Chacahua was sort of an accident. We rented a car to visit some of the outlying market towns near the coast. Most of the people out there are Mixtec, which are a different bunch from the people around Ciudad de Oaxaca. Different traditions and village uniforms, odd hybrid pagan/Catholic traditions, and different food called us out there. We rented a car for a couple of days because public transit in those parts was scarce, if at all.

But we didn’t make it too far. We drove for a couple of hours, but reading through our guidebook got us interested in a little village called Chacahua ("CHOCK-uh-wuh"). It was just a few miles down a dirt road, it said. What it didn’t say was that it was a very rutted and potholed road on which we wouldn’t feel comfortable, in our rental car, driving much faster than 10 or 15 mph. After 45 minutes, we finally arrived at the village of Chacahua, where we met a woman who would let us park our car in her yard for a few pesos a day. She took us over to the edge of the lagoon and introduced us to a man who would ferry us across to the other village of Chacahua on the island across the lagoon.

At first we had intended to stay the night and depart the next morning to see the market towns. But at this point we were an hour down a dirt road and a ferry ride away from the two-hour highway trip to the market towns, so we decided that Chacahua was where we’d stay. And we were glad of that. The sea was gorgeous. There were 30 or 40 buildings on the island, including a church, a school, a few houses, a couple of establishments that let cabanas by the day, and the rest were small houses, many of which had thatched roofs as in the photo. When you’re surrounded by palm trees, it’s actually a very practical roofing material.

There were two restaurants in Chacahua (one of which was tacked on to the proprietress’s house). The latter was the only one open once we got settled in to our tiny, hot, screenless cabana. The woman came out and asked us what we’d like. We asked her what she had. She thought for a moment and said "I have fish and I have shrimp." We said, "We’ll take one of each." The fish was served with head, eyeballs, and skin intact, which is normally not how I like it. But I was very hungry and this was the only choice, and it would have been horribly rude to anything but graciously chow down. So I patiently peeled off the skin and picked between the bones and didn’t regret for a moment my decision to do so, gross though it would have been under other circumstances.

The cabana was hot, and Maris found an ant infestation in her mattress, and we woke up with many, many mosquito bites. But the cabana was $16 or so per night total (split three ways makes for dirt cheap accommodations), and the beach was exquisite, and we were in the middle of nowhere.