This week’s travel dream: Exploring the land of the Maya

A vacation on the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico doesn’t have to be all about scuba diving or enormous beach hotels, said Melina Gerosa Bellows in National Geographic Traveler. A personal curiosity about an endangered honeybee—the stingless Melipona beecheii—led me to set an itinerary focused on some fading Mayan traditions. My area of exploration would be the Riviera Maya, a 80-mile stretch of beach-laden coast that’s “the geographical equivalent of a hammock hanging between played-out Cancún to the north and less-traveled Belize to the south.” My hope was to lay eyes on the Melipona and to learn why the Maya still consider the bees sacred and their honey a “giver of life.”

I stay outside Tulum in the city’s coastal area, a “boho-chic enclave” known for yoga ashrams and low-slung luxury resorts. At Amansala, I sign up for a Mayan clay-and-honey wrap, joining a dozen other women on the beach as we coat each other’s bodies in “mustard-colored goop” and then cleanse away anxieties in the ocean waves. Renting a bike, I later pedal to Nohoch Mul, the tallest pyramid on the Yucatán Peninsula and a shrine to Ah Muzen Cab, a Mayan bee god. Following the 120-step climb, I survey the jungle and marvel that every hill is actually an unexcavated temple. That night, I witness Mayan theater: After we’re led by torchlight down into a mood-setting pit, we watch Mayan actors—wearing only body paint and animal skins with “jangly shells”—perform a re-enactment of the opening drama in their sacred book, the Popol Vuh.

A tip about an even more authentic Mayan experience soon leads me “way off the grid” to a small jungle town, San Antonio Segundo. There I meet an 80-year-old beekeeper, Don Porfírio Chimal Kanchoc, who lets me peek into an apiary, home to thousands of Melipona bees. As bees rush toward me, “I flinch before remembering that they are stingless.” At a ceremony later, I’m allowed to sample balché, a sacred honey-based wine that must be an acquired taste. But the precious Melipona honey itself tastes “earthy and slightly citrusy.” As a reminder of life’s blessings, it seems more than worthy of worship.

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Doubles at Tulum’s Nueva Vida de Ramiro (tulumnv.com) start at $70.