When asked by friends if I wanted to join them for a caving expedition to the Yucatan, it was easy to say yes. I got to go to central Yucatan for a week a couple months ago and became very interested in both the karst and surficial geology. This expedition would be to the eastern Yucatan, exploring caves behind the touristy Mayan Riviera area apparently known for its beaches and resorts. I knew they had found some long cave systems and that a fair bit of the caving should be relatively comfortable, but beyond that I really didn't know what to expect. I certainly didn't expect to have one of the best weeks of caving in my life! Although this trip was purely vacation, it also afforded me a chance to better understand the karst in this area and how it might vary from the central Yucatan area of great interest to my archaeology colleagues (I never know how to really shut down!).
The flight from LAX went as smoothly as it could. After navigating a painfully long customs line, Brad and I arrived in Cancun and soon met with Pat. Unfortunately it didn't take too long for things to get Mexico-y. We overpaid for a taxi to our car rental place only to find the agreed upon rental rate I reserved was a quarter of the price they were now expecting from us! Then there was an elaborate timeshare breakfast scheme (scam!) to try to reduce our rate. It was all pretty ridiculous but luckily we intelligently bailed and made arrangements at a local car rental place, Easy Way (don't go to Dollar Rent-a-Car!). The car was nothing flash and cheap- exactly what we wanted. Driving in Mexico is often exciting and this stretch of road was no different. We got stopped at a police checkpoint where the "officer" was trying to tell us that we were speeding (we weren't) and that we had to pay an infraction or go to the police station. The officer knew basically no English so we claimed ignorance on our Spanish and held three different confusing English conversations in our car. After about 15 minutes he gave up on extorting money from us and let us go. The rest of the drive was better, but still an unusual place. Near endless billboards for pricey "ecotourism" activities like driving quad bikes through caves or ziplining through "forest" and an endless supply of gaudy and excessive resort entrances with guard stations. And then we entered the thunderstorm. Rain so heavy the highest setting on the windshield wipers couldn't keep up. We arrived at our place and waited out the rain in the car to avoid being instantly soaked. Finally we were safe and sound in our rental condo. My nerves were slightly fried and I was glad to put the first day behind us. What a gauntlet!
Luckily the subsequent days were nothing like the first and overall we had an exceptionally pleasant trip. We stayed at a rented condo inside the private resort community of Puerto Aventuras. It was a weird place- a gated and fenced enclave. A golf course, a marina, manicured landscaping, overpriced shops and restaurants- you could even get a $8 margarita overlooking a dolphin petting zoo...It was a bit much at times but our place was nice and quiet and it was easy to feel safe. Mexico's Little America I liked to think of it.
The expedition was governed by routine (and retornos!). Our days would
start at the Tacos Arbolitos taco stand near the freeway onramp for
cheap tacos and massive $2 smoothies. We'd then drive a few kilometers
along the highway, turn off on the appropriate dirt road, and then the
subtle two-rut road until it deadended. Then came the unpleasant 30-45 minute sweatfest through the jungle, trying best to avoid the poison oak-like plants, trails of ants, tarantulas, snakes, etc. to the start of the Jaguar cave system. Once we pop into the first entrance its a very pleasant stroll through the dry-floored cave. Pleasant ceiling heights, so many entrances you don't really need a light. It would even be possible to mountain bike through this section. "Retirement caving" Brad and I liked to call it. The total commute to our leads varied from 1-2 hours. We would then survey portions of the cave, allowing us enough time to get back to the car by 5 or 6pm. After showering the sweat off (the caves themselves are remarkably clean!), we'd drive out of the Puerto to one of about four regular food spots for cheap and tasty dinners...and often loud music and painful survey data entry. Lather, rinse, repeat.
The first few days I sketched which means I led a survey team of two. Most of the survey assignments were mop up work, basically filling in walls or checking side leads off of more prominent passage that had already been surveyed. Some of these areas were quite beautiful and fun to survey, but these areas felt so trampled and without any feeling of exploration. Plus the late starts (arrive at the trail by 8:30a or later) and long hiking commutes meant we were getting less bang for our buck. Although it meant having one less sketching team on our expedition, Brad and I seemed to be the only like-minded people on the trip (mission: survey lots of excellent virgin cave!), and so started to arrive at the breakfast spot earlier and leave before the rest of the team arrived. The result was many more hours of productivity. With Brad sketching and me manning the DistoX, we could be perhaps three times as efficient as some of the other survey teams. After the third day there was no turning back.
