I spent a month on Mexico’s new Tren Maya route and found caves, cenotes and “savage capitalism”

“There are spiders in the rock holes,” says Angel, our Chiapas jungle guide. “If you need to grab the rock, splash it with water first”. Buoyed by an orange lifejacket alongside 20 Mexican tourists, I slowly float along a river flanked by dense trees, rocky ledges, and a preposterous amount of mosquitos.

Earlier, I’d got off Mexico’s Tren Maya at Tenosique railway station, a few kilometers from the jungle river. Built for an estimated USD$20-$25 billion (thrice its original budget), the recently-completed 966-mile (1,554-kilometer) Tren Maya network loops around southeastern Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, which as well as Yucatán state includes the states of Campeche and Quintana Roo.

Promising a super-modern ride and showcase project for Mexico’s former president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the Tren Maya connects touristy cities with ancient ruins and jungles, and is touted as a Mayan adventure. But its infrastructure has led to Mayan sites being damaged, around 6,600 hectares of forest loss, and locals being displaced.

I spent a month traveling 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) of the Tren Maya route, to see what adventure it offered and how life near the tracks has been affected.

Palenque, a jungle town at the route’s southwest corner in Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state, is my start point. The tree-shrouded ruins of Palenque’s Mayan city, which became an important capital around 500 AD, drew tourists well before the Tren Maya’s arrival, but appeal is tempered by the state’s reputation for danger. Speaking over guttural grunts from nearby howler monkeys, backpackers tell me that the buses ferrying tourists to Palenque avoid the roads notorious for hijackings.

I stayed around Palenque for a few days, and joined a few Mexican tourists in a wooden boat going up the Usumacinta River separating Mexico and Guatemala. We eventually get to the deep jungle ruins of Yaxchilan, another ancient Mayan city, where I chat to a tourist called Gloria. She tells me she’s traveled to Palenque on the Tren Maya from her home in Chetumal, on the route’s eastern stretch.

According to Mayan academic and member of rights group Múuch’ Xíinbal, Rubén Solís Mecalco says that cenote and archaeological site damage as a result of the construction of the Tren Maya are examples of colonial mindsets riding roughshod over Indigenous communities.

“I’m happy that we have transportation like this,” she says, adding that before the Tren Maya it had been decades since the peninsula had regular passenger trains. I ask about the destruction the route caused. “When you want to build something, you have to take over something,” she replies, adding that urban development has been rampant in cities on the route such as Cancún for years.

After Yaxchilann, I take a taxi to the pyramid-roofed Tren Maya station on Palenque’s outskirts—the route has been criticized for not taking passengers directly to urban centers—with its shiny floors and glass-walled convenience stores. Gray-shirted officials keep watch over coffee-sipping tourists. Over 6,500 full-time soldiers and National Guard officers are reportedly required to guard the network.

My immaculately clean carriage’s nuke-level air-con easily suppresses the 95 degrees Fahrenheit (35 degrees Celsius) sun-blast outside. Former president López Obrador called the Tren Maya “the greatest construction project in the world”: I can confirm that beyond air-con, it has comfy high-backed seats and a small café carriage selling passable coffee and Milky Way chocolate bars.

After 45 minutes onboard, I’m the only passenger to disembark at Tenosique’s new Tren Maya station. I hear some mildly curious “Gringo!” (‘foreigner’) mutters as I walk to my hotel, ahead of the jungle trip I’ve booked with Wayak Xuul, the only tour company working in town.

24 hours later, I look in my bathroom mirror and admire the pattern the jungle mosquitos have designed across my back. Our tour group had floated along the jungle river, collectively grateful for the fresh water coolness engulfing us from the neck down. As we joined the wide Usumacinta River—at a section further north than the section I explored earlier from Palenque—we climbed into boats and rowed downstream. We paused to listen to kitten-like caw sounds coming from the nearby jungle mass. “Toucans”, said Angel, our guide.

The Tren Maya is busy on my journeys, with the route clocking up 50,000 weekly passengers. Most get on and off at established tourist places such as the port city of Campeche on the Gulf of Mexico, and the Yucatán capital, Mérida. Towns like Tenosique in Tabasco state, and Calkini in Campeche state, seem so far unaltered by the modern stations plonked on their outskirts.

At Calkini, I am again the only passenger disembarking. The vast tarmac car park has two occupants: A police truck and one motorbike-taxi driver, who seems delighted to take me into town for 10 pesos (50 cents) and a photo.

Calkini has a big Oxxo convenience store and excellent 20 pesos ($1) tacos, but seemingly no tourists other than myself. I walk through the town center cemetery in nearby Pomuch, with its boxes of exposed bones and skulls, then visit Becal, another nearby town, known for its handmade Panama hats. A store owner ushers me ‘backstage’, to step down into a small underground cave where artisans are weaving—cool caves create better hat-weaving conditions.

