A different kind of diving

Most of the dives I have made before coming here have been in the sea. I like it there: the sun shining through clear, blue water on to brightly coloured coral; fish everywhere; little shrimps that clean your nails (yes, really, even in Scarborough apparently); everything very Finding Nemo. 

Here, it's a bit different. We do have a nice reef stretching out from the beach and the diving there is fun, but the real interest is in the cenotes you find in the jungle that covers most of the Yucatán peninsular right down to the coast.

Cenotes are holes in the Earth's crust where rock has collapsed to reveal an underground water system below. The Yucatán has no above-ground rivers to speak of. Instead, water flows from inland mountains to the sea via a complex and mostly unexplored network of underground channels. Over the years (by which I mean millennia) the roofs of some of these channels have fallen in, forming cenotes. Some are little more than a few centimetres wide but others are the area of a big village pond or more. The Mayans believe(d) these holes give access to the afterlife and many sacred Mayan sites are built near them. It's estimated there are probably something like 6,000 of these holes into the world beyond/below in the Yucatán jungle, but only about 2,400 have been mapped.

There are many things that appeal about cenote diving. Most cenotes are in great settings – pools of azure-blue water surrounded by the lush green of the jungle; wildlife everywhere; and the feeling of being a long way from the manmade world (though, as they are on private land, they do tend to have a ticket booth and breeze-block "toilets"). The water itself is silky smooth and totally clear, as it really hasn't done anything more than filter through miles of limestone rock. And they form entrances to a mysterious system of underwater caves and channels that stretches across the whole of the peninsular.

Before anyone gets concerned, what I am not doing here is proper cave diving. Cave diving is dark, scary and difficult, the underwater equivalent of potholing, and I have no desire to squeeze myself through some tiny rock hole in the pitch black 20 metres underwater. (And, even if I wanted to, I'm not qualified to do that. It takes a lot of very serious training.) Instead, in a normal cenote dive, you go down and through spacious rock channels that lead either back on themselves or to another cenote maybe 50 metres away.

Divers can go down, along and up into another cenote. Cave
divers will go for the scarier bit further down. It's usually much more
gentle than these brutal verticals and horizontals suggest

And you see some amazing things. These caves were not always underwater and many of them are chock-full of stalactites and stalagmites, like beautiful underwater cathedrals. In a dive four of us did this morning, at a cenote called Tajma Ha, we came across a group of stalagmites neatly piled up by Mayans when the water level was lower, perhaps for taking to another site – you see stalagmites used as decoration in the Mayan ruins. In another, you can see a circle of black on the rock floor, now deep underwater, where, when the caves were dry, someone lit a fire.

But, for me, the best moment is when you approach another cenote. There, above you in the distance, is an block of vivid blue where the sun is shining through the water from the world outside, and silhouetted against it are plants and tree roots and, often, the skinny white legs of snorkelers as they paddle around the pool above. 

At Tajma Ha, if the conditions are good, you can also see what is called a halocline, where fresh water from the mountains floats above the heavier salt water from the sea. The two don't mix and the border between them forms a wavy mirror that seems to hover in front of you. It's a magical thing to see.

Back in the real world, I am beginning to appreciate how much work I have to do to become a divemaster. I have added a list to the sidebar on the right of the page and I'll put a little tick when I have done each stage. Wish me luck.

Arrival

Greetings from Mexico. It's taken a while to start this blog. What I thought would be a quick entry into Yucatan life became a long and sometimes frustrating hunt for somewhere decent to live. I planned on using my first three days here to find an apartment but it took me ten, and during that time I saw some really terrible places, for outrageous sums, and met at least one dodgy dealer (an American expat whose reputation I now know better). But last Friday, I moved into a nice studio, a couple of blocks off Tulum's main street, with two double beds, a little kitchen, a nice bathroom and a balcony. And downstairs there's a space for my bicycle.

I'm here to learn to be a PADI scuba divemaster. Ever since Pedro introduced me to scuba diving in Thailand in 2002, I have been intrigued by the way we can take ourselves down underwater, an achievement as amazing as flying and one of the very few times on Earth you can feel genuinely weightless. Last year, when I was working on The Wired World in 2013, Richard Branson wrote us a piece on how 2013 will be the year of the ocean and it made me realise how little I know about what goes on below the waves.

As well as getting the chance to do a lot of diving, I'm liking the fact the most of what I do here is physical. I'm interning in a dive shop and, shockingly for someone whose work usually involves little more than typing, that means assembling, carrying, loading and unloading a lot of heavy equipment. As anyone who has been scuba diving knows, those tanks weigh a tonne (well, 17kg actually, or 20kg when they are full of air – I have just looked this up in my How To Be A Divemaster book). And here you get to combine that with sun and sea air, which is just lovely.

There are plenty of places in the world to dive and plenty to learn how to be a divemaster. I chose Tulum because, when Charles, Neil and I came here on holiday last November, I did a lot of diving with an Argentinian instructor called Pablo Perotti, who turned out to be a great teacher. I had lost my scuba confidence in Egypt in 2008 in a series of badly managed and scary dives and, when we arrived in Tulum, I hadn't dived for four years and had no real desire to. I told Pablo this and he immediately understood, contained me (to use a psychological word) and helped me get back in the water and build up my confidence again. We went on seven dives together and I knew then I would like to learn more from him.

Pablo's company – which comprises him, another instructor called Tullio, from Milan (there are lots of Italians, Argentinians and Italian-Argentinians here), and Sarah, from the UK – is based in a resort called Papaya Playa, which has a nice hippy/Ibiza vibe, though, like Ibiza, and in fact like most of Tulum, it's not cheap. From the little wooden hut that functions as the office, storeroom, admin department and place to keep your beach clothes, we look out over palm trees and white sand to the beautifully blue Caribbean sea. Today it is a little windy – and we have had some rainy days – but even when the weather isn't calm the place is eye-catching. Here's a picture I took just now.

I came to be taught by Pablo but, in fact, now I am back, I have two good teachers. In his mid-30s, Tullio manages to combine laid-back beachiness and an ultra-professional attitude towards diving and teaching, which I'm impressed by (and trying to imitate). We have been working together for a week now and I have been diving with him and Pablo almost every day.

Learning to be a divemaster is a full-time activity (I'll write more about it later) and when I signed up to do it, I didn't really think through what it would in entail. If/when I qualify I will be able to take people out on dives myself and that's obviously a big responsibility. Scuba diving is pretty safe (as in London, you are at much greater risk here cycling down the street, and Tulum's streets are a lot safer than London's). But no one wants to have the kind of experience I had in Egypt and that is very much up to the divemaster. I guess I realised the magnitude of the leap I am attempting when I was given a new folder for my diving logbook which, on the outside, says PADI PRO.

I'm a bit tired – the house hunting annoyed me after a while – but obviously I'm happy I am here, and in fact the course has already turned out to be the kind of challenge – stretching, rewarding, surprising – that at The School of Life we try to encourage others to build in to their lives. I like my new place and I am excited about what lies ahead. And, of course, it's lovely being in the sun.