Mr & Mrs Smith

Sitting on the edge of a large outdoor tub wrapped in nothing but towels, listening to the loud clatter of birds and owls in the forest all around us, my fiancé whispered, somewhat incredulously: ‘Where on earth are we?’ I shared his wonderment. We had arrived at Hacienda San Jose after a three-hour drive from Cancun – speeding away from the blazing blue beaches into the dusty Mexican interior: who does that in August? – to decamp inside a pocket of lush solitude that felt impossible remote. We could have been in an African jungle somewhere, or Cambodia. We both sighed and dipped down into the warm water, letting our arms and legs float, looking up into a canopy of green leaves.

Hacienda San Jose is a simple place: 11 rooms and four cottages on a small tract of land that was once a much larger colonial plantation, pared down and then carefully restored and updated to accommodate modern guests. Nothing form the brochure – or along the narrow gravel road leading to its plain entrance – signalled we were about to experience anything exotic. It is, after all, a Starwood Property, part of a familiar chain. Even its designation as part of the group’s Luxury Collection had us hoping for little more than soft beds, high threadcount sheets and a steady supply of top-shelf tequila.

But as we drove onto the grounds in the middle of a summer rainstorm and parked in front of a hut marked ‘recepcion’, we were quickly tipped off to what makes Hacienda San Jose sparkle. A staff member glided up to the passenger side of the car with an open umbrella, to ensure we did not suffer a single drop of rain. Then, before we had hardly uttered our names, she demanded we surrender our car keys and led us on foot down a winding gravel pathway to our room, promising all our luggage would be retrieved from the car and follow, which it magically did.

As the downpour continued, we spent an hour exploring our junior suite, No 3, which was really a cavernous two-room cottage. Painted bright blue on the outside, its heavy, wooden doors opened up into a white-and-blue-tiled bedroom with an exposed-beam, 25-foot ceiling, attached to a bathroom of equally huge proportions. Just off the bathroom, in a small semi-private cove of trees, sat our tub – which was large enough for both of us to sit fully submerged up to our necks, once we decided we were secluded enough to drop the towels.

By the time we reached the dinner hour and stumbled, in a warm bath-induced daze, down to the restaurant to eat, we were beginning to wonder: were we, in fact, the only people crazy enough to abandon the crystal blue Caribbean waters at the height of summer for this landlocked preserve?

Yet it turned out our isolation was just a mirage. All 15 rooms were, in fact, full during our stay. It was just that the only glimpse of the other guests – including a lively French family of eight – happened at mealtime, when the seemingly omniscient hotel staff set up tables exactly according to each party’s size ahead of time.

Nature was the only balky party to the whole enterprise. As delighted as we were by the constant, loud whoops and caws of the birds swooping among the trees, we were less enchanted in the restaurant by the giant, bat-sized moths that fluttered toward our plates. One such moth, perhaps fed up with the perfect serenity of the place, dove purposefully into our dinner candle wax mid-meal and drowned. Yet even the moth suicide incident – a drama we analysed at length as we ate – did not detract from the unusual perfection of the sopa de frijol aguacate (black bean soup with fried corn meal stuffed with spinach, cream cheese and avocado) and panuchos (small round tortillas stacked with shredded chicken, tomato, pickled onions and fried cheese) that we ordered as appetizers, or our smoked grouper and stuffed chicken entrees, or the chilled bottle of Argentinian Malbec that we slowly drained.

Most people come to this part of the western Yucatan peninsula to explore the plentiful Mayan ruins, including Chichen-Itza, the famous regional capital that dates back to the 11th Century, about an hour to the east of the hotel. There are other tourist sites – small beaches to the north, along the Gulf of Mexico; the state capital of Merida, with its beautiful colonial structures still intact – all within a 90-minute drive. Further afield, about 200 miles to the east, lies the go-go nightlife of Cancun, which is also the point of entry to the peninsula for most foreign visitors arriving by air.

But the thing this Mr and Mrs Smith loved about Hacienda San Jose was that it inspired us to do none of that. Instead we sat by ourselves at the pool, taking turns in a hammock strung up across the shallow end, then strolled through the garden before deciding to take another long outdoor bath. The birds never paused in their cooing and chattering, the only sounds breaking the silence. And as we discovered one surprising nook after another – a chapel with candles lit; a tree with oversized roots – my betrothed never stopped asking me, playfully: ‘Where are we?' By the end of our stay at Hacienda San Jose, we had the answer: we were as blissfully far away from civilisation as we had ever been.