The Dive Evangelist

Back on my feets, horray! Sorta. It hurts, but I’m ambulatory and the way I see it, if I can walk, I can dive. After two days of tearing through the too-many books I’d brought down here and moving back and forth from the couch and the balcony I was all too eager to get the hell on out of this suite.

What a day it was. When I can be easily amused by making it all the way down a flight of stairs and riding in a van, just imagine what wonders the cenotes held for me.

Our first dive today was actually an open water dive, albeit one of the most peculiar I’ve ever enjoyed. After stopping in the town of Tulum at some dude’s house to get him to escort us to Cenote Angelita (his ejido owns it and he is, evidently, in charge of the diving) and finding him not home we decided to risk a trip down to the cenote in the hopes that, perhaps, he was there already.

Angelita has had a bad name over the last few years, Victor explained, because of banditos. He used the word “banditos.” I really like Victor. Seems people were waiting for divers to jump in the water and then cleaning out their vans.

“Just don’t bring any credit cards or anything expensive,” Victor advised. Of course, being a ditz, I promptly forgot that advice and brought my wallet. I trusted that to get to it, banditos would have to get through Roger first, so I wasn’t worried.

The guy with the keys was there, as were a few other teams of divers. After a long, limping walk through the jungle trail for me and a trip involving a tree badly scraping the crap out of her leg, but saving her from a 15 foot fall into the water for Polina we only had one little obstacle left… entry.

There are no stairs or a ladder or anything of the sort. There is a nearly bare limestone face with a four-foot long rope tied to a root you climb down (and up, that was fun) in full gear.

The reason to hazard these obstacles is that Angelita is home to an unusual phenomenon. There is a halocline at about 100’ and on top of that halocline sits a layer of hydrogen sulfide, a product of vegetative decomposition. Essentially just a very deep hole in the jungle full of water, this is Angelita’s main selling point, but if you’re willing to brave banditos (I love that word) and the sketchy entrance/exit, I highly recommend buying what Angelita is selling.

We dropped together through the not-perfect visibility of the fresh water and at about 30 feet we could see the top of the debris cone from the sink hole’s fall-in about 70 feet beneath us. Peculiar thing, though. Instead of being the top of a mound of rocks, trees, and dirt at the bottom of the cenote, it appeared as a small island in the middle of what looked like a cloud.

An eerie, impenetrable mist lay still in the water surrounding the boggy island; it seemed like something out of an old horror movie featuring werewolves or vampires or, at the very least, villagers with pitchforks and torches.

Paul hovered for few moments waist deep in the fog before seemingly getting sucked down by it feet first, beckoning with obvious spooky drama. Then Victor headfirst. They both vanished.

“What the hell?” and I swam in. Sure enough, it was like swimming through a cloud. A foul tasting cloud (hydrogen sulfide tastes like rotten eggs in your reg). Part of me was convinced I was going to faceplant into mud, so like bog-mist did it look. But I didn’t. The cloud cleared and beneath it was crystal clear salt-water, through which I could see to the 200 foot bottom of the cenote.

Looking up from around 160’, there was an eerie green glow to the daylight through the chemistry above us. A curve of sheer limestone wall embracing us. Whole trees littering the steep banks of the debris cone. It was stunningly beautiful.

The second dive was a proper cave dive. It was also a very lucky cave dive.

Hidden Worlds Cenotes Park offers jungle zip-line tours, even cooler tours involving this groovy sky-bicycle gizmo where you pedal around above the jungle, and cavern diving and snorkeling tours. There is a cave system, but it isn’t open to divers. Unless you know people who know people. Paul is old friends with the owner who offered us the opportunity to dive this remarkable cave.

Entering in the relatively shallow Orchid Cenote (into which the park owner has a staircase from his home’s front door) we first went swimming into a mild current a little ways to see a huge cavern zone where some of the more dramatic scenes of the movie “The Cave” were filmed. Turning to put the current at our backs, we weaved through a forest of those flowing jungle roots of which Scott is so fond before continuing into the cave section.

Because this cave is so very rarely dived, the feel of the place is pristine. The limestone that lay directly under the guideline is not totally bare, but instead houses tiny pockets of silt, utterly undisturbed by a parade of divers. This means you have to watch your fins much more carefully, to avoid disturbing said silt and messing up the visibility, but it’s worth the extra care to appreciate what a cave should really look like.

The ceiling, too, shows how infrequently the cave is dived. There are plenty of broken stalactites on the floor from careless divers and from natural erosion, but never did I see a path worn totally free of decoration across the ceiling. Several times our buoyancy was absolutely critical as we swam through passages impossibly dense with stalactites over-head and stalagmites under-fin, with precious little wiggle room for both a diver and their tanks.

I can’t say honestly that I didn’t have some juvenile worry that if I sank onto the stalagmites they would impale me, and my fellow divers would have to tow me, full of holes, back to the exit. Silly, I know, but what do you want? The rational part of me knew I had to maintain my place in the water so I didn’t damage so much as a single, tiny structure that took more years to form than the Roman Empire stood.

After riding the current (which was nice, what with my bum foot being barely useful even as a rudder) for about an hour we found ourselves under what looked like a massive air pocket. Following Paul’s lead, we surfaced into this pocket, Hilario’s Well.

The room we were in is perhaps 200 square feet, the floor made almost entirely of water, with passages leading off in several directions. This is where snorkelers can see what spectacular formations form in the Yucatan’s caves.

I really wish I was only wearing snorkel gear. Because to get in and out of Hilario’s Well you crawl through the only place where the floor is made of stone, a short tunnel about four feet tall that leads to a perfectly vertical ladder through a narrow well about 15 feet tall. That ladder with doubles and limp… was totally worth it after a dive like that.

Only one dive left tomorrow morning before it’s time to start off-gassing for the flight home. Sigh.

That dive will be to a site called The Pit. If you’re going to wrap up a vacation, might as well wrap it up in style.