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THE highway to Hotbox isn't a wholly hopeful one. Our tumble to this small Mexican island began greatly the way my spouse and I had been told to suppose: with a provoke in a smashed van that, an hour after parting the Cancan airport, veered off the main highway and against a dirt means blocked by two men who calm a small fee from our driver before charter us exceed through.

Then the van rumbled along the dirt highway before striking a stretch of catacomb-roofed pavement. Eventually we indoors at the survive-beaten carry in the patchy city of Clique? That would take us to Islam Hotbox, a spit of land six miles off the northern coast of the Yucatan isthmus.

Forty action overdue, we encountered a landscape with no high-rises, no franchise lodges, no A.T.M.'s, only a handful of cars - with most people darting around on bikes, motor scooters and golf drags - and a dozen or so small lodges impart walking coldness of the carry wharf.

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We were just 93 miles from Cancan, but we felt as although we were light days aloof from the gigantic resorts (and gigantic crowds) of that admired destination for honeymooners and leap waves.

"We don't have any big lodges for big crowds who are looking for all-inclusive deals and parties all day long," said Manfred Pose, who together with his girlfriend, Petra Bare, manages Villas Chimayo, an eco-lodge on an unworried pin argument of coast on the western end of the island.

The pair, who enthused to Hotbox (pronounced OHL-bosh) from Switzerland last year after since an ad to rent the goods in a Swiss newspaper, can button from French to Spanish to English lacking a blink and genially meet visitors, charming time out from sterilizing quarters or other lodge errands to show guests a span and chat about the island.

The tumble is "a little bit of an adventure," Mr. Pose said. "But those people who are burden the tumble will see that it's merit it."

Still the island events about 25 miles in segment, it is excluding than 2 miles thick at its highways argument, and only a small portion is inhabited. The southern part is made up commonly of mangroves, while the northern shoreline is all coasts. The only city is a collection of colorcompletey painted one- and two-buzz material structures on a grid of about a dozen blocks. Even in city, the highways are made of packed gooney sand.

About 2,000 people live on the island, effective commonly as fishermen or in the tourism trade. On the coast near city, pedestrians must tread deftly, stepping over ship tethers and rolled up fishing nets. In the overdue morning, assertive pelicans and seagulls congregate around fishing ships anchored just offshore line, balanced to gorge up any scraps that the fishermen discard as they gut and sterile the day's clip.

Whale sharks, the major of all fish, migrate to the waters off the coast of Hotbox from June through September and have become big company as the focus of an increasingly admired day tumble from Cancan. For about 800 pesos (about at 11 pesos to the dough), tour operators deal the fortune to swim with the dappled giants, which can grow to 40 feet long and are said to be gentle.

There were no whale sharks to be seen at the end of January, when my spouse, Greg, and I visited the island, but there were enough of spirit tours to close cays, kayaking tours through mangroves and ship tours to Islam de loss P?jaros, or Island of Birds, where pelicans, frigates and diverse traveling birds perch.

The island is pancake level with scrubby vegetation. At low rush, the thinning waters uncover rush pools and ripples in the wet sand. Sandbars emerge like a delusion, a cloud blurring the outlines of pelicans and other maritime birds that congregate on the fleeting islets. In January, the heady smell of seaweed wafted up occasionally, but mosquitoes, which we were warned of and arranged for with DEET and citronella candles, were scarce.

Hotbox, which means black fallacy in the Maya talking, is said to have been named after a night tarn in the southern part of the island. And locals say the Maya comported a freshwater tarn, Yamaha, about a 20-thorough ship provoke from the island, to be a sacred fountain of youth.

In October 2005, gale Wilma devastated Hotbox, and although the island has chiefly rerouted, support of the destruction still waits in acne. An amble or golf drag provoke along the coast takes you gone some lodges, some set back past than others. Almost all are made with thatched roofs and are no more than two or three stories high. Villas Flamingos, one of the utmost from city on the eastern part of the island, sits next to the skeleton of the past lodge Pelican, its first buzz chiefly washed away in the storm. Base-long iguanas now sun themselves on the destroyed-tile confound.

On a windswept morning in overdue January, visitors would find the main cube commonly deserted, making the rusted impede cipher at each spot appears asinine. But around 7 p.m., when the restaurants opened for feast, a steady issue of golf drags and scooters - many piloted by children and shipping more people than they were planned for - brought the piazza to life and gave gist to the impede cipher.

Citizen children frolicked on the jungle gym of a new playground in the core of city while adults gathered around the edges to chat. And tourists, most of them European, dined on the clip of the day at the diverse restaurants around the cube.

By broad consensus, the best restaurant on the island is at Casa Sandra lodge, where diners sip monitors by candlelight and the Cuban cook visits each slab to tell the specials. (Be steady to try Grandma's meatballs for 125 pesos.) Sandra Perez Lozano, Casa Sandra's possessor and a poet, came to Hotbox looking for isolation close to spirit and in 1999 built her two-buzz thatched-roof lodge with a complete-segment front overhang and a moment-buzz porch to take in the ocean.

But the outlook of the island, she overdue wrote in an e-packages letter, is hard to predict. "A although we want it to wait in silence," she wrote, in Spanish, "The money and the lodge commerce in this borough are very great and could end this riddle doubt of the Caribbean."

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About the Author

Sharon Shame writes for http://www.aerosboosterclub.com where you can find out more about Aerosboosterclub and other topics.