We started mapping in a cave system north of Jaguar called Mystic
Monkey. This required a rougher jungle trail for access (where I
certainly picked up plenty of chechen, i.e. Mexican poison oak), but was
a much less explored cave. We surveyed our way east to try to connect
to Lost Highway, but when that ended we started surveying in bigger
passage, generally trying to head northwest (inland). We soon made the
critical observation that the caves get bigger, better, and wetter as
you head inland. The water table is flat, at sea level. As you head
inland you gain a thicker roof overhead, which is less likely to
collapse and less likely to have sediment filling the passages. We
surveyed our way north through Mystic Monkey where it ended at the first
of two sinkholes. The second sinkhole was particular large (prominently
visible on LiDAR) with no further large collapses past it so we had a
good feeling it could lead us to a great stretch of cave that perhaps
hadn't been trampled. We crossed the first collapse and entered a small
shelter cave that came to be called Missing Link. A two-minute traverse
through this cave led us to another entrance on the edge of the larger
collapse. Brad braved the jungle and explored the collapse, eventually
returning to announce that he found a promising entrance on the far side. It was promising! And led to one of the best weeks of caving either of us have had!
Here was a cave we could demonstrably tell had not been visited by humans since the time of the late classical Mayans, and there was much to explore. Brad and I returned day after day, each day reaching better cave passages than the previous day. Bigger passages, more formations, bigger rooms, and then the real excitement: lots of very wet and heavily decorated passage. We came to call this cave Lavanderia, the laundromat.
The wet passage got really good! Some of the finest cave I have ever been in let alone explored. Beautiful clear and pleasant water, excellent rooms of stalagmites including 5m tall broomsticks, thick snowbanks of calcite rafts. We surveyed wet passage for two whole days including a few places requiring swimming. Scouting ahead I had to do considerable swimming to reach a place the 40 m-wide passage narrowed down to a 2m x 0.5m opening. To my surprise water was actually flowing out of it as a small rifle (flow is very rare in the low gradient Yucatan) and a very strong draft! I excitedly returned to announce that we had reached the point that my packraft would be needed for the survey. Each night we met up with everyone at dinner, said we had a good day (and not too many more details), and read our nearly 1km of survey data to Peter while everyone read more like 100m. It was obvious we had found some good stuff but we couldn't figure out why more people weren't jumping up and down to join us. I guess they were on holiday.
Brad and I recruited cave diver Bill to join us who seemed keen enough. He proved to be a valuable member of the survey team and with the three of us we were able to be reasonably productive despite difficult survey conditions. Brad sketched in the raft- spinning in circles while trying to sketch seemed to be a new and frustrating experience for him! We did well, surveying lots of excellent passage but ended the day somewhat baffled at where the cave continued. It couldn't just end! Not with the water and air flow.
Brad cleverly combined all his sketches back at the condo to try to give us a hint of where our going leads might be. The three of us opted for a very early start, so early in fact the taco stand was not open yet. We made record time on the hiking commute and were at our leads ready to go by the time everyone else was just starting to drive to their caves. We did some mop up survey off of the previous days survey which helped us map out the walls. The passage is so wide and with so many columns and formations that it is often times hard to know when you have really reached a wall or a low place leads to continuing passage.
We worked our way toward the back of the cave trying to look in the
northwest direction. Sure enough right where Brad's sketch indicated we
should look, we found what was obviously the continuation of the main
passage. It was weird that we somehow missed it the previous day, but
now we were excited and knew good things were coming. And good things
did. We entered the biggest room in the cave that was profusely
decorated. Enormous roof collapse blocks littered the lake, many with
tilted stalagmites. It looked like the scene out of some epic naval
battle and earned the obvious name of the Battleship Room. While
surveying across the Battleship Room (on the main northwest trend), Bill
swam out to the east side of the room and disappeared for a few
minutes. He returned with disbelief in his voice to tell us he just
found an enormous underground cenote with dark, bottomless water. We
also had some disbelief but temporarily abandoned our survey to see what
Bill was talking about.
