La Gran Aventura de Jeff & Gini, Parte Uno

This week we took a quick trip to Mexico. Jeff and I spent one night in Cancun at the Hilton and the next morning met our best friends, Anna and Scott, for our trip to Isla Holbox.
Lest you think that Mexico is all either tourist-trappy or dumpy, let me assure you, there are still phenomenally gorgeous, unsullied places to be seen there. And Isla Holbox is one of those places.

But it's not easy to get to, and I hope for the sake of the natural beauty of the place, it stays that way.

A two-hour van ride, much of it over dirt roads, leads you to the tiny Mexican town of Chiquilá. You then board a ferry that takes you another 45 minutes over to the island.

We were met by a golf-cart taxi (painted yellow, complete with illuminated "taxi" sign) which took us to our lodging.

The trip to the Casa Iguana took about 5 minutes (the island is only about 3km wide) and all the island's roads are sand.
It wasn't fancy or big (only had 9 rooms), but it was clean and had a hot shower and enough air conditioning to keep the room tolerable.

Anna and I immediately went to the beach (about a 50 yard walk) and got in the water.

Let me digress: I am a beach connoisseur. I've been to green beaches, pink beaches, white, tan, gray, black and salt-and-pepper beaches. But I have never seen a nicer, cleaner beach than the ones that surround Holbox. Nor have I ever truly seen "sugary white sand" like they have there. It is so incredibly soft and white, almost impossibly powdery. Prior to this trip, 7-mile beach on Grand Cayman came the closest, but the Holbox beaches blew them all out of the water (pun intended).

Anyway, so while we were basking in the gin-clear 90-ish degree water, our husbands had walked down the beach another 50 yards to a bar. Actually it was a tarp thrown over four poles with a tiny screened tent kitchen next to it. They had two brands of ice-cold beer (XX and Sol) for 20 pesos each (about $1.50) and a small menu of Mexican appetizers.

Let me summarize the trip for you so far:

best beach ever
white powdery sand
ice cold cheap beer
clear clean warm water
sun-filled blue skies
great friends to share it with

So far, so good.

We eventually dragged ourselves "downtown" to find a restaurant. The one we found was just okay, but we really didn't look very hard.

We walked back to our little inn and hit the sack early, in anticipation of a very early wakeup and long day ahead.
Stay tuned for parte dos!

Most of the photos above were taken by Jeff. You can see all of our photos of the trip by clicking on the title of the blog entry.

The aerial photo of Holbox and the photo of the taxi were taken by Scott Mitchell...the rest of his photos of the trip can be found by clicking on his name.