Four years ago, I drove back to Canada after living for a time in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo. Taking the highway north, adjacent to the coast—often lousy with crooked state and municipal cops looking for a bribe, bandits and cartel bullshit—tends to be a more dangerous of the options available to travellers. At the time that I made the trip, the smart money was on traveling into the nations interior. Travel only by daylight and stick to the federal toll highways. Hope for the best as you skirt beautiful, sketchy joints like Villahermosa, Puebla and Mexico City and, within a few days, you'll wind up in just across the border from Eagle Pass, Texas. There, in its twin city of Piedra Negras, you'll hopefully be able to get the cost of your Mexican car insurance refunded before being eyeballed by DHS and have an exhausted dinner at the first Whatabuger you see. Depending on your point of view, the trade-off or bonus that comes from taking this route is spending long, hot days rolling over two lane backstop through the Maya jungle. It's a sea of green that could, with little trouble, swallow two travellers and a dog in a Subaru whole, never to be seen again. Reassurance is found occasional heavily armed patrols from Mexico's Guardia Nacional and the roadside assistance saints from Ángeles Verdes.
The drive, save an encounter with some underpaid cops at a checkpoint in Yucatán, was uneventful. That said, at times, we moved slower than we anticipated as the construction of the Tren Maya was well underway. The scale of the work was massive, unlike anything I'd seen in Canada or the United States. At the time, such were the project's personnel needs that places as far away as San Miguel de Cozumel were left with too few workers to complete construction projects. Anyone with experience holding a shovel left their gigs at home to build the railroad and the infrastructure required to make it hum. The money being offered to hack a path through the jungle was too good to resist.
On one of stops we made at dusk was in a village of fewer than 100 people; a small lattice of streets carved into the green. We were hosted by a couple who, up until a few months before, both worked in Cancun at a resort. When the government promised that the Tren would bring tourists, workers and the opportunity to make a living without having to leave the village, they returned to their to home to open a bed and breakfast. I wish I could recall the name of the town. Things there looked legit: the government poured sidewalks and curbs for every street in the tiny town. The local school was gifted a new football pitch. When I talked to the owners of the bed and breakfast, they were hopeful: we were the only guests to stay with them that night; the only guests in over a week. But it would all change when the railroad was complete. The name of their home escapes me, but I'm left with the far off look in the eyes of one of the owners. It was good to be home, with her mother who cared for her children while she and her husband worked on the coast. With the success of their business, they could stay in the village and watch their kids grow.
I forgot about them until I read this essay in The Globe & Mail, a few days ago.
Deep in Mexico's Maya jungle, brilliant white lights blaze improbably in the wilderness: a maintenance depot for a flagship multibillion-dollar train line. But just beyond the perimeter fence, an off-grid village lies in darkness.
Mexico's Mayan Train, spanning about 1,500 kilometres, was meant to bring development to the country's impoverished south through improved infrastructure and increased tourism. But, two years after it was inaugurated, it is struggling. Ticket sales cover only a fraction of operating costs and hotels built along the route sit mostly empty.While federal spending on the Mayan Train triggered a historic 13.2-per-cent spike in economic growth in Quintana Roo in 2023, that proved to be a temporary construction-related boost. The state plummeted into a 9.7-per-cent contraction in the first nine months of 2025, according to the latest data from statistics agency INEGI.
Quintana Roo did cut unemployment and expanded formal hiring, but about 60 per cent of workers in the Yucatán remain in informal jobs without legal or social security protections.
Hope can be such a desperate, dangerous thing when you rely upon a government to deliver it to you.
Previously:
• Mexican president posts photo proving existence of mysterious Mayan elf
