Nohoch Nah Chich

This time we hit the primary upstream line and followed it for 67' till another much smaller cenote, at which point, having used up one third of my air supply, I called the dive. Again we passed some pretty fabulous formations sculpted by time beyond imagination. We stayed underwater two hours, using only about half of our doubles air. Many more hours could be spent just to have a quick look down the many side lines branching off everywhere. This one truly is a giant maze!

The Cave Diver

My friend Bart just brought to my attention a pretty cool trailer for an upcoming documentary about cave diving in Yucatán, featuring Steve Bogaerts from Aztec Diving, simply titled: "The Cave Diver".

Seeing as I won't be releasing anything anytime soon, you might as well look forward to this alternative movie by Sea O'Farrell :o)

Another dry day

No diving today, Miguel, the freelance dive guide hired by Xibalba, being once again otherwise occupied. Not that I mind too much, as after yesterday's dive my ear was slightly aching and I'm treating it now with antibiotic drops (Soldrin Otico), to prevent it getting any worse, as ear infections usually tend to do real fast.

Still, the apparent inexplicable shortage of reliable full-time and free-lance dive guides is rather annoying. Mostly because there doesn't seem to be any planning. It's day to day careless business. Reason enough I'd say to check any alternatives.

Not being able to make the movie I wanted doesn't help diminish my frustration of course. Not just because I flooded my camcorder. My technique hasn't really gotten any better after twenty dives. It would be easy to blame my back-up camera's limited video capabilities (read: very low resolution, poor light sensitivity, lack of image stabilization), but the fact remains that I just need a lot more dives, camera handling practice and some professional guidance.

Temple of Doom

Where to eat in Tulum?

• as cheap as it gets

For about 20 Pesos you can actually have a decent meal of roasted chicken (¼), rice, salad, tortillas & salsa in several main street BBQ places selling nothing but pollos asados al carbon.

In the evening, if you're not really hungry and just looking for a snack, you can get some tacos (7P/piece) or tamales (10P/pc) from street side vendors.

• for the budget minded traveler

On the south end of the main street, both Tacoqueto & Doña Tina cater to locals with a choice of home made dishes, of which you'll get a plateful for 30-40 Pesos. Add to that 10 Pesos for an agua de fruta or soft drink, or 15 Pesos for a cold beer.

Making your own cheese-tomato-cucumber-avocado sandwich with some halfway decent bread will cost you at least as much.

• tourist class

El Mariachi, Don Cafeto, Charlies, La Nave and various others offer Mexican & International cuisine for the more affluent, with dishes from 50 to 150 Pesos & more, drinks from 20 Pesos & upwards.

While not quite as overpriced as the beach side establishments, you still pay a premium for setting, arguably -if you know what to order where- slightly tastier food and often extremely slow service.

→ Todo Tulum

Nohoch Nah Chich

For my one hundredth cave dive my wish to marvel around in the giant bird cage got fulfilled, despite nobody really knowing the exact layout of this cave. But as I dived this system once two years ago, I still kind of had an idea where to look for the start of the permanent line*.

First though we had to find the cenote's entrance gate somewhere along highway 307 north of Tulum. Despite Nohoch's relative fame & popularity, none of the locals were able to help us out, but again memory served me well: the access road is the same as for Caracol!

From the parking & gearing up area it's a hot walk down to the 24°C cool water. Equipment checks done we submerged and went looking for a line, which we found at the end of the cavern zone and followed till its end barely 26' later, requiring us to close a gap to another line passing by just a few meters away. On my sign we went left, passing a domed cenote then approaching another brighter one. Both with snorkelers? Too much human activity for me so we swam back, shortly checking out the right section after the gap, thereby finding ourselves immediately in a fabulous area of petrified waterfalls.

This wonderful cave system is amazingly vast and very very shallow, averaging around 5m depth, thus allowing for extended dives of up to two hours on just a set of doubles.

* After talking to Robbie from Xibalba, who alas wasn't there when we got going, I found out that there are actually three upstream and one downstream line, and that by going left at the gap we indeed most probably made a circuit back to where we'd started.

[ entrance fee: 150 Pesos ]

Sac Aktun

After yesterday's exposure to the dark side, I figured a dive in Sac Aktun, Mayan for white cave, would be a good antidote. For greater effect and some private time I went solo, getting real close to the cave's building matter in the process.


Not that I ventured very deep inside. I pretty much remained in one wonderfully decorated room just beyond the cavern zone, away from the main line, shortly following a rarely traveled secondary line to a small cenote located not that far on the other side of the road.

As therapy I played around with my TillyTec lights, shooting various trial clips and experimenting with macro photography.


Grand cenote being relatively deserted today, I finished my dive with a tour of the cavern zone, enjoying the play of sunlight streaming in.

Jailhouse

Jungle pool entry followed by a slide down sandwiched between easily stirred up decomposing dirt and a low tannic acid stained ceiling.


We immediately take the first T left and dive along passages so dark our lights seem useless. Captivating black stalactites bring to mind jail bars, hence the name of this cenote I guess. Probably haunted...

There's quite a lot of silt deposited everywhere. A thick layer of it. The mood's definitely somber but brightly clears up after the second T, where we turn right and dive down below the halocline, here at 15m, into slightly warmer and bluish salt water. Our mission area.

The tunnel down here's whitish with crusty crops of beige formations. Half an hour into the dive we pass by some old bones, supposedly from a big tapir.

