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.

Evangelist's Note: Well, my bum foot got me. While most of the gang went cave diving, I've been sitting here eating ibuprofen like Pringles and staring hopelessly off the balcony at the reef only a few dozen yards into the clear, blue Caribbean, which is currently calm as a bottle of vicodin. So, instead of my just making a whole bunch of ridiculous stuff up about cave monsters and probably some sort of dramatic scene involving bad guys with underwater scooters and spear guns, Scott volunteered to be guest commentator for the day's dive. Enjoy.


Casualties of Leisure

Paul lied. Well, I guess it was a white lie. “You can skip tomorrow if you want,” he had said. But he hadn’t mentioned that skipping tomorrow would be a damned shame, too. OK, let’s face it. Every day can’t top the last, ad-infinitum, but the fact is that no dive among these cenotes is quite what I’d call “optional.”

We’ll try to keep that detail quiet around Roger (who, having sold his foot to the devil to see Grand Cenote, didn’t make it into the water today) and Anna (who stayed behind as well, a little under the weather, a lot behind on her work, and maybe a tad sympathetic for Roger).

So, today we had a cozy group: three divers (Polina, Jim, and myself) with two guides (Paul and Victor) between us! The van ride on the way to Dos Ojos was noticeably more sedate, owing to our missing comrades, the absence of their wit, the lighter load of tanks and equipment, and perhaps a touch of sixth-day late-awakening. After a quick trip down the main highway we cut off onto a side road, expecting the usual one- or two-minute washing-machine ride over ruts and boulders to the dive site. Instead, we were greeted by a freaking dirt road to heaven – a brilliant white trail, wide enough for two vans (oh, my!) and stretching off as far as the eye could see. I half expected to find a Long Island wildlife sanctuary at the other end.

Oh, well, at least this wasn’t quite as bumpy. Taking advantage of the void left by Anna and Roger, I made a bunk out of one of the seats and got in a little quality relaxation time. The gentle rocking of our chariot, not unlike mild Atlantic swells, combined with the clink-clink of the now-fewer tanks like riggings rapping mast, briefly took me back to my former life on the open water.

Very briefly.

“We’re here. Let’s go!”
“Where’s the entrance?”
“Are there facilities here?”
“What did they pack for us for lunch, anyway?”


Eye, Captain

Back in the swing of things, we all go into automatic. Within twenty minutes we’ve checked out the site while our driver hauled the heavy stuff out of the van; donned exposure protection and gear; and hit the drink in the first ojo of the Dos Ojos cenote.

Dos Ojos is named for its dual presentation. Composed of two oval openings in the earth revealing twin blue caverns just a few hundred yards apart, it is undoubtedly more obvious from the air (and just goes to prove that the ancient Mayans – or their alien accomplices – clearly had advanced aerospace technology long before NASA and the ESA).

Our journey through the cavern takes us past the second ojo, so we enjoy (more like endure, since we’re anxious to see the cave) a double-length cavern swim. This extended lighted zone will be more enticing in the relaxed finale of the dive. On the way in, I notice the first unique feature of this system: what I call the construction wreckage. Piled on the floor below and near each cavern opening are huge pieces of broken earth, layered haphazardly atop each other. It looks like somebody wrecked a concrete causeway and scattered the pieces around in piles. No, it looks like the gods built these holes on the cheap and instead of renting a dumpster, just busted the cut-out remains over their knees and tossed them under the sub-cellar, thinking nobody would notice. Or maybe they just needed a latrine. I can see Thor yelling, “Clancy, we need a hole here. You can use my hammer…”

The walls here can be odd as well. Rounding a corner and looking up from the rubble field, I spot a perfectly flat wall to the right, set in a perfectly rectangular frame below a flat ceiling. Looks like a movie screen, I think to myself. At that instant, the massive silhouette of a cave creature, haloed in blue-green light, floats across and fills the screen. Wicked cool! The bulky, prehistoric, awkward and finned mega-fish is, of course, yours truly, projected by a team member’s HID light.

