By Christine Tibbetts

updated 2:46 p.m. ET June 16, 2006

Time matters in Mexico. The slow, easy, languid kind which wraps you in a comfort zone of no hurry, all is well, manana is soon enough. Relax. This is your holiday.

That calming mood has returned to the Yucatan Peninsula, where Cancun, Cozumel and the Riviera Maya were buffeted by high winds and copious amounts of rain for 63 hours when category five Hurricane Wilma lingered too long in October, 2005.

Mexican serenity morphed into intense deadlines for several months with owners and employees, residents and developers determined to renew hotels and beaches, restaurants and shops, nightspots and breakfast places.

As each reopens in a brand new style, that traditional Mexican calm returns. Cancun, Cozumel and the Riviera Maya are ready to check out, and fun to visit.

They're different too. If you've been before, and want to return this spring or summer, expect sparkling newness. Expect adults and families, not rowdy students, because this Mexican state called Quintana Roo is taking advantage of hurricane recovery to price Spring Break out of the market.

"Spring breakers go where the market will bear, and Cancun hotels which had to take them before are now upgrading," according to the John McCarthy, head of Mexico's master tourism and economic development planning agency, Fonatur.

"The spring break numbers were already dropping before the storm," said McCarthy, Fonatur's director general. "With renewed properties everywhere in the Yucatan, we believe the spring breakers will be looking elsewhere."

Cancun, McCarthy says, is a new place for the second time. Created from the low jungle in 1974 as Mexico's first master-planned city, Cancun's re-creation today from Hurricane Wilma includes more than renewed hotels and refurbished beaches.

Look for three new PGA-rated golf courses, marinas and nautical opportunities for the first time ever at the hotel-oriented Puerto Cancun or at Malecon Cancun with commercial and residential developments.

If three million visitors, a busy international airport, 142 hotels and supporting shops and restaurants, four-lane highways, hospitals and city infrastructure can happen here, they say, it can happen all over Mexico.

That might be a solid reason to visit Cancun, Cozumel and Riviera Maya right now, before you're lured elsewhere in Mexico.

Sure they still have some hotels waiting in the post-hurricane renovation line, but each had enough completed, brand new and ready to show visitors a good time as each new day passes.

In fact, the Cancun Convention and Visitors Bureau puts out a daily update because change is happening so fast.

The next Cancuns
Cozumel lost its international cruise ship piers to the storm, so now ferries cruisers from ship to shore in vessels provided by the island. No life boats for this short journey.

Claiming 100 percent of the shops to be open, the island's Promotions Board Director Raul Marrufo reports that Cozumel's famous scuba diving reefs are open and the waters are clear.

With the old renewed, and ready again for holiday traffic, Fonatur is taking the Cancun model down the coast in the Yucatan Peninsula and all the way to the west coast of Mexico.

Here are some of the up-and-coming names to claim today so you'll be first in line as they open: Costa Maya, Litibu, Loreto, Los Cabos, and the Sea of Cortez.

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