On the road in Mexico: Day 2
CANCUN - In the good times, they like to call Cancun's tourism hot-spots "paradise". With its palm-fringed beaches, stunning blue seas, and enough night-life to keep the most energetic of holidaymakers happy, why not?
But these are not good times. I arrived here to find the beaches half empty, and the stall-holders with their piles of unsold bead bracelets and Mexican hats staring mournfully at the occasional passer-by.
In the good times, two-thirds of the visitors who come here are from the US. It is a favourite destination for graduating high-school kids. But take a nasty economic recession, and add to it screaming headlines about an epidemic of swine flu, and suddenly the tourists aren't coming any more.
There are 28,000 hotel beds in Cancun. In April, 80 per cent of them were empty. It's better now, but still nowhere near what it used to be. And if you're trying to entice the tourists back, the last thing you want is the US government issuing warnings about the risk of violent crime.
But when I left the glitzy hotel area and headed into what is known as "Mexican Cancun", I found local people worried about the rise in drugs-related crime. Just two weeks ago, three bodies were found in an abandoned car, blindfolded, hands and feet bound. The car turned out to belong to a senior police official.
Paradise? Not exactly. But at least there's a major international conference in Cancun this week. It's the Global Flu Summit.
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