Eventually I stop thinking like a five-year-old, and we all pop our heads up at Ojo #2 to recalculate our turn-around pressure (since this second cavern is a nearer potential escape hatch), then make a beeline for the cave we crave. The first hint of the end of the road for cavern divers is encouraging and only a teensy bit disturbing.

Don’t ask. I really don’t know.


Clear the Set

Finally reaching the end of the cavern line, I run a jump to what’s known as the IMAX line.

IMAX, eh? Hmmm. Subtle clue. Oooh. Oooh. I know, I know. It’s a site of the filming of the IMAX blockbuster, “Amazing Caves.” We’re officially cave tourists now! I remember not seeing this movie and therefore not appreciating it, but I’ll bet it was absolutely breathtaking, because here we are in the middle of it and I am passing through a scenic sampling of some of the best features we’ve encountered throughout the week – moderate-sized rooms, wide passages, ornate ceilings, and walls dripping with frozen calcite sludge. In our path, in the walls, and above and below us we see architecture reminiscent of Gaudi, or maybe Tim Burton, or both, forming altars, huts – heck, entire miniature cities at times.

A couple of jumps and a dozen or so minutes from IMAX land, a surface appears in the water above us, illuminated by – oddly enough – large, fixed halogen lights. As Paul leads us toward this new source of fresh air I feel like I’m approaching a movie set. Poking our heads out, we discover a cute little dry grotto called Tak Be Lun, complete with cute little openings in the ceiling with cute little ladders hanging from them and people hanging from the ladders. And more halogens. Turns out it isn’t a movie set; it’s a tourist attraction. Now we’re part of the attraction – cavemen (and woman) from the deep. Actually, Paul explains, it was the support site for a movie set. For several weeks this dry cave, with a moon pool to the wet cave, was the field office and staging area for the filming of “The Cave.” Ah, this one I’ve seen!

Naw, the dry cave itself wasn’t in the picture, but the cave I just swam through was. And what a blast this is from my past. “The Cave” was the beginning of the personal journey that led to this very dive. I remember watching this sport-adventure-action-thriller because I was a diver turned on by anything involving SCUBA gear, but being totally in awe of what was going on: people actually swimming miles horizontally into tunnels, through twisty, scary passages and picturesque landscapes from another world, using tons of special equipment, and hanging out in cool grottos lit by HIDs. I dreamed of doing this kind of stuff. Yeah, right. Me. Like where and with whom? One of the guys who made the movie, like Paul Heinerth, I suppose? Sure, in your dreams.

Side note: Get involved, guys. If you’re reading this, take my advice: Come to club events. Meet other divers. Hook up with folks with similar interests. You may find one thing will lead to another, and that thing will lead you in unexpected directions.

Back to the mainline… having taken in all we could of Tak Be Lun without getting out of our gear, we do a quick gas check and decide that each of our double-tank rigs holds enough to push on further. But after ten minutes or so, we reach the end of the particular line we’ve been following, which converges with the end of another line, both bearing arrows pointing back the way we came. A sure sign that if there’s anything at all interesting beyond this point, you’re going to have to drag out another reel and look for it. Since we’ve had a satisfying dive up to this point, Paul throws a question to us in the form of a thumbs-up illuminated by his HID: Wanna go back up?

Up. Funny thing about up. It’s a universal diver’s signal to end a dive, so we use it in a cave, too. But it’s an odd (or maybe sadistic) concept in the context of a cave dive. In an open-water environment, “up” literally means, “let’s go up.” You know, as in, “I’d like to move toward that big atmosphere of free breathing gas at a rate of one foot per second.”

In a cave, “Up” means, “You’d better hope we planned this dive right, because we’ve got a 30-minute haul from here to the first place where there’s something other than rock over our heads.” And then we can go up. Maybe. If we don’t have a decompression obligation.

