6: back to the Mayans

the ruins at Tulum

After the cave diving Scott joined us in Playa del Carmen and the next morning we took a bus to the ruins of Tulum, a Mayan city located on cliffs along the coastline. On the bus an Englishman amused us by asking the bus driver to stop at their hotel, then just repeating himself more loudly in English when the bus driver didn´t understand.

We left our big backpacks in the back of a restaurant near the entrance and trudged through the mud to the entrance. There seemed to be a lot of insects queuing to bite us. Tulum was pretty touristy, but quite picturesque, and there was an interesting "Temple of the Diving God" with an upside down figure depicted.

scary stelae

We got some food at a local place near the bus station and then got on the night bus to Palenque. Scott was strangely anxious about this journey, and was convinced that he was being slyly watched by the man sitting on the opposite aisle. The bus was a bit of a luxury one with a movie and free crisps (what luxury!), and seats that leaned right back into an almost sleeping position (although I only discovered this about an hour away from our destination). After a good ten hours or so we arrived in Palenque, around 7am, and headed for the hostel round the corner, Yaxkin. Clare and I got booked in to a dorm room by ourselves and we took a colectivo to the ruins.

Scott and Clare at Palenque

I found Palenque to be the most impressive Mayan site we had visited. It was in a lush jungle setting (poisonous caterpillars kept dropping on me from the trees above) and the structures were magnificent. After our guide left us we wandered round some of the less populated areas of the city and explored smaller ruins, finally sitting on the rope bridge facing the waterfall for a while. We headed across to visit the museum on the main road, but unfortunately this was closed, so jumped on a colectivo back into town. That evening we ate at a local restaurant and drank loads of mescal (tequila). It made walking back in the pissing rain a bit more fun.

The next morning Clare slept in and I ate breakfast alone in the open air restaurant attached to the hostel. The waiter said he had no milk for my tea, which was odd as I had seen him drinking it from the carton as I´d walked in. Not that I would particularly have wanted the same batch, of course. For the first time in my trip I felt a little melancholy, thinking of various people at home, and with varying sets of emotions attached to those people.

Scott left us that day to head back to Cancun and catch his flight home to LA, and Clare and I did boring things like laundry. We rested the next day, me feeling a bit under the weather still, and enjoyed a nice dinner in the hotel´s restaurant, until the band started playing and we could only just stare at each other, unable to speak or hear over the enthusiastic drummer.

The next morning before dawn we sat on the step outside the hostel for our bus. When it arrived an hour later we headed in the direction of Yaxchilan, another Mayan site on the banks of the river bordering Guatemala.We stopped on the road for breakfast, a weird sort of truck stop for tens of tourists, dishing out scrambled eggs and coffee. Our tour guide was crap. On arrival at the border post, without giving us any information about what we were doing, he pointed us in the direction of the boat and we found ourselves on our way to the site, without having dropped off the heavy items in our bags, or having put on any insect repellent.

On arrival at the site we pleaded in mutual Spanglish with a friendly Mexican couple for some of their DEET, and wandered round the site. We were supposed to have a guide in English, but they were nowhere to be seen, so we did our own tour, looking at bats and running away from mosquitoes. I was in such a foul mood I didn´t even get my camera out. In the main plaza I was aware of an overly loud noise coming from the river side, but having heard some of the ´jaguar whistles´ being sold at the other sites, I didn´t think much of it, until I climbed over the wall and saw two big howler monkeys mucking about in the trees above us. The noise they made was astoundingly loud, basically like a pig fighting a big cat.

We took the boat back to the border area, zooming past an expanded dead cow being picked apart by birds in the river, and after a lunch of mosquitoes (I think there was some food under them) with the friendly Mexicans we rushed to another site, Ek Balam ("the jaguar"). This was a beautiful site but we had so little time to see it, and almost missed the main feature of the painted murals, which nobody told us closed half an hour before the site did.

The people in this area are very different to those further north, and we stayed overnight in the midst of a small Lacandon community. The Lacandons appear much more indigenous than the westernised people of Cancun, wearing long white tunics and leaving their hair to grown long down their backs. There were some gorgeous little girls but we didn´t want to take photographs as this was apparently frowned upon. That evening, after a simple dinner of quesadillas, we watched as they had a little party in the clearing, and headed to bed with the sounds of children playing. It was probably the closest we came to seeing ´real´ people in Mexico.

5: cave diving

After our diving in Cozumel we got straight on to the ferry back to Playa del Carmen and booked into a hostel. Lots of people had recommended we dive in Dos Ojos, a cenote (sink hole and underwater cave) between Playa and the ruins of Tulum, so we booked a trip through Scuba 10. Gerardo was the slightly nutty owner of the dive shop, a bit of a flirt, very jokey, but gratifyingly specific when it came to his equipment: everything was just so, in a way that reassured you he would be a safe guide. We got the normal scuba stuff ready for the next day, but it was interesting to see how the cave divers' kit differed. Basically, they had two of everything: two tanks instead of one, two sets of regulators. The idea behind this is that really there is only one way out: the way you came in, so you can't afford to be in a position where you might be at risk of running low on air as there's nowhere for you to surface. They have two tanks for when they are diving on their own and perhaps being a bit more adventurous with where they go, but it also means that they have plenty of air for their customers, if they run into difficulty!

