There's a luxury measured in price and a luxury measured in memory. A lavish route through Mexico - from the Caribbean coast, through the wild Pacific, to the heart of the capital - shows that the most expensive thing you can buy there is actually quiet.

The first stop is Mayakoba on the Caribbean coast, where the villas open directly onto the canals, and the boundary between inside and out simply disappears. You reach the accommodation by quiet boats through mangrove canals. Here there's also a temazcal - a ritual in a chamber of volcanic stone where a shaman guides you through songs, medicinal herbs and steam - and a nighttime ceremony beside a sacred cenote, with sound bowls and meditation on the water. It sounds esoteric, but the point is as old as travel itself: sometimes you pay just to be left in peace.

On the Pacific coast is Mandarina, wild and physically far from the Caribbean calm. Here the days begin with horseback rides along the shoreline at dawn, walks through jungle revered by the sacred trees of the local population, and whale watching from a private boat. The spa treatments draw on pre-Hispanic knowledge - warm oils, herbs, full attention to detail - with a huge parota tree, called "grandmother," watching over the rituals.

The third part is entirely different: Mexico City and the Polanco district. Here the luxury is urban and intellectual - hotels with Californian architecture and a Mexican soul, restaurants like Lorea with Basque influence and seasonal ingredients, a perfumery conceived as a cabinet of curiosities, and showrooms with modernist pieces rescued from Mexican architectural history. You can even fly by balloon over the pyramids of Teotihuacan at dawn.

The point of the whole route is simple, though expensive: authentic luxury in Mexico isn't in the price, but in the intensity of the memory. From the renewal of the body on the beach, to the expansion of the mind in the city. For a Balkan traveler who saved for years, this is a dream with a lot of zeros - but at least the dream has a clear address.