Fortunately, today we’ve accumulated no deco time, and there actually are several holes in the grass along the way to which we could escape if necessary. Not that they are needed. We meander routinely back to the cavern zone, where Polina lingers well past our lunch break capturing images of stalactites, rocks, snorkelers, and me.

As we surfaced, we got officially chewed-out by another diver. A cavern instructor (note rolling of the eyes as I type) stops us while we’re removing our fins and says, “uh, you might want to read that sign up there.”

“Really,” we ask, “What does it say?”

It says, “No touching the formations,” he says with a sincere, though protractedly weighty, tone. “I call those “expensive pictures.”

He is, of course, referring to my touching of a large and sturdy stalactite at one point in our photo shoot, as I hovered extremely close to it, in order to steady myself and ensure that I would not bump it with something hard, like a tank. But he is right. Were a few thousand people to do the same, it would be irrevocably changed. Better to add a few inches of clearance and make do with a photo your conscience can live with.


Trust and Traversal

One of the lessons from my first cave course that will always stand out in my mind is the lecture on “trust-me dives”. The lesson is pretty simple, actually:

Know what you’re doing. Know where you are. Know the landscape. Know the way out. Don’t just follow someone else. And, if someone suggests that you abandon some or all of that and just follow them, run for the hills.

But what if that someone happens to be the instructor who gave you that lecture? Sort of reminds me of my driving road test, when the tester turned to me and said, “See that stop sign? Just go straight through.” Could be a test. But we’re not in a class, so I’m thinking he’s serious. Here’s the offer: to follow a traversal route downstream from Dos Ojos to a remote cenote. We’ll cover over a mile of cave; all we have to do is trust that there’s light at the end of this particular tunnel instead of turning back after we’ve used a third of our gas. Of course, Paul says, there are several cenotes along the way, just in case we don’t have enough air. At least, says Paul. As far as he remembers.

Well, I guess you’re always trusting someone – trusting your instructor’s training, trusting the guy who planted that arrow, trusting the other jokers in the cave not to silt it up or cut your guideline to the surface.

Hell, we’re trusting Paul Heinerth. And, of course, we’ll be noting the distance from the last cenote every kick of the way.

And, man, are we glad we decided to make the journey! Mile River Traverse is a wonderland. During our trip we pass a kick-butt variety of terrain, from wide tunnels to tall and narrow and winding passages. At one point, we cruise through a series of cathedral-ceilinged passages with dramatic, craggy ravines below. A few minutes later, we’re cruising through a horizontal crack with a ten-foot ceiling, with stalactites and stalagmites forming an obstacle course of bars and turnstiles. There were moments we wished we all were diving sidemount.

It was in this passage that we discovered some enterprising users of the water supply. Tree roots, growing in fine-stranded veils, emerged from cracks in the rock like the mops of long-haired divers waving in the water column. At times these feathery growths took on the character and color of dense furs. We also discovered the roots of human infiltration into the aquifer.

Most of the time, the floor has been flat and sand-covered, giving the impression of a thick, solid bottom. But, as we discover, it’s a flimsy façade. At many points the “floor” is just an inch-thick crust; we can see through holes punched by falling debris that there’s a whole other cave layer below.

That’s the thing about these caves. They’re fragile. Look up at any time and you’ll see tons of rocks and formations over your head, cemented together by what amounts to soft, wet chalk. Any disturbance, like bubbles, or an earthquake, or – say – a construction crew overhead, and….

Brrrrrrrrr-rup-bup-dididididididididdididum-dum-dum.

Paul stops and points to his ears. Do we all hear that? Sounds like a helicopter or a jackhammer nearby.

Brrrrrrrrr-rup-bup-dididididididididdididum-dumdumdumdumdum.

It’s getting louder as we progress.

BRRRRRRRRR-RUP-BUP-DIDIDIDIDIDIDIDIDDIDIDUM-DUMDUMDUMDUMDUM.

