31 December 2011
Happy End of the World! Well, not really. Our Mayan guides at Chichen Itza explained that the end of the Mayan Long Count would be December 21 (or 22?), 2012. But that would just start another counting cycle, and it was really no big deal, except they planned to market the hell out of it this year to earn some extra pesos.
[Interesting etymological note: “Yucatan” is the name of this peninsula and one of the Mexican states of the region. 500 years ago, when Cortez’s men used Spanish to ask the local Mayans the name of this place, they repeatedly answered “Yucatan! Yucatan!” and so it came to be known. Yucatan means “I don’t understand” in Mayan.]
There are no rivers in the Yucatan. No proper rivers that you can swim, fish, or paddle a canoe in, anyway. This seems a bit odd, considering it rains plenty here, with the southern parts approaching tropical rain forest (or tropical “dry/seasonal” forest, more exactly). But when the water falls from the sky, the ground doesn’t stop it. The whole Yucatan peninsula is made up of limestone. It’s karst country, to use the proper geological term. [“Karst” was first named in Slovenia, another wonderful place we visited in 2011 with plenty of turquoise water and nifty caves.]
When rain falls through the sky, it absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and some of the water and C02 combine to form carbonic acid, which is why rain water is a little bit acidic naturally, even without man-made pollution making it worse. The acidic rainwater reacts with the limestone, dissolving it. The rain eats the rock. In areas with lots of limestone (“karst country”), the water seeps into the ground much more so than in many other areas, and travels in underground rivers. As the underground rivers dissolve the surrounding rock, you get caves. Sometimes the river eats away too much of the roof of the cave, and it collapses, giving you a sinkhole, or as they are known in the Yucatan, cenotes (“seh-NO-tays”).
The lack of surface rivers means that there is very little sediment pouring into the sea, meaning the water is generally very clear (high visibility), which is one reason why the Meso-American reef system (2nd longest in the world, I think) is such a popular snorkeling and diving location. Besides the reef off-shore, another diving/snorkeling location that is very popular in this region are the cenotes themselves. There are thousands of cenotes across the Yucatan. They were the basis of the great Mayan civilization, and all major cities had one or more cenotes. Some of them are large (several hundred meters across), many of them are deep (we swam in one that is 90m deep), and they all generally have steep sides or even sides that angle out from the shore as you go down (the reverse of a regular lake), meaning the surface area at the bottom is much more than the top. The water is usually very clean (unless they have been abused by humans) and startlingly clear.
We snorkeled in Cenote Azul near the southern Yucatan town of Bacalar (which is also on a 60 km long freshwater lake – very beautiful). It had a little restaurant on the side, but people were surprisingly good about observing the no littering rule, and they also tell you not to wear sunscreen or bug spray into the cenote for water quality (hard to say if people were observing this rule).
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| No picture from above can do the color of this water justice, but this picture at least shows how big this cenote was. |
The water was refreshing. It felt clean. I like swimming in fresh water so much more than salt water. From the outside, I snickered a bit about the “Blue Cenote” monicker, as it didn’t seem particularly blue to me (maybe it was the low angle of the light). But when I got in…wow!
The water was so clear, it was hard to remember it was even there. My hands and toes and in front of my eyes seemed to just be floating there in nothingness (well, because you’re less buoyant in freshwater, I had to work pretty hard to “float,” but that’s another story.). There wasn’t an abundance of fish, but the fish that were there were very easy to watch, including lots of little tiny fish about 1 inch long and only maybe ¼ inch wide that were shiny and were mouth breathing at the surface, it appeared. When I lifted my head above the water, you couldn’t see the fish at all. There was a leaf fallen from the tree, yellow and rust colored, suspended in the water column, spinning in the light. It was mesmerizing. The fact that you couldn’t see the bottom (it was almost 300 ft/ 90 m deep!!!) and it was so clear really heightened the effect of floating in space. This particular cenote was generally cylinder-shaped, like a well, both very large (250 m across, maybe) and deep. The water was very near top of the geological depression (some cenotes are more hole and less lake), and the walls were thick with vegetation above the water line. The roots of the trees went down underwater along the outside of the rock 20-30 feet. Below that, there was nothing to see but the abyss.
Shannon didn’t like the cenote as much as me. Swimming over the abyss, with so much down below, was unnerving, and not being able to float as well in the freshwater didn’t help. So she had somewhat mixed feelings about the whole thing, but I loved it, and insisted that we visit another cenote the next day, on our drive back to Cancun.
The two most famous cenotes around Tulum are Gran Cenote and Dos Ojos. Dos Ojos (“Two eyes”) cenote is part of a cave system that extends tens of miles, and is apparently one of the longest systems in the world. It sounds like an incredible scuba dive, but my PADI certification is rusty and I don’t want to refresh it with cave diving, generally considered some of the most risky kind of diving you can do. You can snorkel there too, but without an underwater light I don’t think it would be that interesting (almost no natural light, I’m told), and I didn’t have time to rent a light from a dive shop. Gran Cenote was rumored to be friendlier to snorkelers and provide a better natural environment.
We accidently avoided paying the 100 peso entrance fee by parking in the commercial lot (for dive tours and tour buses). I guess sometimes it does pay to be a stupid gringo. This place was pretty crowded, and despite the name, was much smaller than cenote azul. The cenote is sort of horseshoe-shaped, and you can leave from several wooden platforms in the middle. There is only maybe 15 feet of open water between the platform and the opposite wall at most, but you could swim into some barely lit rooms and the area was larger. It was also much larger underwater. I could watch scuba diving parties with their underwater lights and be surprised how far away they were, discovering whole rooms that I wouldn’t have known were there. Cenote azul was like swimming in a huge well, but this was more like a flooded cave. There were stalactites hanging down into the water, sometimes just above, sometimes into the water. From the dark areas, you could look back towards the daylight and see beautiful blue and turquoise colors punctuated by shadows of stalactites and swimmer legs. Because there were more people in a smaller, shallower area, the water was not nearly as clear at Gran Cenote than at cenote azul, but the feeling of swimming around on top of a cave was unique and worthwhile. I would definitely like to come back and do some diving trips into these cenotes, because I think that that is how you see the majority of their awesomeness.
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| Getting ready to explore the water and caves. |
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| A view from above. |
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