Going underground
OK we should probably catch up first, before heading underground. I’m in Playa del Carmen on the Mexican Yucatán Peninsula. I’m here for two weeks to go to a Spanish school.

This morning while out on a shopping expedition I found out that my school won’t start until Tuesday. Tomorrow is Mexico’s Constitution Day, or at least it’s the public holiday for the day. That allowed me to give my Spanish a run while trying to change the bus tickets I’d arranged for Wednesday – the day I’d assumed would be a public holiday. I did lots of Spanish but failed to sort out the tickets. I’m getting the impression Mexican bureaucracy is a thing.
Anyway that brings us to this afternoon and a tour I’d booked a while back. This part of Mexico is riddled with underground rivers which have eroded their way through the underlying limestone. In many places these caves have collapsed to form spectacular sinkholes known as cenotes. In fact ‘cenote’ is any underground reservoir of water, and so the sinkholes marketed as cenotes aren’t really centotes at all as they are not underground as such. But I digress.
The first part of my tour was on an electric bike. I had been looking forward to some exercise but my bike stretched the defining line between bicycle and motorcycle. In fact the guide instructed me not to peddle, so there you go. Now the little bike shop that offered the tour had mucked up, they weren’t supposed to offer it on a Sunday. I was the only actual paying person on the tour; but as they had taken the booking they offered other places to their friends. This turned out wonderfully for me as I got to speak a lot of Spanish.
So we rode, or motored, through Playa del Carmen. First through the busy downtown, then through a poor area, then into a rich section and finally into the ‘mayan’ squatter camps on the edge of the jungle. With abrupt suddenness we were in the jungle proper riding along dirt tracks for about an hour. Finally we walked the remaining stretch to our cave entrance.

The cave was just an unimpressive crack in the ground. But as we descended we were surrounded by stalactites glittering gold in the glow of our torches. Then we were wading and swimming with the pale white flakes of calcium beneath us reflecting our lights through perfectly clear water. The caves grew larger and surprisingly deep, we spent some time diving down in the final one. Then we sat and turned off the torches, sat in the profound dark with the only accompaniment the occasional musical plop of water dripping off the end of a stalactite. It was all quite magical.

We retraced our steps – at some speed this time as the guide was now convinced that I wasn’t going to fall and the 12-year-old who did come off several times was safely riding double. Finally I got a lovely local thing that was much like an enchilada, but wasn’t an enchilada. The fact that Roberto, the guide, ordered it meant that I don’t know its name but I do know that it was very local and very tasty. I feel like I’m starting to get a sense of the place, but am especially rating the cave swim as a special experience.

The cave looks amazing, what an experience