Dodging a Holiday in a Remote Mexican Town Piotr Redlinski for The New York Times A tourist relaxes at Casa Carolina, an inn near Xcalak, Mexico. The night before Thanksgiving, while most of my acquaintances were setting tables or stuffing turkeys, I was in a lonesome town in Mexico, watching a salamander eat mosquitoes on a greasy kitchen wall. It was a hungry thing and went about devouring its prey with whip-quick lashes of an energetic tongue. Though I had chosen to avoid the feast day in the north, I didn't mind the little lizard's gluttony. Its meal, after all, was untroubled by the usual distractions: by football on TV or, moreover, the familiar family dramas. Despite - or perhaps because of - its enforced veneer of bliss, the month between the Macy's parade and the Times Square ball drop can often inspire an unseasonable longing to escape. The place that I'd escaped to - Xcalak, a seaside town at the bottom of the Yucatán Peninsula - is one of those remote locations, like Key West or Gibraltar, whose inaccessibility is the essence of its charm. I had come for the holiday to evade the conventions of overeating and bickering with kin - to experience an admittedly transparent feeling of without-ness. Xcalak (pronounced ESH-cah-lahk) is a fishing village defined by what it lacks. Its few hundred residents largely live without electric power or modern indoor plumbing. There are solar panels and rain-catchment basins, but there aren't any banks or A.T.M.s. You can't use your credit card, and forget about your cellphone. The nearest place to refuel your car is an isolated Pemex station 30 miles away. What the village has instead of creature comforts is an amiable vacancy, an atmosphere of off-the-grid seclusion that comes from the fact that it rests at the end of a very long road. It was the day before the holiday arrived when my companion, Cheyne, and I started on that road, leaving the Cancún airport in a rented Chevrolet. Content to be in exile, we traveled south on Highway 307, snacking on a bag of salted corn chips and speeding past an endless stream of garish all-inclusives. But two hours later, once we passed Tulum, the tourists - and the traffic - disappeared. The road abruptly narrowed and began to snake through drowsy towns of thatch-roofed shacks and vivid orange stores and wild dogs chasing bicyclists, none of whom had much appreciation for the local driving rules. As we neared the so-called city of Felipe Carrillo Puerto, it was obvious that we had left the guidebook Mexico behind: stooped-backed men appeared on the shoulder and were whacking at the overgrowth with vintage-style machetes in the kind of pointless toil typically reserved for chain gangs in the north. It was in Felipe, three hours south of our departure, that we filled our tank for the last leg of the journey and finally consulted the traveling directions we'd been given by our hosts. These were decidedly ambiguous and give a flavor of the navigational patience required for the trip to Xcalak. "Just south of the town of Limónes," our cheat-sheet read, "take the road toward the sea and Majahual. Before Hurricane Dean the signage was excellent. But most of the big signs blew down in the hurricane, so you have to pay attention to the distances to know where to turn. Advised that our turn was precisely 67 kilometers past the service station in the center of Felipe, I pulled over for a moment and Cheyne took the wheel. Within an hour, she had found our exit and swung us off the highway to a smaller road that passed through marshy swamplands and stretches of an inhospitable scrub. An hour after that, on the turn to Xcalak, the thoroughfare that had once been simply narrow tapered even further to a hilariously slender one-lane road. This, we later learned, was a habitat for jaguars, which emerged from time to time, slipping out to hunt from the mangrove jungle hungrily encroaching from the berms. At any rate, we flew past a garbage dump and the stench of burning palm fronds. Hawks and cormorants were whirling in the sun. It had been 30 minutes since we'd seen another car, and turning from the landscape, it occurred to me that the two of us were utterly alone out there - and that, in the excitement of all that isolation, Cheyne had our little Chevy moving at a rate in excess of 100 miles an hour.