White Sandy Streets of Holbox

"People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.” – Dagobert D. Runes

After a rather harrowing ride to the little port town of Chiqila (see Amy's post below), we arrived just in time for the sunset and the 5pm ferry to Holbox. Isla Holbox is on the northeast corner of the Yucatan and the little town of Holbox is where the ferry comes in. 

So by the time we got to Holbox it was dark and there's nothing like arriving in a town you've never been to in the dark and wondering where to go. So we hired one of the "Holcars", which are gas powered dune buggies which can carry 4 people and their luggage. It's been raining A LOT here, I mean really pouring and there are huge puddles covering most of the streets here.  But the Holcars go right through there puddles with no problem. 

After we checked into our hotel, La Palapa, which is right on the beach, we went to have a drink in the hotel's restaurant, Casa Nostra, an Italian place. As we were having our cocktails, we looked at the menu and noticed a lot of Sicilian dishes that we remembered from our trip to Sicily in 2012. Then the owner came out, Beppe, and started talking to us about Sicily and the food and wine, etc, etc. When he mentioned the special of the day was spaghetti in octopus ink he had me sold, even though I was thinking dinner would be at some Mayan place. 

The spaghetti was awesome, as was the Italian red and white wine we had. Te second course was a very nice filet of fish cooked in limoncello. 

The next morning we decided to walk as far as we could on the beach that goes east of town...after a really good breakfast of huevos rancheros and scrambled eggs with ham and other goodies. 

So one of the things we are trying to do here is finding places that are still relatively uncrowned, where the tourists don't know or care about. Well, Holbox has certainly been discovered, at least by Mexican and European tourists. But once we walked past the hotels lining the beach, we were pretty much alone, along with the lizards, pelicans, flamingoes and iguanas. We walked about 3 kilometers until we could walk no more, as there was a large inlet that's was too deep to wade across. So we swam across it, just to see the other side. 

By this time we were tired, thirsty and hungry, so we headed back to civilization for lunch. Right on the plaza, there is nice restaurant famous for their langoustine pizza. Well, we opted out of that but had the octopus cocktail and the conch served in garlic sauce. Mahvelous!

And here are some pictures of our lovely little town of Holbox...

Tonight we were lassoed into a marvelous restaurant right off the square. By this I mean that the restaurant's waiter, Carlos, was at the square talking to tourists trying to get them to his restaurant. No menu, just the fresh catch of the day. So we had shrimp in pepian (pumpkin seed) sauce, wonderfully spicy, and a fresh (2 hours before it was swimming) grouper in a delicious cerano chile and cream sauce, all washed down with a fume blanc from the Valle de Guadalupe in Baja. Oh my!!