As we round a corner, we no longer just hear it; we feel it reverberating in our chests, our ribs rattling with every rap-a-tap, our brains quivering as the shock waves run through the water-water boundary between river and our bodies like a bullet through queso fresco.

BADABADABADABADABADABADA-BRRRRRRRRRRP-BADABAP-BAP-BAP!!!

Polina pauses to snap a photo of another tree root. The rest of us are thinking, um… do you really need that shot?

We give her a few seconds and then press on in a gesture that says, “enjoy the rest of your dive; don’t get buried alive!” She gets the message and pries herself from her subject, and within a minute or so we’ve cleared the cave-in zone.

3,800 feet into the dive, we pass the Dos Palmas Cenote and pop up to visit some local bathers, check our gas supply and continue. More enticing scenery later, we finally arrive at our destination. Having left the watery eyes of Dos Ojos upstream, we emerge over a mile away through the humble opening of Motz-Sayha cenote.

And, of course, the smiling face of our driver, [the other] Roger, is waiting there to greet us. What a day!

OK, kiddies. Polina has had a chance to take some bang-up pictures of what these decorations I’ve been going on about look like so the lesson plan is complete. Please open your books to Geology, the page about cave formation. This was our Earth Day dive, so what better way to celebrate than to learn a bit, then go swimming into the heart of the Earth?

Caves form underwater. Having never thought about cave formation beyond the movie version of Journey to the Center of the Earth with James Mason it never occurred to me that this was so absolute. Caves are formed when ground water finds the water table and starts dissolving the minerals in the substrate. Rain saturates the soil and seeps down. As the water seeks a downhill path underground it starts to join and flow as any other trickle builds, eventually, into a river. These subterranean rivers find their way either to the ocean or to topside rivers (which find the ocean) and the water cycle keeps on spinning.

“But Rog,” you say, “When I was a kid my folks brought me to Carlsbad Caverns, and that’s not full of water.”

“Please raise your hand before speaking and give your answer in the form of a question,” I’d say sharply. But you make a good point. What’s more, you’ve hit on the crux of how these caves in the Yucatan are so gorgeous and intriguing. The stalactites and stalagmites I’ve been talking about as thought they’re made out of solid gold chocolate… they need to be not-underwater to form. So at some point the earth managed to keep all the water out of these Mexican caves for the millions of years required. An ice age seems to be a particularly effective solution for keeping lots of water locked up out of the way.

So during the last few ice ages, instead of rainwater seeping through to the substrate and getting flushed away to the sea, it would drip from the ceiling, leaving a little trace of minerals, typically calcite (this will be important later). Those few molecules of mineral left on the ceiling are the start of a stalactite. The few molecules that reach the floor in the corresponding spot become an inchoate stalagmite. With a few exceptions, the tites and the mites form as a pair, eventually joining in the middle to form a column which, once it gets big enough, starts dripping off stalactites of its very own.

The Mexican caves, being so close to sea level, refilled with water after these formations were created and are now diveable. Dry caves happen to be above the ancient water level and are obviously still walkable. Please stay with your tour guide, though. Getting lost in these places is not a joke.

There is a small army of other types of formations and for descriptions on that I’d refer you to the experts. Or to Wikipedia. In any case, I won’t bore you with the details. The most important thing to be learned here is about the calcite. When you come across a largish, rounded topped stalagmite made of this bright, smooth substance and you hold your flashlight lens right up against it… it glows like one of those rocks from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

And that’s cool. End lesson.

I now refer you to some pretty pictures:
Some stalactites fossilize the shape of a prehistoric waterfall.

A stalactite and its stalagmite just started kissing into a pillar when the water returned.

Go ahead, swim through, there’s more pretty stuff on the other side.

Each level of these stairs was filled with a little, mineral-rich pool of water somehow. I don’t remember how. It’s just real pretty.

Decoration overload.