Some 78 miles (125 kilometers) of railroad later, I disembark at Tixkokob’s station, completing a hat-trick of small-town solo disembarkments. With no bus running into town, I apologetically enlist a National Guard official to phone a motorbike-taxi, which probably wasn’t the work the young official envisaged when joining the force.

A Mayan guide I meet later, on a bee tour in Valladolid, a city on the northern Tren Maya stretch, is similarly sceptical about the Tren Maya being touted as a force for good.

In Tixkokob, I pay 20 pesos to swim in a small cenote, down some stone steps round the back of a house, splashing Evian-clear water as a bat flies overhead. Cenotes are freshwater pools often found in caves, and there are thousands of these sinkholes around the Yucatán Peninsula. They’re also sacred to some of the estimated 2.5 million Indigenous people living on the peninsula.

Many cenotes have had Tren Maya infrastructure built through them, with ecologists criticizing authorities for not conducting proper ecological surveys before drilling. “Cenotes are the door of the inframundo, the underworld,” says Rubén Solís Mecalco on a call.

Solís is a Mayan academic and member of rights group Múuch’ Xíinbal, explains that according to Mayan culture, cenotes have protector spirits. “When one new cenote is opened [discovered], you need to make a ceremony to ask this spirit if you can go in,” Solís says, adding that cenote and archaeological site damage as a result of the construction of the Tren Maya are examples of colonial mindsets riding roughshod over Indigenous communities.

Naming the project Tren Maya (‘Maya Train’) was ludicrous, Solís says, as it promotes Indigenous culture as a “product without soul”. In 2020, Mexican journalist and author Luis Hernández Navarro wrote that the Tren Maya represented “savage capitalism that dispossesses the original peoples of lands and territories”.

Solís agrees: “It’s symbolic when someone came and destroyed everything around you, and is taking your culture and selling it as a product.” While López Obrador said the train provided work in some of Mexico’s poorest regions, Solís says that low-paid jobs didn’t compensate for the destruction caused by the train.

A Mayan guide I meet later, on a bee tour in Valladolid, a city on the northern Tren Maya stretch, is similarly sceptical about the Tren Maya being touted as a force for good. Javier Ku Caamal shows me stingless bees native to Yucatán, whose honey has been cultivated by Mayans for generations.

Ku Caamal says that more tourists have taken his bee tours since the Tren Maya came to Valladolid, but that some people in his community feel “shame” about the idea of being exposed to its passengers, viewing the train as just for tourists and the middle class. “They’re not connected, because they’re poor, and the people they’ll see there are richer,” he says. “It’s just ‘different’, to them. It’s a mentality”.

He tells me he had family members working at Tren Maya stations, but economic stimulation hasn’t filtered down enough. “The life of poor people is not changing. The line between rich investors and the [Indigenous] communities is very visible.”

My final Tren Maya stop is Playa del Carmen, a resort city on Quintana Roo state’s east coast. As the train arrives, dense jungle flanking elevated tracks give way to sparse dirt expanses cleared by recent deforestation.

Guillermo D. Christy, a hydrologist and Cenotes Urbanos activist group member who has been instrumental in exposing the Tren Maya’s environmental impact, drives me in his dusty truck over mud tracks, into the jungle. We step into shallow water in a wide limestone cave, part of the Aktun Tuyul complex, believed to be part of an underground network comprising hundreds of miles of passages.

I ask him if he [D. Christy] has lost hope of damage being mitigated, now the Tren Maya route is complete. “It’s not lost yet,” he says, adding that he is more optimistic now that Mexico has a new President, Claudia Sheinbaum.

With torches strapped to our helmets, we splosh through caves, dodging stalactites. “This water is safe to drink,” D. Christy tells me, as I swim in a pool lit-up turquoise by our torches.

Later, our torches illuminate rusty pillars protruding through the limestone. D. Christy says they are among thousands buttressing the Tren Maya track. The water around the pillars is brown. “Not drinkable,” he says. “It’s beginning to rust, so in time it’s going to fail.” He adds that beyond iron contamination, train infrastructure caused diesel and concrete spillages in caves that are water sources for wild animals.

López Obrador has accused activists of staging environmental damage, but D. Christy says the pillars are proof of fragile environments being smashed through. I ask him if he’s lost hope of damage being mitigated, now the Tren Maya route is complete.

“It’s not lost yet,” he says, adding that he is more optimistic now that Mexico has a new President, Claudia Sheinbaum. Government representatives recently visited the caves, and D. Christy points out that the Environment Ministry said it would implement environmental restoration plans.

He turns off his torch and tells me to do the same. We sit in the shallow cave water, in the blackness, our legs gently cooled by the water, our ears suddenly attuned to distant drips. “It’s good to experience the cave as it is,” he says.

As we walk back through the jungle, we hear the rumble of the Tren Maya—“the greatest construction project in the world”—unseen behind the greenery surrounding us.

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