Cancun, Mexico — SEEMINGLY, all is \o7bueno\f7 here on Mexico's sunny, sinny Caribbean coast, a year after Hurricane Wilma bore down for a three-day weekend like some party girl who wouldn't leave.
In the Hotel Zone, the ribbon of resorts along Cancun's beachfront, innkeepers have been on a spending spree, adding presidential suites and tennis courts, flat-screen TVs and more shore than ever before to its world-renowned beaches.
Along Kukulcan Avenue, 6,000 freshly planted trees sway to the billowy tropical breezes that seldom rest. (Think Rachel Ward wrestling with her hair and skirt in the movie "Against All Odds.")
And diners are again ordering pork chop Milanese at La Dolce Vita or the buttery broiled grouper at Lorenzillo's, where customers pause on their way out to feed the 10-foot crocodile that swings by almost every night for a little late-night bite.
For decades, travelers have come to this glitzy peninsula, 640 miles due south of New Orleans, for its guilty pleasures and remarkable setting, the Yucatan jutting out so far into the gin-clear Caribbean that you can almost smell Castro's cigar.
And a year after a Class 4 hurricane swallowed the beaches and tore open some of the nation's priciest hotel rooms, all is well here in Cancun and the sprawling resorts to the south and east.
Or is it?
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Guests will return
THERE is no heat like a tropical heat, a warm cup of coffee down the back of your neck, but I am not the only one to have broken a sweat here. Roman de la Cruz melts a little as he describes cowering for three days in a cottage as Wilma skidded to a halt, held in check as if by the devil's thumb.
"It got here and just stopped," recalls De la Cruz, 46, who has seen other hurricanes come and go, usually in 12 hours. "All I could do is stay in my cottage."
Remarkably, no one died in the storm that caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage. But when it finally left, so had those magical beaches and something else vital: As they were with New Orleans after Katrina, tourists were wary of visiting during the next hurricane season, June through November.
It left tour promoters such as De la Cruz in dire straits and the little vendors at Market 28 in the city's core suffering for customers.
"It was the worst summer I can remember," De la Cruz says.
