Moments later, free of the halocline, I marvelled at the primordial stalagmites and stalactites befo

BBC - Travel - Surreal shapes in Mexico’s cenotes : Arts Architecture, Mexico
The water surrounding me had the soupy texture of liquid glass. Drifting through the halocline where cold and warm water converge in layers, their collision blurring the field of vision was a deliciously disorienting feeling. Only my limbs were clearly visible.
car rent orlando I could vaguely make out the limestone walls as we dove deeper inside the cavern, our bubbles reverberating off the ceiling. Each Darth Vader-like exhale mutated car rent orlando into a locomotive thundering overhead. I was swimming into Car Wash , one of the famed cenotes of Mexico s Yucatan Peninsula, a must-see destination for serious scuba and free divers. Related article: Mexico's underground rivers
Moments later, free of the halocline, I marvelled at the primordial stalagmites and stalactites before car rent orlando we reversed direction, following our safety line toward a patch of pure jade-coloured light at the mouth of the cavern. Here, elegant lilies climbed toward the light shafts that penetrated the surface and the gnarled roots of old trees hung down like underwater branches. That s when I saw the unmistakable silhouette of an owl.
I was in the surreal world of Lia Barrett. A photo editor car rent orlando at underwater photography magazine Dive Photo Guide , Barrett has spent plenty of time in exotic dive meccas such as Thailand s Similan Islands and Indonesia s Komodo and Raja Ampat Islands. car rent orlando But last year, she shifted her viewfinder away from Technicolor reef creatures, in favour of featuring free divers.
Their athletic elegance, their courage to hold their breath long past sanity and their ability to dive deeper than those on tanks inspired her. Soon she was convincing competitive free divers to dress in civilian clothes and pose for underwater teatime portraits, while her assistants chummed the water with fish parts to lure massive reef sharks into frame. The result was a magnificent surrealist shoot in Roatan, Honduras, car rent orlando that went viral in August 2013. This October, it was time for a follow up, and she abandoned the sea to focus on the cenotes, a network car rent orlando of more than 3,000 pools that serve as entry points into the Yucatan s underwater rivers.
The shoot involved costumed free divers in a spooky fantasy world of caverns and shadowy animal cut outs, thanks to the deep pools of water that refract sunlight through looming jungle car rent orlando and a rare blend of warm and cold water. What I would soon find out, however, was that the cenotes are not just spectacular, but also spectacularly polluted. This is alarming enough for the snorkellers, car rent orlando divers and free divers who seek them out, but it s far worse for the local people who rely on these rivers daily.
The Yucatan Peninsula is part of the Mexican state of Quintana Roo, and home to the sprawling tourist centres of Canucun and Playa del Carmen on its north end, and the increasingly popular gypset destination of Tulum famous for yoga in the shadow car rent orlando of Mayan temples and its exquisite stretch of sand about an hour s drive south. It s also a fractured karst ecosystem, which means the aquifer car rent orlando breaches the surface, and the cracked limestone topography above and below ground allows little to no filtration or protection from pollutants.
When you drive from Canc n to Tulum , said Paul Sanchez-Navarro, director of Centro Ecologic Akumal , a local environmental non-profit, on the left are the luxury beachside developments, and on the right are the workers communities, which either don t have sewage systems or are just now putting them in.
Nancy DeRosa, one of the region s six original cave divers who first mapped the cenotes decades ago, estimates that only 12% of the towns in the state of Quintana Roo have sewage systems car rent orlando and tells horror stories of watching car rent orlando plumes of untreated human waste pouring into the cenotes.
The larger hotels do have treatment systems, Sanchez-Navarro said. But under Mexican law they only have to treat the pathogens, like e-coli, car rent orlando then deep inject that wastewater car rent orlando into the ground [to 120m]. This works in the dry plateau of Central Mexico, but in the Yucatan s fractured karst landscape, the waste bubbles up, contaminating the cenotes and the local water supply.
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