To Dive For
For an unforgettable snorkeling adventure in Mexico, bypass Cancún and head for the beautiful underground rivers and canyons of the Yucatán.
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“In there,” I said, pointing to a dark maw at the base of the cliff face. It looked like the entrance to some theme park thrill ride—the mouth of a cavern with a few stalactites hanging down like fangs, ready to swallow anyone who ventured too close.
The guide, a young woman with a Brooklyn accent, divided the expedition into two groups of ten and passed out an underwater flashlight to every two snorkelers. She explained that we would be swimming into the cavern to a distance of eight hundred feet, beyond the reach of sunlight, traveling a circular course that would bring us out the way we came in. She reminded us that we would not be going into the regions accessible only to cave divers; there would always be air above us.
“Youse guys stay together now,” she admonished.
Silently, our little flotilla of snorkelers entered the cavern. We kept our eyes underwater, transfixed by the velvety blue light from the receding sun. I dove to the bottom, looking up at my children paddling above, glowing in that brilliant pane of blue light like figures in a stained-glass window.
But by and by, that light disappeared, and we had only our flashlights to guide us as we floated deeper into the cavern. The rooms we passed through were the size of houses, filled with cantilevered boulders and cave formations that glowed in the flashlight beams with a milky radiance. There were cascading flowstones and stalactites that hung from the ceiling and pierced the surface of the water like daggers. The water’s clarity suggested a kind of nothingness, the void of deep space. I swam around and below the children, watchful and a little worried, because the water was so deep, the rooms so vast, and unspeakable dangers so easy to imagine. The kids were all good swimmers, and there were shelves of flowstone to rest on if they got tired, but just the same, I would periodically take hold of their hands, to reassure myself that this strange universe was not somehow tugging them away.
DURING THE NEXT FEW DAYS WE DROVE up and down the road between Playa del Carmen and Tulum, visiting one cenote after another. Some of them were large, nearly dry craters like Nohoch, with a rim of water at the bottom leading back infinitely into the rock. Others were filled almost to the edge, with the surface so still and translucent, it looked as if it had been sealed with a giant sheet of Saran Wrap. When we snorkeled through the waters of these cenotes, the sunlight fell across the boulders below us in waving curtains of light. We saw turtles and golden fish with accordion-pleated sailfins they raised above their backs to catch the sun’s rays, and peculiar little diving birds—grebes, I think—that pedaled along underwater for great distances with their enormous feet.
At the entrance to one cenote, we found a dilapidated old school bus. Through its open windows the children had the opportunity to see an ancient hippie, completely unclothed, sashaying down the aisle as he sang a mournful a cappella version of “Paint It Black.”
“Okay, we’ve seen a naked hippie,” Dorothy said. “Now can we go to that Xcaret place?”
We had passed the entrance to Xcaret many times in our meanderings up and down the road, had seen the tour buses streaming into it and the colorful billboards advertising the theme park as “Nature’s Sacred Paradise.” Robbed of Cancún, the kids had focused their hopes on this place, which seemed to offer exactly the sort of exotic synthetic experience their gringo souls most deeply craved.
So Sue Ellen and I relented and we drove into Xcaret, passed through a fake Mayan temple, and paid $20 apiece for a wristband that was our token of admittance. What we found inside was an incredibly well-groomed, well-run, and utterly dispiriting tourist trap. There were uniformed attendants everywhere, and restaurants and gift boutiques, one-hour photo shops, horse-riding demonstrations, botanical gardens, and snack bars squeezed around authentic Mayan ruins. There was a manicured beach and a man-made breakwater to protect it and an enclosure where, for an extra fee, visitors could swim with captive dolphins.
The centerpiece of Xcaret, however, was a snorkeling tour of an underground river that flowed through the park. A few years before, this river—a winding channel that worked its way above and below the surface before discharging into a sparkling lagoon—had been one of the loveliest features of the entire coast, or so I’d been told. But now that it had become part of “Nature’s Sacred Paradise,” it had been blasted and diverted, its opening to the sea closed off and its aura of beauty and mystery debased.
To enter the underground river, it was necessary to put all our valuables into plastic bags to be ferried to the exit point. We were then required to don orange safety vests, and when we entered the water, we became part of a crush of bobbing snorkelers, moving passively along on a gentle current, flailing about with our orange safety vests and wristbands.
“This is stupid!” Charlotte said, and I allowed myself a little thrill of triumph, proud that this trip had helped further what I considered one of the most crucial elements of the children’s education: the ability to tell the difference between what is real and what is fake.
My attitude toward Xcaret was partly the environmental hauteur of a privileged American. In this desperate country, where the peso fell every day and showed every sign of falling through eternity, places such as this meant jobs. Still, my mood was low when we left—I was thinking of all the beautiful places we had visited in the past few days that would no doubt someday suffer the same fate as Xcaret.
But when we turned off the road for lunch, heading to a beach and campground known as Xcacel, things began to improve. For one thing, there was a two-headed sea turtle, maintained alive in a shaded tank just above the beach. An old American woman, a fierce advocate of the turtles that crawl ashore on these beaches to nest, put her hands into the tank and lifted out a turtle with eight waving flippers and two heads that strained in opposite directions.
“This is Boo-Boo,” she said, indicating each of the heads in turn. “And this is Bo-Bo. They’ve got two of everything—two sets of lungs, two hearts—but only one rectum. So when one of them wants to go to the baño, the other one has to go too.”
We admired the two-headed turtle for a moment more, made a contribution to a fund to protect the turtles’ nests from human egg poachers, and then strolled over to an open-air restaurant that overlooked one of the prettiest beaches in the Yucatán. The turquoise water was blinding, an assault of color, and the breeze moved gently beneath the palm fronds, where we sat eating our pescado tikin xik.
This beach, the local rumor went, had been sold to the Japanese, so who knew how long before it too went the way of Xcaret and Cancún? How long would that Mayan temple on the edge of the lagoon stand there in its pure solitude, and how long would the cenotes we had snorkeled in remain untapped and unpolluted?
I thought of that trip into the perfect darkness of the Nohoch cenote, with the light beams sweeping across the lustrous flowstone and bats flapping in the airspaces above our heads. Ancient Mayan kings had once performed bloodletting rituals, piercing their penises with stingray spines and running knotted cords through their tongues as a way of reaching a level of spiritual intensity sufficient to allow them entrance into the Otherworld. The places we had visited did not require such a cruel price of admission, and though they were off the normal tourist path, they could hardly be considered a part of the secret Mayan cosmos. But sitting and recollecting in the bright glare of the sun, I felt we had at least touched the margins of that ancient dreamscape, and that when we looked back on this trip, it would be in dreams that we remembered it best.
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