Saturday Feb 17: Cenote Diving from Playa Del Carmen

Up early this morning to catch the ferry across to Playa to meet with Edyta and dive the famous Mexican Cenotes. We met our dive master Miguel at the dive shop and he drove us for about an hour out to the Cenotes known as Dos Ojos (two eyes). My first look at the Cenotes was awe inspiring – down a set of rocky stairs and all of a sudden bright blue rock pools open up with stalactites and stalagmites on the floor and roof completely covered with water. There were a number of people snorkelling, but we were able to get into our dive gear and head underwater into the cave systems which are some of the longest in the world. I had some trouble equalising my ears after the cold I’d had, but it didn’t really matter because the water wasn’t much deeper than 5m throughout the dive. The under water world was amazing. There weren’t many fish, but in some areas the way the light played off the stalactites and stalagmites was really amazing. Further in to the caves, there wasn’t much light at all and we had to use torches to find the way, marked out by a rope. Buoyancy in fresh water is also really different, as we needed less weight to keep us down – for some reason, it was much more difficult to take photos in the clear water too, everything turned out fuzzy. Our two dives were equally magical and it’s safe to say that both Edyta and I are now hooked on cenote diving. We had a delicious lunch of fish at the restaurant (and a celebratory beer) before heading back to Playa del Carmen. From here, Edyta and I headed out to a local bar which had the most awesome band, food and vibe, filled with locals enjoying their Saturday afternoon. We had a really strange type of Ceviche to eat – which just had raw fish and a delicious sauce with lots of chili that didn’t hurt as much as I’d expected which was surprising. After a couple of beers it was time to farewell my dive buddy and head back to Cozumel and prepare for some regular diving tomorrow.