[Frontispiece] Holy crap he was right. It truly was one of the most amazing things I have seen underground. We waded out of the low side passage to emerge at the edge of a chamber more than 100 m across. In front of us the water dropped off perilously into black, bottomless depths. The room belled out into a wide, low dome with stalactites and roots draping down from the ceiling. Catfish lazily circled. Three skylights, two pinholes and one 2m x 1m, pierced the roof letting in gold and green light which turned to indigo blue once engulfed by the water. The sight was incredibly dramatic and incredibly satisfying. I felt pretty sure that this incredible feature probably signified the end of the cave (at least for us, Bill was foaming at the mouth to dive it!) and though that turned out to be true, I was not disappointed. We stopped to have a snack as Brad's head was spinning with the task of trying to survey this enormous room. In the end Brad decided to change the scale of his sketch and I surveyed out splay shots as he worked his way around the perimeter. Bill and I dropped the 85ft parachord line I had from the edge of the abyss- it all went down without hitting bottom! We had just enough time to survey back through to connect into the Battleship Room before it was time to head out.
Sara picked the perfect time to arrive- right after we made a critical discovery! The next day she and her Alpacka joined us. Now four strong, we could split into two groups as needed. We headed straight to the cenote and systematically explored the walls for continuing passages. We found several oxbows but it became quite clear there was no further cave development. The water was coming straight up out of the depths. Bill tested his diveline and came up with 195ft! And that was just at one location so it could possibly be even deeper! Sara and I took photos, which was a challenge with my point-and-shoot and unsynchronized flash, but I managed to get a few decent photos. Bill and Brad did some mop up survey. We eventually caught up with them and helped finish the survey. It was maybe a little sad to see the best week of caving I've had in a long time come to an end but what a fantastic day! And what a first day in Mexico Sara got! Reluctantly we packed up the boats and wetsuits and walked our heavy packs back out the cave.
The next day would be my first day off after 10 days of caving. After a taco breakfast Sara and I drove to Paamul to go snorkeling...or so we thought. The ocean was exceptionally rough and murky. Nevertheless I theaded out. I saw a few fish and some sad looking coral, the came in to check on Sara. We had a mellower rest of the day spending most the time in Puerto and some time in the pool. For Sara's third day we took the packrafts into Jaguar Claw Cave this time to have a look at the wet continuation and sketch in the existing survey. After a few in-cave navigational blunders (and more on the way out), we made it to the back of the mapped cave and suited up. We went a long way (I would know I swam the whole way!) to the back of the known cave, passing a couple interesting entrances and some large collapse areas. It was a great passage, certainly bigger than Lavanderia, but Brad and I were happy to see that our little cave was more beautiful in a lot of ways. It was nice to get another taste of what might be out there, still yet to be found. Another nice day underground.
The last day was to be the tourist day for Sara and I. We drove to Akumal and had a tasty breakfast at the Turtle Bay Cafe and then went snorkeling in the bay where we saw several sea turtle lazily munching away on sea grass. As we turned to head in we saw a beautiful ray and followed it around for a while as well.
We then drove on to Tulum to see the ruins, which while excessively touristy, were still worth seeing. Some interesting architecture and lots of large iguanas. We walked along the beach for a ways and stopped for lunch at a small restaurant right on the beach.
Our last stop of the day was to Zacil Ha cenote. Yaxunah's grand cenote probably spoiled my expectations, but it was a nice enough cenote with a pleasant family atmosphere (cf. tourist atmosphere). We found an interesting side alcove which leads off to a deeper section where cave divers obviously go. We enjoyed the refreshing water temperature and taking photos in the light beams. We had a feast of pizza back at the Puerto for our last meal.
Thankfully the return to the airport and remainder of the travel went smoothly. Though I certainly got beat up, sweat a lot, and at times was covered in chechen, it was a fantastic trip and a great vacation. I'm glad Sara was able to come for the best part of it.
