The Dive Evangelist

After the dive at The Pit Jim, Scott, Polina, and Paul went to see the ruins of the ancient Mayan city of Tulum. I elected to stay behind instead of acting as a hobbling sea-anchor to everyone’s sight-seeing. “Hell,” I figured, though I had been excited from the first inception of the trip to visit them, “They’re ancient ruins. Pretty good chance they’ll be here when I come back.”

I will be going back. In November, in point of fact. Paul will be running another trip down there just after hurricane season and I am all in.

After the first dive, no… after the first five minutes of the first dive I knew that I was going to be spending huge portions of my vacation time over the years of my life visiting this little point on the globe.

The caves of the Yucatan are like none other anywhere in the world. There are places where underwater caves do have decorations from having been dry at some point, but no where else in the world can you find a cenote every ½ mile or so. No where else is there such diversity in landscape to the caves, sometimes within a single cave system.

What’s more, the jungle is vast. Somewhere in there are countless cenotes into which no diver has ever splashed. Jim, over the course of the week, speculated often on how marvelous it must be to discover something new, to see something no human has ever seen before in its perfect, completely undisturbed even by exhalation bubbles, absolutely natural condition. Mustn’t it?

I asked Paul during some ride, percentage-wise, how many of the cenotes he thinks he’s dived in the Yucatan since his first of a zillion trips down in the mid-80s.

“Oh,” he thought for a second, “Maybe around 1%.”

I know cave diving isn’t for everyone. It’s very gear intensive. It’s very skills intensive. One must be perfectly comfortable in situations that may make another hyperventilate just to think about. There are no pretty fish nor vibrant reef colors.

On the other hand, every year thousands and thousands of non-divers go snorkeling in places like Grand Cenote or in Hilario’s Well. The delicate beauty of the ancient rock formations is captivating on such a deep, primal level to people. I would speculate that it is humbling and comforting to be in the presence of such earthy antiquity. Just as the Mayans worshiped these places, so too are we moderners drawn to their serene beauty as though the planet herself is embracing us to our very caveman roots.

Should you find yourself in the Riviera Maya sometime in the near future ask the dive program at your hotel or nearby shop about a cavern tour. If the mood should take you to enjoy a peek at such things with even more intensity contact the National Association for Cave Diving or the National Speleological Society's Cave Diving Section, or visit your local dive shop and just ask. I swear, I was positive I would claustrophobically be unable to get any further than the door until I took a cavern class.

Also, if you should find yourself anywhere near Playa del Carmen anytime soon, you absolutely must… MUST visit my new favorite restaurant on planet Earth.

An alux (ah-LOOCH) is a sort of Mayan leprechaun, a spirit of the forest, cenote, farm, field or… cave. The restaurant Alux is built into a dry cave in the middle of the town of Playa. From the street it is just an unassuming gate, behind which is a staircase carved into limestone. The cave in which the restaurant is arranged is still forming in parts, with roped off areas of mineral pools or still-dripping stalactites. Other than the main dining room and the main lounge area there are a dozen little dining and lounge tables built into very private grottos throughout the cave system. The extraordinary ambiance is matched by the deliciousness of the menu.

Nancy, the owner of the Villa DeRosa drove us there Saturday night, before it was time to go home.

“What better place for dinner with a bunch of cave divers?”

She could have just left the question mark right after “dinner.”

Though, be prepared: if you order an after-dinner coffee it will take 15 minutes to make and involve several liquors being poured from condiment boat to condiment boat as streams of gentle blue flames like a genie’s light.

And so after diving and after dinner and after a final night’s sleep hearing the Caribbean lapping at the beach only yards from my pillow it was time to fly home.

Drat.

Good think I’m going to Bonaire in a few weeks, or I just might’ve been depressed.

Sometimes I make wise decisions. It’s rare, but it happens. Sometimes I make unwise decisions. Most of the time I pace and weigh pros and cons and think that I’m really rationally deciding on a crux in the road, but I'm pretending to myself. The truth is that I am a downy feather on the flight of fancy and the majority of my decisions are made as snap judgments based on what I’m in the mood to do despite all but the most extenuating external circumstances.

I could not decide this morning whether I would risk further injuring my again-aching foot (which I have come to view as my arch-nemesis) by going on this morning’s dive. I hemmed, I hawed. I told people I wasn’t going. I told them I’d just come along for the ride and see how I felt there. I brought a book just in case I decided not to dive.

But I knew I was going to. Both the little angel and the little demon standing on my shoulders were wearing dive gear and screaming in my ears, “Screw the foot, it’s time to get wet, Dummy!”

Scott is a lying jerk. That white road to the Dos Ojos entrance is just as rough and tumble as any other road we’ve been on. Sure, it LOOKS a little cleaner and there are spots where one car can stop and let another pass, but I felt tossed around plenty. Passing the parking area of the main Ojo we continued on an even less-used road that made the white one look as cosmopolitan as Lexington Ave.

“Wow,” remarked Paul, “This road is way better than it used to be.”

