To Dive For
For an unforgettable snorkeling adventure in Mexico, bypass Cancún and head for the beautiful underground rivers and canyons of the Yucatán.
(Page 2 of 3)
The lagoon was vacant except for a dozen German tourists who came trooping down the path with their snorkeling gear as we anchored the boat in front of the temple. Like many tourists, they had planned their trip for the most congenial time of the year—the dry season, which lasts from November to April. During these months, the water appears exquisitely clear from above, but when we slipped overboard and looked beneath the surface, it not only was opaque but had a strange visual texture, like wrinkled wax paper. Various fish—sergeant majors and parrot fish—swam in front of my mask lens, but I perceived them only in a nearsighted haze.
“What’s wrong with the water?” the kids wanted to know. But there was nothing wrong with it. The peculiar haziness was merely proof that fresh water from those underground streams was pouring out of the rock, mixing unevenly with the salt water surging into the lagoon from the sea. When fresh and salt water meet, they have a tendency to stack themselves, the heavier salt water settling to the bottom, the fresh water riding on top. The plane that separates them is known as the halocline.
Sometimes a halocline is hard to miss, a sharp divide that sorts the water into strata as clearly defined as the rock in a road cut. In this lagoon the distinction was far more subtle, a strange wavy blending that reminded me of an old episode of The Twilight Zone I had seen as a kid in which a family discovers that their house contains a secret door to the fifth dimension. When they work up the nerve to go through the door, they find themselves in a world of undulating, distorted images, with imperceptible and barely audible figures beckoning them farther.
My own family, I knew, felt a little as if they had been dragged into a strange dimension as well. I had originally told the kids we were going to Cancún for spring break, and while this had been true in a technical sense (we would be arriving and departing at the Cancún airport), I had not adequately prepared them for the fact that they would not be spending their days sipping virgin daiquiris at the swim-up bars of luxury hotels or hanging out at Planet Hollywood and the Hard Rock Cafe. They had been cruelly disappointed in these fantasies once before, years earlier, when I accidentally left them with the impression that we would be spending a weekend in fabulous Cancún, when in fact we were going to a sleepy little hideaway on the Frio River called Concan. Once again, we were not going through the main door, but through a secret door, into a world of mute Mayan temples and wrinkly water and endless submerged grottoes.
We wore ourselves out that day, visiting another solitary tem-ple/lighthouse a few miles down the coast and then stopping to snorkel another lagoon or two and to browse along their shorelines for beautiful cobbles of fossilized coral. By the end of the afternoon only Marjorie had the energy to accompany me to Xel-Ha, a national park at a broad lagoon between Puerto Aventuras and Tulum.
The admission fee for Xel-Ha was $10 apiece, and “National Park” struck me as a highly suspect designation for what turned out to be an assemblage of swimwear boutiques, cafes, towel rental facilities, and juice bars. The lagoon that spread out in front of all this, however, was the real thing. It was a vast and tranquil sheet of water with a few craggy islets rising from it. The low afternoon sun cast a flat, soothing light across the surface.
When Marjorie and I entered the lagoon, we encountered once again that tricky mixture of fresh and salt water. Here, however, the halocline was more apparent. The fresh water on top was chilly and blurry, but when we dove to six feet or so, we hit a band of warm, clear water, in which schools of big parrot fish were suddenly, magically visible, grazing along the sand bottom of the lagoon. I noticed that the passage of my body through the halocline stirred up the layers, causing them to commingle in eerie ways. When I came across a large barracuda on the bottom, half the fish was clearly visible, but the other half melted away into a gauzy abstraction.
ADMIT IT, DAD, it’s a purse,” Dorothy chided me the next morning as we made our way along a rocky path deep into the forest.
“It’s not a purse,” I said, referring to the canvas shoulder bag that contained several bottles of water and a notebook that I could not handle without soaking the pages with sweat. “I believe Eddie Bauer refers to it as a guide pouch.”
“As if you were a guide,” she said. “It’s a purse.”
We had embarked on the first phase of the Indiana Jones Jungle Adventure, a mile-and-a-half walk through a humid tropical forest that led to a cenote known as Nohoch Nah Chich, a Mayan phrase meaning “the Giant Bird House.” Nohoch Nah Chich is the main hub in a remarkable attempt to map the underground river systems of this part of the Yucatán. The leader of the enterprise, Mike Madden, the American owner of a dive center based in Puerto Aventuras, had shown me a map that morning of the Nohoch system. When Madden set the rolled-up map down on the floor of his office and opened it, it took up nine feet, and it depicted a fibrous network of caverns, tunnels, and cenotes spreading aimlessly in all directions. Madden and his teams of cave divers have been exploring this system since 1987, using underwater scooters to roam through enormous water-filled rooms that can be 1,400 feet long by 400 feet wide, and then can pinch off to narrow passageways through which a diver has to wiggle like an eel. Except for the occasional distant light of a surface crack or a cenote opening, the caves are perfectly dark, and the divers must swim through them bearing their own light as well as their own air, sometimes carrying 250 pounds of survival equipment. By using the scooters, and by caching extra scuba tanks and lights at critical intervals, they have traveled more than 30,000 feet in a single dive. There is no telling where the thing begins or ends. It is already the longest underwater cave system in the world. At the time we visited, Madden and his divers had mapped 129,000 feet, painstakingly connecting one cenote to the next, and were on the verge of following the passageways all the way to the sea.
To the degree that this sprawling subterranean complex has a front door, Nohoch Nah Chich is it. Madden started the Indiana Jones tour as a way of allowing casual tourists such as us a relatively safe peek into a lethal and unnervingly beautiful counterworld.
The Indiana Jones Jungle Adventure is a hokey name for an authentically strange experience, though I must admit I did swagger a bit along that forest path, with my Eddie Bauer guide pouch slung over my shoulder and sweat pouring into my eyes from my sodden hatband. The path was an irregular ribbon of coral rock, and the kids seemed to enjoy the challenge of keeping their footing as they hurried along. More than a dozen people were on the tour this morning, along with several horses carrying ice chests and snorkeling gear.
At the end of the path we came to a Mayan farm, where a man named Don Pedro lived with his wife, Doña Rafaela, in a breezy compound of palapas, fruit trees, and Brahman cattle. The cenote was on their land, and as we passed the main house—where Doña Rafaela had set up a display of embroidered dresses to sell to the Indiana Jones adventurers—we could see the land disappearing into a deep crater fifty or sixty yards away. The Nohoch cenote was eight hundred feet in diameter and appeared to be completely dry except for a crescent of dark water far below. To reach the bottom of the sinkhole, we climbed down a wooden stairway and then walked across the broad summit of the rubble cone to a wooden platform built at the edge of the water. Above us rose the raw chasm of the sinkhole, the rock festooned with the long stringy roots of the trees that grew along the lip of the precipice. Perpetually shaded by the steep overhang that rose above it, the narrow strip of water here was dark, but achingly clear. Schools of minnows patrolled the area beneath us, and when Charlotte—eating a grotesque Mexican cookie crowned by a bright pink marshmallow—dropped a crumb into the water, the minnows converged on it with the fury of an atomic fusion reaction.
“Where are we going exactly?” Dorothy asked as we pulled on our fins.
My Library
