The entrance to Kukulkan cenote, Chac MoolĬenotes in Mexico can be busy places with lots of divers, so there's an element of crowding that the guides obviously want to avoid, but rushing a total novice and a diver with a phobia is going to end badly. 'Come on, jump in,' he shouted, while we flapped about on the side, trying to make sure we hadn't forgotten anything vital. We struggled into our suits in the heat and waddled down to the entrance with our tanks on our backs, and there was Dario, trying to rush us into the pool. Here, in the shade of the forest, he talked us through the two dives we'd do and showed us the dark and menacing-looking cenote entrances – one called Kukulkan and the other called the Little Brother – before taking off his groovy yellow aviator sunglasses, stripping to the waist, sucking in his chest like Val Kilmer in that famously homoerotic locker room scene in Top Gun, pulling on his wetsuit, and jumping into the cenote entrance, which at this point was little more than a rock pool. Dario, a middle-aged Italian man who thought (and probably wished) he was a lot younger and more handsome than he actually was, drove us out to the Chac Mool cenote, on the way south to Tulum. The first dive didn't go well, it must be said. The entrance to the Little Brother cenote, Chac Mool As a team, we couldn't have been less suited to cenote diving. It turns out that cenote diving needs you to be in control of your buoyancy – one of those skills in scuba that takes time to learn, much like stability on a bike – and it also consists of a lot of enclosed, dark water and, um, cavernous spaces. And second, I'm deeply phobic about dark water, I get claustrophobia, and I hate large cavernous spaces, like aircraft hangers. First, this was Peta's first real dive following her course sure, as part of the PADI Open Water course you have to do four dives in open water (in her case, the sea), but these are part of the course rather than independent dives, so this was Peta's very first dive as a qualified scuba diver. Dive One: Kukulkan All smiles after our second cenote dive So we signed up with Dive Mex, the people who'd taught Peta to dive, and rolled up the next day to meet our guide, Dario, and another paying customer, an affable American from Oregon called Roger, who'd been diving since the 1970s. The most accessible cenotes aren't quite so mysterious, and every dive operator in the area promotes cenote diving alongside the more traditional reef dives off the island of Cozumel, so when we turned up in Playa, fresh from the five-hour bus ride from Mérida, and found we couldn't get space on a Cozumel dive for a couple of days, we figured we'd try a cenote dive in the meantime. Being made of limestone, this part of the Yucatán is riddled with underground lakes and rivers formed by rainwater seeping through the ground, and this porous geology has created a collection of some 6000 cenotes, surrounded by forest and connected to each other by endless miles of flooded caves and river systems, most of which is still unexplored.
A cenote (pronounced 'seh-no-tay', from the Mayan for 'water-filled cavern') is a flooded limestone sinkhole that's formed when the roof collapses on an underground river. So the thought of coming back from Mérida to Playa del Carmen to go scuba diving in a cenote wasn't exactly top of my list, but cenote diving is one of the unique experiences of this part of Mexico, and it would be silly not to at least try it. It didn't end well I don't tend to relax when screaming. Peta once brought along a selection of scented candles on a skiing holiday so we could have some nice, romantic candlelit baths after a hard day on the slopes. I kid you not if I'm in the bath and someone turns the light out, I completely freak – that's a phobia, no doubt about it. I've long had a phobia about murky depths, and a phobia it most definitely is, because it even affects me in the bath. 'Ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod, DARK WATER! ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod, NOOO!' is how it normally goes when I'm faced with my nemesis. Mexico: Cenote Diving Five Day Rule Diving in Cozumel
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