AKUMAL, Mexico — She is in a pit 3 feet deep and as long as a coffin when we are allowed to approach at 10:30 p.m.

It is easy to find her. When she crawls out of the sea — at night when it is safest — the 500-pound green turtle gouges the white sand and leaves a wide, rutted trail like that of an all-terrain vehicle.

Safely above the high-tide line, she chooses her spot not 15 feet from  a private swimming pool. Then she engages her powerful rear flippers and begins spitting out sand, digging herself deeper with the unwavering sense of purpose of Mike Mulligan's steam engine, Mary Anne.

The turtle, whose species is endangered, was hatched from a ping pong-size egg somewhere on this very Caribbean beach on Mexico's Yucatan peninsula up to 30 years ago.

At that time, there were hardly any roads on the whole coast of Quintana Roo, a long-ignored jungleland populated by descendants of the great Mayan civilization.

In 1958, a restless young Frenchman, Michel Peissel, was able to walk 200 miles along the roadless coast and its dense jungle, encountering only friendly Mayas and finding more than a dozen lost Mayan ruins on the way.

Today, much of the coastline south of Cancun, known as the Maya Riviera, is wall-to-wall all-inclusive resorts and vacation playgrounds.

Green and loggerhead sea turtles frequently bury their eggs right next to beach chairs and palapas. Akumal, the area in which we stayed for a week in a low-key resort, means "place of the turtle."

The nonprofit Centro Ecologico Akumal tries mightily to mark and monitor the nests, making late-night vigils.

The volunteers have succeeded in getting many of the resorts and beach house owners to keep lights from pointing to the beach so that emerging turtle hatchlings looking for the shimmering sea to find their way home don't instead see a floodlight and head inland to their deaths.

For more than two hours, 10 of us allowed to accompany a scouting foray stand reverent and transfixed as the old girl releases about 100 eggs in a cavity.

Then, with the devotion of a mother, she buries her young and tamps the sand. The temperature around each egg will determine if it is a male or female.

 It's nearly 1 a.m. as she turns like a tank and lumbers silently past us and is again swallowed by the sea.

Fortunately, she doesn't know that when her hatchlings dig themselves out in 50 to 60 days, few will live to adulthood. On average, only one out of 1,000 will get to make this nighttime deposit in the sand.

When I'm not invading their privacy on the beach, I am swimming with the turtles and a bewildering variety of colorful fish in the shallow coral reef that forms the second-longest in the world.

The snorkeling and relative seclusion of this spot about 60 miles south of party-central Cancun is the main reason we chose Akumal Beach Resort, with its half-mile of beachfront on a sheltered bay. We run into families who have been coming here for  generations.

Remember that scene in "Finding Nemo" where the school of moonfish form an arrow to show a frantic Marlin the way to Sydney and his captive son?

I have a similar experience one morning on a snorkel. Approaching a cluster of coral, scores of silvery fish suddenly form an arch right in front of me. We are face-to-face, eyeing each other with what I anthropomorphize as mutual curiosity.

As it should in an exotic place, the air around our resort is scented with cries of unfamiliar birds and the soothing sweeping sounds of palm tree fronds.

A beachhead has been carved from the jungle to accommodate man, but the wild things are ever pressing to get in.

We have geckos Velcroed to our ceiling at night and black spiny iguanas patrol the sidewalks. Hermit crabs scuttle across the planked lobby floor. Giant frigate birds loom overhead and I watch with amusement as a pelican takes a nose dive right next to a wader.

 There always is a healthy breeze on the beach, but venture behind our building and biting insects suck your blood faster than you can say "paradise."

I have long had a morbid fascination with what it would be like to ride out a hurricane at the shore. This trip I kind of found out.

Tropical Storm Arlene hits the evening of our arrival and howls outside with horizontal rain for two days. Palm trees flap madly. Our sliding glass deck door rattles at night and chairs are blown off the open-air dining area. Full glasses of Dos Equis beer even are toppled. Oh the tragedy.

All things pass however, and we are soon greeted with Jimmy Buffet-like weather.

One day, we ride horses on several miles of undeveloped oceanfront south of Playa Del Carmen. It's fascinating to get a feel for what this entire area looked like until very recently.

I get up one morning and Carlos, a taxi driver I have bonded with, gets me to the Mayan ruins at Coba. I am the first one to enter and hike briskly the 1.5 miles to Nohoch Muul, the 138-foot-high ceremonial pyramid and the tallest structure in the northern Yucatan.

It's also one of the last Mayan pyramids you can still climb — the rest are now off-limits in the name of preservation.

I am the first and scale the 120 incredibly steep, uneven stone steps to the top, where priests 1,300 years ago stood, looking out over a city of 55,000. Now, it's mostly thick jungle and only about 25 percent of the ruins have been excavated. Mounds adorned with trees are everywhere. Each will be a building, once trees and dirt are one day removed.

I get the same goose-bumpy feeling I experienced one summer while scouting with researchers for Anasazi rock art in the Southwest.

"This is one of my favorite places in the whole wide world," says Mindy Russell-Haight, a recently retired Spanish teacher who has joined me on top with about 15 high-school students from near Kalamazoo, Mich.

"I think it might be the spirituality," she says, gazing on the endless jungle and what once was here. "I suspect it's also the vista."

About 20 years ago, when she first came and the ruins had only recently been opened to the public, Mayan women would emerge from the jungle and ask her for water.

I visit other structures, including the ball court where — historians still argue about this — either the losing team was sacrificed to the gods, or the winning team earned the honor to be sacrificed and immortalized.

For three hours we have the place almost to ourselves. Then, as I had been forewarned, a slug of about 100 tourists, disgorged from tour buses, is suddenly making its way on the old Mayan roads.

Back at the entrance, I am floored to learn that Carlos has been patiently waiting for me the past four hours.

Our finale is a bumpy but so-worth-it trip to The Jungle Place, a government-sanctioned sanctuary for spider monkeys too often illegally removed from the wild.

Heidi Michlin, a Texas woman, and her husband, Joel, arrived here 13 years ago to build a dream house in paradise. The property still sits vacant.

When a woman approached them trying to sell an illicit baby spider monkey, they insisted on taking the obviously malnourished primate to a vet.

When the monkey miraculously survived and the couple learned of the extent of the illegal trade and that there was nowhere to take confiscated or abandoned spider monkeys...well, let's just say their lives took a detour.

Today, they devote day and night to a constantly expanding labyrinth of cages for monkeys that because of human habituation can never be released back into the wild. It costs $200 to $250 a day just to buy fruit.

Currently, they have 22 spider monkeys including the original, Chaac, now the colony leader.

To help fund their sanctuary, they allow up to 10 people a day to interact with a handful or so of female monkeys. After removing all jewelry and glasses, we enter a cage.

For more than an hour, the monkeys crawl on us, doze in our laps and swing over our heads.

One look into those dark eyes and you're a goner.

acrable@lnpnews.com

For a listing of outdoors events throughout Lancaster County this week, go to lancasteronline.com. Click on Sports, then Outdoors.