Xcalak, MX

I'm happy that I did a little research this past summer and found out that Paula Preston, caretaker at a private home Ceilo y Sol, said that we may be able to camp here. It's close to town, just across the bridge from the Leaky Palapa restaurant which is run by two Canadian women and is so popular that we had to make reservations for dinner on Thursday evening.

The little fishing village of Xcalak (Ish-ca-lac) has only has about 300 full time residents and many small hotels North of town on the potholed sandy beach road. We took a 3 mi walk up the road on Tue morning before it got too hot. There are a few nice small hotels and two dive operations plus a lot of private homes mostly owned by North American expatriates. Ivan from Ontario is building a new home and he hired an artist from Chiapas to carve Mayan designs into his porch columns. The artist did great work as seen from the photograph. We met him on our bike ride, he had just flown in for a week to see their progress.

On Wed morning we rode our bikes South of town and it was mostly a jungle preserve with no houses or views of the ocean. The temperature was in the high 70's but it was so windy that it was too cold to sit in the shade. We read books most of the day and stayed out of the wind. It's interesting that even with the high winds there is very little surf since the reef off shore knocks down all the waves. It is very quiet here also, the waves are but a dull off-shore roar. A vegetable truck stopped by today so we could replenish are fresh veggy supply. This place is 90 mi from the main road so it is surprising that anything gets delivered here. There is electrical power but the lines only go about 1/2 mi North of town. The small hotels all have solar or wind power and generators.


If your looking for an undiscovered little place in Mexico this could be it. There is a lot of real estate & ocean front lots available. The local real estate company donated funds to fix up the school. The biggest excitement in town this week is that they dropped off a large bulldozer that is supposed to start repairing the beach road from Xcalak to Mahahual. The main road to Xcalak is smooth asphalt with wide lanes but the beach road as it now stands is more like a series of huge craters. It made us laugh when some places created small topes from rope. The road is much worse than going over a large rope.

 On Thursday we got out for an early 10 mi bike ride on the bumpy beach road going North. There is another settlement and small hotels about 5 mi North of town but with the bad road it could take 20 minutes by car to get there. There really are no campgrounds but there are lots of small areas to boondock. We like the place that we are camping since it is so close to town and we are the only people other than the caretakers. However, we need to move out on Sunday morning. We don't need to get up to near the Cancun airport until about 2 weeks from now, So we are looking for other places we want to try camping between here and Cancun.