I left the comforts of Cozumel apartment life and caught the ferry to the mainland in the morning. I met up with Jose, an old Spanish man who was to be my dive master for the cenotes. We picked up two Frenchies, both mid-twenties, Caroline and Fabian. At the first cenote, Dos Ojos, we geared up and got into the fresh water of the cave opening, only to find that Caroline wasn’t such a great diver and probably not experienced enough for this sort of thing. I used my first 500psi of air just waiting for her to descend and equalise. She continued to be a hassle during the dives. She had no control over her buoyancy and kept floating to the top of the cavern. I can imagine for someone with not much experience, being in a seemingly enclosed environment with no access to the surface, could be quite terrifying. She also managed to lose one of the good rental masks and complained bitterly with exaggerated facial gestures about the tanks hurting her sunburned back.
The cenote diving was interesting for the first five minutes. The second five minutes was the same as the first five minutes.
The entire dive was the same as the first five minutes. It was something I’d always wanted to try, but now that I’ve tried it I will never need to try it again. There was barely any aquatic life to see, apart from the odd tiny silver fish. Just stalagmites and stalactites, and if you’ve been in a limestone cave before you will know what the inside of a cave looks like, just fill it with water and there you have it; cenote diving. The coolest thing for me, was the way the exhaled air from our regulators rose and formed pools of quicksilver on the ceiling of the cave. They appeared as perfect mirrors until you touched their surfaces, breaking the illusion, and they would then appear like windows with a view of the roof behind them. There were also several parts of the dive where daylight broke through the cenote ceiling and created a fuzzy rainbow in the water. After the dives it was great not to need to rinse salt off everything.
I headed back to Playa and then caught a bus towards Coba. I had planned to camp somewhere but by the time I got to the small town it was dark; the hotel across the road from the bus stop was more appealing.
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