When I reach 2/3 of my nitrox, I call the dive, looking forward to getting out again. For some reason, Systema Naranjal, incl. Cenote Cristal aka Naharon, Mayan Blue aka Escondido & Cenote of the Sun among others, never quite gave me a good feeling inside.

[ entrance fee: 100 Pesos ]

Fish or ghost?

→ ogilbia pearsei
→ typhliasina pearsei

Chan Hol

Nice 82' dive through narrow tunnels, low passages and decorated rooms, past old human bones, traces of charcoal fires and almost intact pottery, then back to the present and unlimited free air.

Bursts happen

About 12' into the dive, as I grabbed my SPG to check my remaining air pressure for the third time or so, it suddenly started to release a constant stream of bubbles. Miguel being right in front of me, I gave him the emergency signal, whereupon he immediately turned around, saw the problem and quickly shut off my left tank and thereby my back-up regulator with the failing SPG. After that we of course swam straight for the exit. Hadn't he been right there, I would of course have shut off the valve myself, though not quite as fast and I would most probably have silted up the tunnel in the process.

At first I thought my SPG had somehow just unscrewed itself from the HP hose, there was no doubt however once I took the SPG apart in the dive center: a piece had broken off from one of the two tiny O-rings! How? Old and/or not properly lubricated O-ring plus friction could be one explanation, but who knows.

One thing's sure though: That's already the third regulator related issue on this trip (2nd stage elbow O-ring failure, free-flowing 2nd stage and now SPG O-ring failure). And that right after having had my regulators serviced & checked by Tauchsport Manta in Munich. I guess they really didn't want to see me back again. Well, they won't.

UPDATE: Check out gear maintenance for even more troubling info.

Chan Hol

Short 23' dive (incl. 3' safety stop), aborted due to a technical issue.

Muchachos

Small entrance, big cave. Due to travel depth and distance, nitrox and a stage tank are recommended. We dived it on air and only just avoided decompression by keeping it short, read: 72'.

[ entrance fee: 100 Pesos ]

Kalimba

Another great dive in Kalimba, this time involving one jump and one T, both times to the right. A 102' underwater trip of eyes-wide-open speleological pleasure. Mind you, though wonderfully decorated this system is very fragile and often restrictive, requiring perfect buoyancy control and careful crawling through various passages. Meaning should anything go wrong you'll need more than just a cool head to get out again. 50' into the cave is a long way back indeed. But then, nothing like a bit of risk awareness to keep a clear focus and sharp senses.

Taj Mahal

To my dismay the whole jungle clearing was full of vans as we arrived, but luckily they all belonged to cavern tours, meaning we had the cave all for ourselves. Though the best part here is arguably the extended cavern zone, actually connecting two cenotes and an air filled dome in between with several small holes in the roof through which sunlight beams in and refracts onto the water's surface.

The cave itself reminds of the weirdly eroded tunnels in Calavera, but unfortunately lots of it is exactly at halocline level, here at 12m, thus resulting in blurry vision for anybody except the leading diver.

[ entrance fee: 80 Pesos ]

Tortugas

Nice tunnel dive, left at the first T then right at the second T. I didn't see any turtles though? In order to avoid having to decompress, as most of the dive is spent below the halocline, here around 21m deep, nitrox is recommended. We used EAN36, diving on air this dive would otherwise most probably have resulted in a rather long deco penalty.

[ entrance fee: 70 Pesos ]

Tulum playa

Sun drenched day at the beach, barely 5km away from downtown Tulum, but another world all together, reachable by taxi for 40-60 Pesos. After having met some old acquaintances at La Zebra, I didn't hang around too long before marching off again. All the way back to Tulum pueblo, a rather hot, not to say rationally insane, 8km stroll.

A look into the Room of Tears

The original 320x240 30fps AVI source clips used for this video were recorded in Aktun Ha with a Sea&Sea DX8000G digital compact camera fitted with a 0.6x WAL, by the light of a TillyTec HID 35 with 80° flood reflector and a TillyTec LED 1000 with diffuser.

For the record: Uploading this 2'22" (15.6MB) video-clip took about 25', excluding a failed first attempt and post processing by Blogger.

Aktun Ha

This cenote is actually better known as Carwash, though I much prefer its Mayan name, which simply means water cave.

Somehow today I felt like doing a mourning dive to the Room of Tears, a relatively easy one jump cave dive, through a small hole off the main line, requiring some crawling, before being rewarded by the sight of this most famous & highly decorated little room.


Called back into action is my almost 3 years old Sea&Sea DX8000G, which despite two powerful lights alas still won't let me take sharp pictures in the darkness of the cave... so it will be down to low-res video-clips from here onwards. Shows that my drowned Xacti's one stop more sensitive lens and EIS clearly made a huge difference.

Chac Mool

While the 500m dive along the highway large eroded tunnel isn't too interesting, the destination is all the more so: Xich Ha Tunich, supposedly the world's largest underwater stalactite, measuring at least 8m according to my depth gauge, starting just below the halocline at around 11m down to about 20m. This giant drip stone is not just big though, it's also really beautifully formed.


As we got near the water, Miguel noticed a Turquoise Browed Motmot, which I only got to see thanks to my camcorder's 10x zoom. As it turned out, that would be the last picture it took for me.

[ entrance fee: 80 Pesos ]