Post by LSDeep on Apr 4, 2005 11:54:20 GMT -5
QUINTANA ROO, Mexico (31 Mar 2005) -- I was told to look for pirate treasure. Keep an eye out for skeletons, too, someone said. The Mayans were fond of sacrificing humans and throwing them in the cenotes - the blue eyes of the Mexican jungle that was my dive destination.
I had been warned. Still, running into the grim reaper himself underwater was a bit unnerving.
"Stop!" the reaper exclaimed silently from his signpost. "Proceeding further may result in death."
We turned around from the mouth of the cave, following the sign's advice. But beneath the sign, a line was visible running to the blackness beyond. This was an entrance into the darker cenotes - a guideline that an intrepid diver, one with tons of gear and experience, could follow into the recesses of a vast underwater world.
We were not that intrepid. dick, a 50-something Bostonian, and I were on the gringo dive. No death, no fame, just a two-tank trip to the cenotes. The cenotes (pronounced: see no tay) are underground rivers with an appetite for limestone. Millions of years ago, the rainwater ate through the limestone and formed sinkholes. Divers call them portals as they are the doorways into a cave system, the frontiers of which have only just begun to be explored. Of an estimated 3,000 cenotes in Mexico's Yucatan, only 1,400 are on the books. It's enough to bring out the Magellan in anyone.
We, however, were not qualified cave divers. We were tourists who paid $90 apiece to plunge to the depths of the Hidden Worlds Cenote Park, about 30 miles outside Cancun.
Our dive was in the middle of the jungle, so we piled our gear into Chango. Chango - Spanish for monkey - is what you get when you cross dune buggy with a hayride. We jounced into the jungle, our tanks rolling at our feet. After an exhilarating 15-minute ride, we jumped off at a blue metal staircase under a thatched roof. I peered over the side. I couldn't see the bottom of the staircase.
"Climb down and jump in," said our Norwegian dive master, as he started lowering our tanks into the hole on a pulley. We were feeling hot-dog like in our thick wetsuits, ready to split our neoprene casings in the heavy jungle heat.
The scary staircase led down to a cerulean lagoon. The water was dizzyingly clear. Stalactites and stalagmites sandwiched the dive platform. Bats squeaked overhead.
It was an entirely different blue planet from the one I had grown up on.
After a short briefing and a buoyancy check, down we went. An insane landscape of rock formations greeted us. We squeezed through tunnels, watching our bubbles hit the cave ceiling overhead. Small fish floated around us. Everything was covered with fine white silt. We could see only what our flashlights illuminated.
Then we saw it - the underwater equivalent of the aurora borealis.
"Don't panic," our guide had warned us topside. "There is nothing wrong with your mask."
We were in a halocline, the space where the rainwater meets the Caribbean. The lighter fresh water stays on top, the heavier sinks to the bottom. The effect is like eating too much nutmeg. Our masks seemed to warp. The water slid around us. Then a silty poltergeist reached for us with white arms waving around like tentacles.
"I told you it would be like this," said our dive master when we surfaced, awestruck and full of adrenaline. "You will never see anything like this. Ever." He was right. The world's best cave diving is just across the border. Along the 100 kilometers of the Riviera Maya are more than 120 explored, surveyed cave systems. Eight of the nine longest cave systems in the world are located in the Riviera Maya. I got a taste of Sistema Dos Ojos (the Two Eyes System), which is 200,000 feet long, nearly 40 miles.
"It's the best Swiss cheese a diver could ask for," says Steve Gerrards, one of the first cenotes explorers. "You could dive every day for the next 10 years and not be able to explore all of the known underwater cave passages."
And that's just the known cenotes. Backpacker scientists cart their dive gear through miles of jungle, asking Mayans for the locations of the unknown ones. Almost 400 miles of the caves have been surveyed since the 1980s. Many more have not. But the grim reaper sign that warns off the novices has a point: cave diving is the world's most dangerous sport and has claimed at least 431 lives since the 1960s. People only explored the cenotes for the last 25 years. Although the Mayan sacrifices stopped long before that, diving has served as the updated version and continues just about every year. This past December, two divers drowned in the cenotes after getting separated from their group. Disorientation, confusion and stress commonly cause most fatalities.
But any open water diver will be reasonably safe checking out the cenotes' welcome mats, the caverns. The cavern zone is the area in which light is faintly visible and is accessible to anyone with a "C-card" - a diver's certification.
SOURCE - Billings Gazette
I had been warned. Still, running into the grim reaper himself underwater was a bit unnerving.
"Stop!" the reaper exclaimed silently from his signpost. "Proceeding further may result in death."
We turned around from the mouth of the cave, following the sign's advice. But beneath the sign, a line was visible running to the blackness beyond. This was an entrance into the darker cenotes - a guideline that an intrepid diver, one with tons of gear and experience, could follow into the recesses of a vast underwater world.
We were not that intrepid. dick, a 50-something Bostonian, and I were on the gringo dive. No death, no fame, just a two-tank trip to the cenotes. The cenotes (pronounced: see no tay) are underground rivers with an appetite for limestone. Millions of years ago, the rainwater ate through the limestone and formed sinkholes. Divers call them portals as they are the doorways into a cave system, the frontiers of which have only just begun to be explored. Of an estimated 3,000 cenotes in Mexico's Yucatan, only 1,400 are on the books. It's enough to bring out the Magellan in anyone.
We, however, were not qualified cave divers. We were tourists who paid $90 apiece to plunge to the depths of the Hidden Worlds Cenote Park, about 30 miles outside Cancun.
Our dive was in the middle of the jungle, so we piled our gear into Chango. Chango - Spanish for monkey - is what you get when you cross dune buggy with a hayride. We jounced into the jungle, our tanks rolling at our feet. After an exhilarating 15-minute ride, we jumped off at a blue metal staircase under a thatched roof. I peered over the side. I couldn't see the bottom of the staircase.
"Climb down and jump in," said our Norwegian dive master, as he started lowering our tanks into the hole on a pulley. We were feeling hot-dog like in our thick wetsuits, ready to split our neoprene casings in the heavy jungle heat.
The scary staircase led down to a cerulean lagoon. The water was dizzyingly clear. Stalactites and stalagmites sandwiched the dive platform. Bats squeaked overhead.
It was an entirely different blue planet from the one I had grown up on.
After a short briefing and a buoyancy check, down we went. An insane landscape of rock formations greeted us. We squeezed through tunnels, watching our bubbles hit the cave ceiling overhead. Small fish floated around us. Everything was covered with fine white silt. We could see only what our flashlights illuminated.
Then we saw it - the underwater equivalent of the aurora borealis.
"Don't panic," our guide had warned us topside. "There is nothing wrong with your mask."
We were in a halocline, the space where the rainwater meets the Caribbean. The lighter fresh water stays on top, the heavier sinks to the bottom. The effect is like eating too much nutmeg. Our masks seemed to warp. The water slid around us. Then a silty poltergeist reached for us with white arms waving around like tentacles.
"I told you it would be like this," said our dive master when we surfaced, awestruck and full of adrenaline. "You will never see anything like this. Ever." He was right. The world's best cave diving is just across the border. Along the 100 kilometers of the Riviera Maya are more than 120 explored, surveyed cave systems. Eight of the nine longest cave systems in the world are located in the Riviera Maya. I got a taste of Sistema Dos Ojos (the Two Eyes System), which is 200,000 feet long, nearly 40 miles.
"It's the best Swiss cheese a diver could ask for," says Steve Gerrards, one of the first cenotes explorers. "You could dive every day for the next 10 years and not be able to explore all of the known underwater cave passages."
And that's just the known cenotes. Backpacker scientists cart their dive gear through miles of jungle, asking Mayans for the locations of the unknown ones. Almost 400 miles of the caves have been surveyed since the 1980s. Many more have not. But the grim reaper sign that warns off the novices has a point: cave diving is the world's most dangerous sport and has claimed at least 431 lives since the 1960s. People only explored the cenotes for the last 25 years. Although the Mayan sacrifices stopped long before that, diving has served as the updated version and continues just about every year. This past December, two divers drowned in the cenotes after getting separated from their group. Disorientation, confusion and stress commonly cause most fatalities.
But any open water diver will be reasonably safe checking out the cenotes' welcome mats, the caverns. The cavern zone is the area in which light is faintly visible and is accessible to anyone with a "C-card" - a diver's certification.
SOURCE - Billings Gazette
