Plate I01
A pyramid built to keep the equinox.
Chichén Itzá, Yucatán, morning
Mexico is two coasts, a high cold capital, and a peninsula that belongs more to the sea than to the mainland. It is pyramids you can still climb at the spring equinox and colonial towns painted the colour of every fruit at once. We design it as four journeys, not forty, because the country rewards the traveller who picks a single thread and pulls it slowly.
Eight plates from the studio's last year in Mexico. The equinox light at Chichén Itzá, a cenote at noon, the callejones of Guanajuato after rain. These are ours, taken in the off-hour.
Tibro has been sending travellers to Mexico since the mid-nineties, first through a single partner in Mexico City and now through ground designers in three states. It is a long-haul country from India, and we have always treated the flight as a reason to stay longer, not shorter.
We hold annual retainers with the hotels we use. The hacienda outside Mérida, the two casas in Oaxaca, the cliff-edge rooms at Tulum. Rather than booking on commission. It means we answer to you, not to a rate sheet, when we tell you a room is worth the night.
Our designers are Mexican and they write the days you will spend. What lands in your inbox is what they send, edited only for your dates and the pace you ask for.
This page does not list the four journeys; those pages do, and a person sits at the end of them. Four is everything we offer in Mexico. We would rather write a fifth slowly than a tenth this year.
Warmly,
The Tibro studio , Mumbai, Mexico City (partner)
Three letters from the last two years. Mexico surprises the people who booked it expecting only a beach. These are the notes we kept.
We went for the Maya sites and came home talking about a market. Our designer had built in a free morning in Oaxaca that we nearly skipped; instead we spent it being walked through the Mercado 20 de Noviembre by a cook who chose our lunch for us. Chichén Itzá was extraordinary, but it is the smoke off that grill we keep describing to people. The cenote swim on the way back to Mérida did not hurt either.
We timed it for Día de Muertos on the studio's advice and were nervous it would be a tourist crush. It was not. They had us in a small town outside Oaxaca where a family let us sit at their ofrenda. The capital before it had been all Diego Rivera and very good dinners. A fortieth birthday I did not think could be topped, quietly was.
A honeymoon that we wanted to be half beach, half not-beach, and Tibro split it exactly right. Four nights on the Tulum coast, then inland to a hacienda near Mérida that we would not have found alone. High ceilings, a pool the colour of the cenotes, nobody else there. The designer answered a midnight message about a dinner reservation as if it were noon. We will go back.
Mexico is a different country on each coast and a third one in the mountains. Tell us which one is pulling. A Day of the Dead in Oaxaca, a quiet week on the Yucatán, a milestone you want marked with mezcal. And a designer will write back with what ten nights could hold.