I am very, very glad I didn’t skip today’s dives. Every once in a while one or the other of my feet will swell up and it hurts like a bastard to walk. As luck would have it, this morning was one of those very mornings it happened. I figured perhaps it would be best to take it easy and heal up so I’d be good to dive the rest of the week without worry.

“Hm,” said Paul.
“What?” I asked.
“Don’t skip today.”
“Oh?”
“No. You can skip tomorrow if you want. But you can’t skip today. Maybe Jim and I can just pull you around the cave so you won’t have to kick.”

Plenty of ibuprofen later I realized why skipping today was not an option. There have been sections of cave in the past few days that have been stunning… today’s dives were stunning from the moment we emptied our BCs to sink to the moment we took our fins off to climb the ladder out. There were more “WOW!” times in just today for me than there were in most of the 1990s combined.

All of the pictures taken above were taken in Grand Cenote today. Those of you who have seen one of Polina’s slide shows know what a talented photographer she is and those pictures are as splendid a demonstration of her skill as any. But as I mentioned before, no picture could ever really do the place proper justice.

Jim and I asked Paul, as we packed our gear, whether in the decades he has spent as a professional underwater cave photographer, videographer, and cinematographer he feels he has ever captured the real feeling of one of these places.

His answer came without pause.

“No. Never.”

Anna reminded me of something said the other day. Diving these caves is like exploring a fingerprint.

They are all so different. A single cave system can be night and day depending on which hole you decide to poke your head through. Today’s dives were a perfect example of the light/dark imagery there. The morning dive was like swimming under a clear, blue, spring sky. The afternoon dive was like exploring the secrets of night itself.

Mayan Blue. That’s what the American caving community calls this particular hole in the earth. The Maya have another name for it (they seem to have a different word for everything), but we figured we’d stick with what we can pronounce. I still don’t understand how a word with four Xs in it can be said without a sprained tongue.

The cenote is relatively small. The cave is big. Very, very, very big. Apparently, when the memo was sent out that caves are supposed to be little and claustrophobic, Mayan Blue was not accepting any mail. After dropping down through the somewhat crowded pool (Scott dropping the most, having launched a giant stride off of a ledge about 8 feet up from the water), yet again, we found ourselves in a cave through which we could have a four-contender dirigible race.

While there was not a great deal of decoration in the main portion of the cave, the mammoth-sized limestone rocks which have dropped from the ceiling into massive piles like the Devil’s dominoes make the swim as awe inspiring as any other cave so far. Through the blue water you can see piles and piles of them in all directions. That is only the main portion of the cave.

About ½ hour into the dive Paul showed Scott where to run a short line to a side tunnel which is, we later learned, called Death Arrow. I know, very spooky, right?

Calling that room Death Arrow is as appropriate as renaming Michelangelo’s David “Thrill Killer.” There’s some story involving an cave diving line marker that leads to the name, but Paul calls the room the Wedding Hall and I think that’s what I’m going to call it as well. Smaller than the main tunnel it is a rough, horizontal oval of a tunnel blanketed in a heavy lace of decoration. Not only is this beautiful place different from every cave we’ve seen so far, it’s completely different from the rest of the same cave.

And herein is the fingerprintiness.

Surely, when I get back, I’ll be asked better than a dozen times, “So what was the best dive?” And I will have to think of some reliable leger-de-man to avoid this question altogether.

There is no way to explain. I could type for a thousand hours. I could show you a thousand pictures. I could talk for a thousand days. There is no way to describe the way in which each of these caves stops your heart in your chest in its own way. You simply have to be there. I am sorry. I’ll keep writing and I’ll keep trying, but to really understand just how beautiful the insides of the Earth really are, you’re going to have to see it for yourself.

Not only does the hotel send us a little, Mayan tank of a dude to move all our tanks around and to pack the van (and what’s prettier than a van ready for a day’s cave diving?), they also pack us lunches on request. Today, instead, we decided to go to a little restaurant in Tulum for grub between dive sites. Dona Tina. Holy crow. Best Adobo Chicken ever, hands down. Served with this fresh, handmade, corn tortilla. I could go on for some length about the delights of true local cuisine. The short form: I would prefer a couple of tacos carnitas for a handful of pennies at a roadside shack of questionable building integrity any day of the week to any all-inclusive, all-you-can-eat buffet on the face of this Earth.

