Diving the Yucatan's Cenotes: Dos Ojos & The Pit

I am excited because today we do our first scuba diving in the Cenotes. We meet at the dive shop before driving the 45min to 1h to our first one ( and fairly famous ): Dos Ojos. 

This means 2 eyes because it’s two cenotes connected by a channel. It’s our first one for its depth, it’s very shallow: no more than 7m deep. First thing that comes to mind when I see the water from outside is how clear and transparent it is. The color is a beautiful turquoise blue.

But underwater? It’s magical. You dive through another world and see here and there through the holes and pools, rays of sunshine going through these incredible colors: you just feel awe. 

It is unique and I have never experience this anywhere diving before. We follow a line, the barbie line, and it takes 45min to complete the circuit bringing us back to our starting point. As an introduction to cenotes diving, it certainly is a great one. 
Our two other dive buddies are Ioen and Juliette and we get along very well. Ioen has bought a brand new Insta360 and his videos are insanely beautiful. 

After our surface interval we drive to the other cenotes of the day called: The pit. It’s our dive guide, Ana, favorite apparently. And it’s a gorgeous cenote. As the name suggests it’s a giant pit and a deep one. It goes down to 35m on the upper parts and tunnels continue to deeper levels to another large cave 90m below. Other caves connect to Dos Ojos and to another Cenotes. For the avid cave divers, the many underground rivers offer endless opportunities. 

In this Cenotes they found fossilized bones of a giant sloth and skulls dating as far as 16,000 B.C. There are pictures of them at the entrance. Ana mentions that thousands of thousands of years ago the water level was 30m lower than today and to find water animals and humans went into the caves. Many didn’t make it back to the surface. When you are cave diving, you can find mammoth bones, old fireplaces and incredible prehistoric remains. That’s why she likes cave diving so much in these Cenotes.

But I enjoyed this dive site for a very different reason. As simple as the geography of it is, at least on the part that is accessible to our level of diving, it has 3 distinct layers. The top layer is fresh water, and at about 12/13 m it becomes salt water. The divide is blurry and you can’t see a lot, like you have very very dirty glasses. And at 30m, there is a cloud of sulfuric water – inside of which, dead trees have dropped from the surface. The result: a surrealist moment where you feel like swimming into a cloud with skeletal trees peeking through at odd moments. A mix of a horror movie, yet all of this in an incredibly clear and turquoise blue water, surrounded by ray of sunlight.  It is amazing.

As we circle our way back to the top at a senator pace – we observe rock formations such as stalagmites and stalactites.  The milk white clouds of the bottom is nice to see from the top. The colors also change as you look from the bottom to the top. When you are in the salty area, the water has a green tint whereas in the fresh water area it’s more turquoise blue.

These two dives were incredible – and I can’t wait for the next two days. I am genuinely blessed to see these amazing dive sites.
As we make our way back to Playa Del Carmen, we agree with our dive buddies to meet for diner in town later in the afternoon. 

The meeting point is in Los Aguachiles – and I quickly checked it’s 7min away. When it’s time to go, Alexis asks the address and shows me. 7min BY CAR ! I was too quick and didn’t look correctly on google maps.

The location is completely opposite town from us and it means that we will walk through the pedestrian streets and center of Playa Del Carmen: the 5th street. 

I don’t know what I expected but not a good km ( if not more ) of super loud bars, restaurants, street entertainers, souvenir shops and anything a super touristic town would have. It’s super busy and a lot of people are here. I don’t even want to think how horrible walking this one up and down must be during high season. Clearly not our kind of place but as you get used to the noise aggression… it’s interesting. As the night settle, all the bar lights are on, and I guess it has its own atmosphere. Yet I still don’t understand why you would want to have a drink or diner in a place with the music so loud that it must be hard to just order.

After crossing the entire length, we found the place and our dive buddies. As the name suggests, the specialty is Agua Chiles. We haven’t yet tried this famous dish. It’s like a ceviche but much spicier. We all order a small version as the plan is to go eat tacos next. This is just starter and it taste really good. Alexis and I ordered the octopus one ( I love octopus ).

Then as intended we continue 10min away to El Fogon, which we have been told by many locals that it’s the best tacos. The chorizo and sirloin were awesome. Our dive guide had recommended the Taco Loco and that’s what Ioen ordered. It’s massive – they put literally every meat on the menu inside and a strip of bacon on top ( just in case there wasn’t already enough meat ). He finds it delicious and valiantly gets through 90% of it. Juliette cleans the rest.

It's not too late, but we are a little tired and have two more dives early tomorrow. We bid them goodbye at this point. They were getting excited about drinking Mescal and going bar hoping and we didn’t feel like it. By the time we are back to our place, a solid 30min walk later, we are exhausted and ready for bed.