Una desviación para los tacos

After Christmas In Austin we braved Southwest Airlines and headed to Mexico—AUS✈️CUN was one of the few flights largely unaffected by the whole mess. Our last trip was late 2019, immediately before… everything.

Three corn tortilla soft tacos on a white plate. One with chicken and rice, and two pork pastor with corriander, onion and rice.

The Yucatán Peninsula is a huge limestone karst formed millions of years ago and shaped by everything from ice age and glacial melt to meteor impact1. It’s jungle landscape marked by thousands of cenotes, doorways into another realm, many of them woven into the life and mythology of the Maya.

Once dry, the cave systems are full of beautiful speleological decorations, the remains of ancient mega fauna, fire pits and artefacts from another lifetime, and sometimes the people that may have inhabited them.

We spent two weeks diving and exploring this beautiful world.

I have far too much video to sort though—I’ll post some short clips in the future—perhaps some photos will help explain the draw.

The first rule of cave diving is to always have a continuous guideline to the open water2.

A diver hovering among the rocks leading into an underwater cave system, tying a guideline reel to a nearby fallen tree branch, the crystal clear water casting a green blue hue across the scene.Primary Tie-off Two divers descend into the an underwater cave system, their gruideline tied to a nearby fallen tree branch, the crystal clear water casting a green blue hue on the scene.Heading In A Halycon Pathfinder guideline reel securely tied into the main line of an underwater cave system.Tied Into the Mainline

Once inside, it’s dark, eery, and beautiful. The lights you have with you the only source of illumination.

A diver swims down a lava tube in an underwater cave system, his dark drysuit and greyscale camouflage fins lit by a team mates primary light, as it illuminates the walls of the cave in greens and blues.Lava Tube A diver swims through dark speleothems and covered in silt an eery green cast illuminating the scene. Speleothems The silouhette of a diver against the brightly lit cave walls and myriad delicate speleothems outlining an underwater cave tunnel.Delicate Speleothems

One of the most beautiful sites in caves close to the sea is the halocline, an area where the inland fresh water mixes with salt water from the ocean—beautiful and sometimes frustrating when you’re in the rocking chair.

A diver swimming through a brightly lit white pock marked cave, their hand dragging through the halocline mixing the fresh and salt water layers, trailing a blurry interface behind them.Mixing the Halocline, from Above A completely blurred view of a brightly lit cave tunnel. The halocline so mixed that visibility has dropped to near zero, like looking through a deeply defocused camera lens.In the Middle of the Halocline A diver swimming through a brightly lit white pock marked cave, through the middle of the halocline mixing the fresh and salt water layers, trailing a blurry interface behind them.Mixing the Halocline, from Below

As always, I’m counting the days until we head back to the Mayan Underworld.

  1. There is a world of information available online about karst geology and hydrogeology. Here’s a good summary of the Yucatan. ↩︎

  2. See Sheck Exley’s foundational book Basic Cave Diving: A Blueprint for Survival. ↩︎

Ryan Booker @ryanbooker