The second dive, in Naharon Cenote was the “night” portion of our day. Victor, who it now seems is with us for the whole week (and all the luckier we are for it. His knowledge and experience with these caves is interesting and makes the dives more fun. Also, Victor is the only one of us who speaks Spanish. That helped in getting my ATM card back from the bank this morning), explained that millions of years ago the decorations in the cave were as white as the limestone they filtered through. At some point the vegetal detritus created heavily tannic water which stained all the formations black.

These black formations were like something out of Giger. The darkness of the place sucked up the light from our HIDs. The other divers, who were so present in the other caves became little more than floating spotlights. The portions you could explore were only those that fit in a single circle of your light. But with portions so abundant and formations just as multitudinous and delicate or singularly immense, just as organic-seeming or obvious stone, with so much in all directions and barely enough mind-power to absorb it all… I felt like I was exploring the streets of New York on my hands and knees.

And so, popping back out to the topside world from the caves of night, another dive day is done and it is time to get back to a few of my favorite things. No, I haven’t gotten to spend near enough time at this, here beach bar. The nights have been early, but the days have been worth the sacrifice.

I was half asleep this afternoon on the ride "home" and only barely noticed the atrocity of a multi-million dollar façade of the resort golf course next door. In that dreamy notice an image popped into my head and I realized at once why I find the thing an atrocity and I hope that a hurricane knocks it down. Soon.

The other day as we were breaking down our dive gear a dog came wandering by. Dogs are all over the place, not just in Mexico, but in most developing areas. They’ve been with us since the stone ages, why should now be any different?

This semi-feral weimaraner mutt ambled up to us strangers with friendly eyes and a happily wagging tail. Below the pup-like glee was also a haggard, emaciated look. He held his right forepaw off the ground as he walked to avoid the pain the ugly, purple infection there was surely giving him.

Just a dog.

We have the luxury in much of the US to consider dogs beloved family pets. We can afford fancy-pants food for them and vets’ bills. But in developing nations where food for your family is the struggle, what is a dog but just a dog?

That dog’s happy look at just being petted a bit and being told what a good dog he is flashed into my head as if the stone façade was a movie screen. The money spent on that ugly neo-modernist piece of crap isn’t going to improve the quality of living for the local Mexicans and Mayans. The revenue generated by the hotels up and down this stretch of paradise mostly goes offshore to multinational corporations who could barely give a whit about the local help as other than The Help.

And as long as the tourism industry continues to stamp on the necks of local populations mercilessly, they will stay too poor to be able to consider the feral animal populations as anything other than just dogs.

As divers we have a special connection with the growing eco-tourism movement as the environment our sport is dependent upon is so ecologically sensitive. But among the talk of global warming, dying reefs, dwindling fresh water, and other such dramatic effects, we need also to remember our impact on the populations where we travel.

The locals who are a meal away from hunger, the forests beyond the resort gates, littered with broken down auto parts, the dogs who, each and every one, deserve a human who loves them and lets them sleep on the bed instead of dying of gangrene in the jungle… they are all part of the "eco," too.

I don't speak any Spanish. This is a marked disadvantage when trying to order tacos from a roadside stand where not one of the three women cooking speaks any English. I know it makes me the stupid American and no matter how many times I resolve to speak the language spoken where a great bulk of my diving takes place, I never do because I'm too busy playing on the internet. Sometimes a word jumps out at me, though, close enough to English's Romantic language roots as that I can translate.

