part in global transformation. The earth is waiting, the plants are waiting, the people are waiting...

In South America the Incan prophecy states that the eagle and the condor North and South Americans) will fly together. Native American tribes speak of the evolvement of the rainbow tribe. In Mexico the Mayan calendar pointed to 1996 as the commencement of the Age of Itza, the Age of Light, where Mayans and other people will begin to exchange cultural information and find ways to live together. Sandra Dayton is living her vision to help make this so.

Mary Locke is an intuitive healer, retreat supervisor, workshop leader, social worker, and writer who lives in Merida, Quintana Roo, Mexico. is Email.

Also read Inside Maya Echo - Sandra Dayton

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