As I fought the very real possibility of whiplash over every bump I could only assume that this road used to be booby trapped and guarded by club-wielding jungle trolls.

“OK,” said Louis, the driver of the 4x4 we’d hired to get our gear out there, “Leave the van here.” This statement seemed pretty obvious, since the only continuing route possible was across terrain beamed down from Mars. Riding in the back of the truck along that 100 yard stretch of what I generously call “road,” I felt like I was on some sort of screwed up roller coaster where you just might wind up bleeding in a jagged ditch. “We’ve had a couple of flat tires,” Louis off-handedly remarked. I didn’t think to ask how many broken axles.

The Pit was discovered some years ago by Dan Lyns and Kay Walton who were swimming in a remote tunnel of the Dos Ojos system. Seeing daylight ahead they were delighted to have found another entrance to the cave system. When they swam out of the cave into the cavern zone they also found there is seemingly no floor.

The name could not be more appropriate. The opening is about the size of a studio apartment in square footage. However, the water is about 30 feet down. Straight down. No stairs, no ladder. Just a hole in the jungle with water at the bottom. There is a small platform to one side of the pool at the bottom, but no clear way of getting there jumps out at you.

“The path runs behind that tree,” Louis pointed out.

I couldn’t figure out what the hell he was talking about. I had to wait until I saw one from the small party of other divers who were there walk down a path about 15 feet long, then grab a rope tied around a tree trunk and rappel down about 8 feet, before turning into some unseen course of cave, popping out again on the little platform at the water. I watched as a set of tanks were lowered using a pulley attached to a tree that hung out over the hole, for people to gear up while floating.

No problem, right? Well, some of the other team decided to take a more straightforward approach to entry. They just giant strided. From 30 feet up. Sure, I would’ve liked to have done the same, but was concurrently glad to have an excuse not to. Scott and Paul both did, albeit a little reluctantly when push came to jump.

SPLASH!

The Pit is the biggest room you can think of. It may not actually be Madison Square Garden big in cubic footage, but it damn well feels it. From the surface you can clearly see the mammoth decorations on the walls as far as 150 feet away from you on the other side of the room, but you can not see the bottom. The water is 200+ foot visibility. You can not see the bottom.

After dropping down about 80 feet you discover why you can not see the bottom. A halocline with a wispy veil of hydrogen sulfide obscures the enormous debris cone at about 120 feet.

Our dive plan was to go deep. Very deep. Most of us had figured out a dive plan to our new greatest depth with next to no limitation but physics below us.

In 1998 Paul accompanied a student to this site to make just such a deep dive. After the student was done, on a whim Paul decided to drop down into the cenote in a different spot than the original discoverers had explored. The original floor was found to be at about 240 feet. The side where Paul swam out of sheer curiosity turned out to be about 300 feet deep. What’s more, at that depth there is the gaping maw of an enormous cave which he was the first person to lay eyes on, if not ever, in tens of thousands of years.

Slowly we dropped for what seemed forever. Slowly slipped beneath the cloud, then through the squidgy vision of the halocline. Still we dropped, following a thick yellow line straight down. And dropped. And dropped.

Oddly, my right ear decided to stop equalizing at about 160 feet, so I stopped there reading it as a sign from the gods that my injured feet were DCS magnets and I should knock off the depth. Paul and Victor went deepest, to around 230 or so. Scott and Polina came in second with just shy of 200. Jim had planned for 180. After about five minutes of enjoying the elegance of such enormity under the delightful effects of high-pressure nitrogen, we started back up.

Sure, I could’ve gone right back up the line, but I decided that's for wreck diving in the nauseating Atlantic and that I should swim freely around the huge room. I kept an eye on my depth to make sure I was following my decompression obligations and explored. There are so very many decorations equal to the size of the goliath hole dangling from every edge.

At about 40 feet, toward the back of the cavern I found two cave entrances, one of which had been the spot where Lyns and Walton had likely frozen all those years ago to say, “Holy crap!” Right about the same time I bumped into Paul, who was also swimming around and who made a couple of motions toward another vertical, yellow line which I read to mean (and later confirmed to mean), “THIS is the line I meant to follow. The one that goes deep.”

A dive of better than 200 feet, and we were on the shallow side.

Somewhere in that cave there is an ancient human skull, possibly one of the oldest in North America; researchers are looking into it. Just under the rickety wooden platform there is a little nook some diver has covered with a free piece of limestone. Inside are shards of ancient pottery. The cenotes, after all, were holy places. Still are.

"Bottom time" on this dive may not have been long, but between swimming around the cavern, decompression, and just struggling to take it all in this turned out to be a pretty long dive. A perfect last dive of a phenomenal trip.

The climb out of the hole was a bit of a challenge. Something of an obstacle for someone with four usable limbs, it took me a solid 20 minutes to shimmy my way out of that hole, trusting sketchy hand holds and taking frequent breaks. Finding myself leaning against a sapling on one such break, more or less supported over a 20 foot fall back into the water, I looked up at the remainder of the climb and thought, “Sane people don’t do this.”

Without really caring what part I meant, I got back to climbing.