Thousands have gotten out, but thousands more tourists remain stranded in this Caribbean resort city pounded for two days by Hurricane Wilma.
Tourism officials estimated that mostly charter flights took about 6,000 people out of Cancun airport on Tuesday, while thousands more were bused to planes in Merida, a 280km trip that normally takes four hours but which has been lengthened by heavy traffic and partially flooded roads.
"Enough's enough," Paul Bracey, 45, of Wales, said at a hotel serving as a shelter in Cancun as he waited for a bus to Merida late on Tuesday night. "We're still stranded, and have been told six days of lies. Soon we can have something real to eat, have a shower."
Officials said about 22,000 foreign tourists remained in the area on Tuesday, down from a peak of almost 40,000 during the storm.
There was still had no solid estimate of the damage caused by Wilma, which lashed the coast on Friday and Saturday and wiped out the heart of Mexico's US$11 billion foreign tourism industry, even washing away much of Cancun's famed white beachfront.
Aurelio Fernandez 35, a carpenter from Spain said he planned to fly back on a charter flight from Merida yesterday, leaving behind a suitcase at a Cancun airport locker.
"I'm leaving, but my bag isn't," said Fernandez, said at a hotel where he was evacuated; officials cleared the school where he was originally sheltered after looting broke out in the area.
"It was the most refreshing of my life," Fernandez said of a shower he took at a hotel still being used a shelter, the first he had had in five days.
Cancun was still without electricity on Tuesday, but generators began to hum to life as gasoline became more widely available, bringing light and water back to many hotels.
Colonel Robert Martin, defense attache for the British embassy, said 8,000 British tourists were still in Cancun.
"There are 200 hotels and 150 shelters here," Martin said. "It takes time to reach them all."
Eric and Michelle Joseph, honeymooners from San Jose, California, said that a river of human waste had run through hallways at the hotel where 1,200 tourists were sheltered during the storm.
At the height of the flooding, tourists had to use a ladder to climb out of the hotel from the second floor because of flooding.
"Our whole family is calling senators, congressman and Governor Schwarzenegger," said Eric Joseph, 26. "My Cingular [cellular phone] bill is probably going to be US$3,000."
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS