After a 100m walk through the Yucatan jungle, under a 30°C hot sun, in a 7mm neoprene wetsuit, carrying about 50kg of cave diving gear, you kind of get rather hot and steamy.
You’re then faced with a hole in the ground and a 3m jump into Calavera, supposedly meaning skull for the gaping mouth-like hole with two smaller eye-like ones around it, but better known as the Temple of Doom.
Wings pumped up you take a couple of deep breaths and apprehensively (the first time) or brazenly (the next times) step forward – hoping your gear will take it. The subsequent big splash causes the resulting waves to splatter noisily against the cenote’s walls, waking up the few bats that call it their home.
There’s nothing like feeling the fresh 24°C water flood your suit and cool you down. Soon the peace is restored as you prepare to submerge. Buzzing bloodthirsty mosquitoes clearly audible in the ominous silence.
Like every cenote, this one has its own character, in this case a slightly somber one. Due maybe to the rather small hole and surrounding trees filtering most of the light, except around noon, when sun rays break through the water’s surface and delight the blessed diver with a spell binding show.
Calavera is a dome like cavern, with a mount of debris in its middle. About 10m deep, along the circular wall, there’s a fossil layer of coral bits and shells, witnesses of a time long gone by, when Yucatan was part of the ocean bottom.
The two parallel cave entrances are both located below the halocline, here at around 12m – where fresh and salt water meet but do not willingly mix. When both are inevitably disturbed by the first diver, this causes very blurry vision for the following divers, until they sink further down fully into the warmer and heavier salt water.
The main tunnel, known as the Madonna passage, is bright bluish white, with a lone brownish statue, the Madonna, halfway in. The water flow’s slow but constant erosion really has done some strange things here with the soft calcareous walls, creating weird sculptures here and there.
It’s possible to do two circuit dives here, after careful preparation and attentive planning by all team members, as the multiple T junctions invariably cause some confusion otherwise. Continuing past the two circuit branches, the tunnel opens up into a great room, with a big stalactite known as the Fang.
Getting out of Calavera is a bit harder than getting in. But the steep metal ladder helps.
