A tourist crosses a flooded street on a surfboard after Hurricane Wilma hit the resort town of Cancun in Mexico's state of Quintana Roo last Sunday. Cancun, one of the world's top beach destinations, lay gutted on Sunday after Hurricane Wilma blew out hundreds of hotel windows, tore through boutiques and left the Caribbean resort under water. - REUTERS
CANCUN, Mexico (AP):
HUNDREDS OF haggard tourists stranded for days by Hurricane Wilma were dropped by the sun-scorched roadside short of Cancun's international airport yesterday after officials promised flights would finally start to carry them home.
Twenty-seven flights were scheduled to leave Cancun's international airport after it reopened yesterday morning, reconstruction coordinator Rodolfo Elizondo said in a televised interview with the Televisa network.
Dozens of taxis and tour buses dumped tourists and their luggage at a checkpoint well short of the airport.
No flights were seen leaving and the apparent organisers gave little explanation, though workers were separating tourists into groups with and without tickets.
"There's no information. Nobody knows anything. And what they know changes every minute," said Steve Toth, 41, of Crown Point, Indiana.
He and his wife got off a tour bus with their 2-year-old daughter in stroller and wandered around asking for help.
"Where are we going to go from here? This is crazy," he said.
NATIONAL PRIORITIES
President Vicente Fox acknowledged that getting the tourists out - and then getting them back in again by the start of high season in December - was one of Mexico's highest national priorities, given that Cancun is one of the nation's biggest sources of cash income.
"They should bring down transports. The conditions are getting worse, and people are going to start getting sick," said Tom Dinonno, 48, of Levittown, New York, as his wife Karen struggled to make a credit-card call from a Cancun pay phone.
When the call finally went through after 20 minutes, they got their son's answering machine - and silent tears started to stream down Karen's cheeks.
