Torch Off – Diving the Cenotes of Mexico
It all started with the August 2013 issue of National Geographic. Page 99. Secrets of the Maya Otherworld, by photographer Paul Nicklen. It blew my mind. Dark underwater caves, crystal-clear water, and beams of sunlight that looked like lightsabers from Star Wars. I’d never seen anything like it. Seven months later, I was standing at the edge of my first cenote with my scuba gear on.
Long live analog!
What exactly is a cenote? The easiest way to picture the Yucatán Peninsula is as a giant piece of Emmental cheese. Beneath the jungle lies an enormous labyrinth of flooded caves and underground rivers. Scientists estimate there are somewhere between 8,000 and 13,000 cenotes scattered across Yucatán, Quintana Roo and Campeche, of which only around 3,000 have been officially mapped. Most of them aren’t scattered at random. They trace a single arc across the peninsula known as the Ring of Cenotes, the buried rim of the Chicxulub crater left by the asteroid that ended the age of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.
Over thousands of years, rainwater slowly dissolved the limestone underground, leaving caves, caverns and gullies. Every now and then, part of the cave ceiling collapsed, opening a hole to the surface. Depending on how much of the ceiling has fallen, you end up with very different cenotes, some little more than narrow openings in the jungle floor, others wide open pools.
My attempt to visually explain cenote formation
No two cenotes are alike. Some are open to the sky, some are home to colonies of bats, some have tunnels that run beneath the roots of the jungle above, while others are so flooded with sunlight that trees grow from tiny islands in the middle. Some hide ghostly clouds of hydrogen sulfide that look like underwater rivers of mist. Others are crystal clear from top to bottom. Some preserve fossils or ancient human remains, while others are home to tiny white cave fish, locally known as dama blanca: eyeless, since generations of total darkness made eyes a cost with no benefit, and evolution stopped bothering with them. One of my favourite encounters around cenotes happens while diving through dark tunnels and caves: you break the surface inside a small chamber lit by a single opening in the rock, and find it’s already occupied by motmots (a type of bird), who’ve made it their home. If you ever get lost in the Yucatán jungle and desperately need freshwater, follow the motmots. This underground network was the region’s only reliable source of fresh water, in a landscape with no rivers on the surface at all. The Maya built their civilization around these cenotes, which they treated as sacred rather than merely useful. They believed the rain god Chaak lived inside them, and that the caves themselves were entrances to Xibalba, the underworld. Archaeologists have found offerings left as a way of speaking directly to that world below, and in many cenotes, human remains are still visible to divers today. It’s worth remembering this before you put a mask on: you’re not diving into a swimming hole. You’re diving into a sacred world.
Skull remains in Mérida cenotes, pics by Anthony Chareun
My own love story with cenotes is inseparable from one man: Pepe. Master of masters. Owner of an eternal smile, I’m fairly sure Pepe has spent more time wet than dry, and that his wetsuit hasn’t touched salt water in years. All of the cenotes I’ve explored, except for the ones around Mérida, have been with him. He knows every strange corner of these caves, where to find the motmot, where to find a cool mirror in the water around rock formations that make you feel like you’re on Mars. I confidently follow his lead.
I trust him so much that if he signals me to turn off my torch in a narrow tunnel, I just do. I know something great will happen. The first time I did, I suddenly found myself in absolute darkness: the kind where it doesn’t matter whether your eyes are open or closed, because they see exactly the same thing. We just floated there in complete silence, listening only to the sound of our own breathing. Twenty metres beneath the Earth, and the feeling is closer to floating through the universe than to floating in water, an unforgettable meditative session. The Maya had a word for that darkness, Xibalba, and it doesn’t get more real than with your torch off.
Pepe was also the one who introduced me to a cenote that’s become one of my favourites: Zapote. From the surface, it doesn’t give much away. Just impossibly clear turquoise water surrounded by lush jungle. Then you start descending. The entrance is narrow enough that only two divers can comfortably pass side by side. I’ll confess, it wasn’t easy the first time, but I trusted Pepe, and I knew there was a jaw-dropping world to explore down there. Just breathe and let your weight do its thing as you descend. At around twenty-five metres, enormous bell-shaped formations begin to appear from the ceiling, known as the Hell’s Bells. Below them sits what almost looks like a small underwater island, built over thousands of years from fallen trees and organic material. A ghostly cloud of hydrogen sulfide wraps around it like fog. Beneath that cloud lies the fossil of a giant ground sloth.
Yes, the sloth was THAT big.
Diving a cenote is a completely different experience from diving the open, salty water of the sea. It was the marine life, the sharks, turtles, the crazy variety of shape and colour the ocean holds, that got most of us into diving in the first place. But a reef is something you watch, dazzling as it is, and your eyes do most of the work. A cenote is something you’re inside of, and every other sense activates. There’s no wildlife parade, no fish to follow, so instead of only looking outward, you end up also looking inward; it becomes something closer to meditation, an inner journey as much as a dive. And it’s amazing.