I felt a bit apprehensive about diving in a cave. I don't particularly class myself as a claustrophobic person but I had realised through the enclosed diving spaces of the Cathedral that I am uncomfortable diving in restricted spaces. I think this is partly because it's easier to bump your tank on things by accident, not realising how much bigger you are, but also because I am so anxious not to touch and damage any coral that I lose a bit of confidence in controlling where I am in the water - however I've got a lot better with this.

Modelling the latest cave dive wear

Clare and I have both been used to diving without needing any wetsuits (the water here is around 28 degrees - "icy!" say the divemasters) but the water would be colder in Dos Ojos, so Gerardo kitted us up with rash vests, a wetsuit, and a shorty over the top. I also had some nice neoprene boots as they ran out of my fin size. It was a good look.

The entrance to the caves were down some steps and into a clearing filled with mosquitos... thankfully, despite being complete bastards, they couldn't pierce the neoprene - but they would get us later.

The water was cold but not as cold as I had thought it would be, and after having lugged the tanks down the hill in the Michelin suit it was actually lovely. The visability was amazing, it was like swimming in glass - as Clare said, probably the closest to flying that we would encounter. The formations under the water were extraordinary, huge: giant stalactites and stalagmites that had taken thousands of years to form. There were giant boulders of rock stacked on top of each other, and, inexplicably, bits of tree - not sure how those got there. Gerardo had told us that there was an alligator living in the caves, and carefully took us to the edge of a boulder where he pointed over the edge to a plastic croc with a Barbie in its mouth. I guess you had to be there!

Matt complained about the cold between dives and Gerardo almost convinced him that the crisp packet we had just finished would provide insulation to his arse, unzipping him and shoving it into his back. During the second dive we exited the water into the Bat Cave. There were snorkellers in here too - a narrow shaft here led them down steps from the ground onto a platform. We didn't want to disturb them too much with our torches but you could hear them squeaking. Before we got guanoed we headed back out. By the end of the second dive I felt I'd had enough. The formations were without argument amazing, but I missed the surprise of fish and colour.

Me in the cenote

That evening we found a noodle place and stuffed our faces.

4: the diving begins

After another day not doing all that much in Cancún we decided to head down the coast to an island called Cozumel to start some diving. Aside from being a cruise liner stop-off that has 'eco-parks' where you can swim with dolphins and has a turtle sanctuary, it's mainly known for its diving, and it does contain some cenote (cave) dives - apparently including the 5th largest underwater cave system in the world. On the ferry across we happened to bump into Matt and Rachael so we decided to team up with them to find some cheap accommodation.

We found a cheap hotel that was ok (any basics missing were made up for by the friendly siamese cat) and got settled just before it started to pour with rain. The streets flooded pretty quickly but in a break from the rain we walked the couple of blocks up to the Deep Blue dive centre and booked a couple of dives for the next day. The evening was spent in a bar on the main square in the pouring rain, with Matt begging for (and getting) free tequilas for all of us.

We met on the pier at a reasonable time the next morning and met Blanca and Luís, the two divemasters for that day. Luís was looking after another group of divers, a Spanish family who were doing a try dive and had never done it before. Blanca gave us a very thorough brief and we sped past some enormous and cruise liners on our way to the site.

Squirrel fish

The first thing we saw in the water was a nurse shark. Whenever you talk about diving with sharks to people who don't, they always say "oh I would be terrified" - but the reality is that you get a bit excited, you swim after it to get a closer look, and then it buggers off. The marine life seemed less vibrant than I had seen in the Red Sea, but we did see more 'big' things, like a small hawksbill turtle. There are loads of weird things in the sea, and fish that look positively jurassic, like the squirrel fish.

The sun came out that afternoon and we treated ourselves to a nice meal at a restaurant Blanca had recommended. Somehow Matt got us free tequilas again.

Ray

The next morning we did two more dives, this time starting at a special location called the Cathedral. The Cathedral was a location that only advanced level divers should attempt because it is a cavern and therefore enclosed overhead - making exit more complicated if you have problems! At around 30m it's also a deep dive, so time at the site was limited (the deeper you dive, the more compressed air you consume, therefore less tank time). The coral formations were pretty impressive, and we encountered barracuda and a large ray (covered with sand) soon after entering the water.

Our second was a drift dive down Palancar Reef. Here the current was very strong and it was difficult to stay in one place to observe things. Our divemaster executed a couple of lionfish along the way. Lionfish are not native to the Caribbean; they are very beautiful, and very poisonous, eat everything and have no predator. In Mexico they seem to have a policy of killing them as they come across them. They're not sure how they got there, but one theory (apart from the difficult aquarium pet one) is that they're brought over in ships' ballast tanks. In Belize our divemaster told us that less than a year ago he'd never seen a lionfish, and now he sees them on every dive.

Divers need to ascend out of the water at different times depending on how much air they have used - we always dive in pairs so both get out when the first person runs low. To avoid problems with nitrogen build up in the body you have to ascend slowly and always do a safety stop a few metres below the surface. Clare and I got a bit swept along by the current and realised due to the frantic flashing of the divemaster's torch that we were almost past the line that Matt and his buddy were already attached to. Hard kicking ensued.

Clare and I wondering where the line is