Ponderossa was the name of the cenote in which we spent our morning. While it could just as well mean "Toaster Oven" I'm guessing that the word means "Ponderous." And Great Gary Cooper... how ponderous it is. One of the largest sinkholes in the Yucatan, it acts as a community swimming pool to the locals as well as being the premiere place for checkout dives for students from Open Water all the way to Full Cave. The cavern zone (defined as the area where one still has a direct eye-shot towards the door and sunlight) is simply cavernous, being a nearly 5 minute swim down, just to get into the proper cave zone.

We were planning to do what is called a circuit, which is to swim in one entrance to the cave and out another, making a huge, underground circle. For more than a half an hour we swam through tunnels made of sponge-like limestone tunnels so incredibly delicate that just the exhalation bubbles hitting the ceiling produced a tiny tumble of stone which was able to hold its weight in the reduced gravity of water, but not in an air pocket.

Since I first heard of the idea of a halocline in my open water class I had been obsessed with the idea of experiencing one and, as I wrote before, the experience is unique and exciting. Though, by the end of this dive, I decided that the blurry mix of the halocline was a nuisance and wished that the cave would commit to being either salt water or fresh and just knock it off with the trying to blind me. We all agreed that there were a few interesting effects that the haloclines produced during this dive, though. The first is that, when you’re swimming below it, it tends to produce a ceiling effect. Visibility is clear where you are and you know that should you move up another few inches it will be shot to hell, so you tend to keep your head down, even when the floor comes up to meet you.

One by one, we all broke ourselves of this habit and discovered the second effect. Remembering that the halocline is not, in fact a ceiling, we each popped through it to swim well above in those areas where the water column was more abundant above than below. At this point we looked down at our blurry teammates who seemed to be rooting around in a stream below us. The water under the water effect can scarcely be described fully. It’s damned weird.

Though interesting, as I said, it becomes annoying after having to make the transition about forty dozen times depending on the topography of the cave. Mostly, to me, due to the waste of gas. Remember, salt water and fresh have different buoyancies. So any time one is neutrally buoyant in fresh water, hitting that thermocline was like hitting a wall of positive buoyancy you have to dump a ton of air from your BC to sink into. Alternately, coming up from the salt layer one bobs up from the momentum a few feet, before sinking like a rock strait into the thermocline again from being so negative in the fresh water which requires the addition of a few breaths worth of tank air TO the BC.

We didn’t make it all the way to the other entrance, having to turn back the way we came because of gas restraints. So we marked how far we got and figured we’d go around the other way on a second dive. We were, Victor reported, only a few feet from that second door.

On the second dive nearly everyone had to turn back without getting to the marker of how far we’d reached on the first. Victor and Paul came back, finally, about ½ hour later.

“The marker was about ½ way along the circuit,” Victor admitted. So in almost an hour and a half… we’d swum ½ the cave.

Our third dive of the day was in a different cenote called Choc Mul. The name being that of the Mayan Rain God, this indicates another reason these holes in the jungle were so important to the Maya. There was a type of bird Victor pointed out earlier in the day called a Mok-mok. These non-aquatic birds love the cenotes and, when left relatively alone express their happiness for being where they like to be by producing a funny sort of a squawky song. The Maya would follow this song when they needed to find the nearest cenote. And why would they need to find one? The Caribbean is a lovely place made of water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink. The cenotes solve that problem. Naturally, their sole source of fresh water became synonymous with the Rain God.

Choc Mul is another of those Indiana Jones sets with a pain-in-the-calves staircase to climb after the dive. It is also another one of those places where the sheer enormity is brain-bending.

At one point during the dive I found myself hovering in this… this… room. The floor was 40 feet below. The ceiling was 20 feet above, an endless sprawl of decoration. While there were some heavily decorated bits of column and wall nearby, just beyond them my light could not penetrate through the 200+ foot visibility to the actual walls of the room in any direction. I could clearly see the rest of the dive team in as much wonderment as myself, hovering and whipping their heads about trying to take in every one of the limitless billions of beautiful details, the water so clear as to seem to fix them in mid-air.

It may be under the ground, but it is heaven.