22/09/2022
journal extract: cenotes and scooters in valladolid
19/08/2022
The first step of our day was to hire a pair of scooters.
Having never driven a scooter before, I was quite nervous. After repeating in my head the rental man’s instructions for what seemed like the hundredth time, I booted the kick stand, turned the key, squeezed the brake while pressing the start button, and the engine came to life.
As I revved the throttle, while still squeezing the brake, I felt the power of the machine beneath me, and my heart was in my throat. We were parked on a busy street in Valladolid, which functions on a one-way system, despite there being no signs to indicate the direction of traffic. We should discern this ‘by looking at which way the cars are going’, the rental man confidently instructed us.
I finally plucked up the courage to ease my fingers off the brake, while tentatively revving the throttle. The bike jumped forwards and I walked with it a few steps, before sensing its balance and momentum, checking my mirrors, and lifting my feet off the floor. Once going, I felt a grin begin to spread across my face, and the wind lift my hair into the air.
I knew I was going to like this.
First, our friend Leah navigated us out of town, but we quickly ended up in a literal garbage dump, with lagoons of filthy water peppering the road every three metres or so, making the way practically impossible. A man working at the dump cheerfully waved us forwards into the miscellaneous debris, but having been on the bike for no more than fifteen minutes, I was shitting myself. I followed Amy through the first lake, revving so as to not lose balance, despite my instinct to go as slowly as possible. I tried not to look down. It was one thing to fall off a bike, it was another to fall off and land amongst the swamp of rubbish and dead things that swam beneath us.
We made it out on the other side, and faced the rest of the road. After conquering several of the lakes I was beginning to build confidence, but
watching Amy’s wheels disappear under the deepest lake yet, I was glad I had opted for the less sexy, but certifiably more powerful, black, all-terrain scooter, rather than Amy’s shiny red Vespa.
We escaped the garbage heap and were on track to our first cenote. Cenote Oxmán was a vast, deep cave, into which a circle of light illuminated a pool of luminescent blue water. Dark shapes hovered just beneath the surface, which we came to identify as friendly fish that swam alongside you. Huge vines trailed from the top of the cave into the water, which reflected dappled sunlight onto the cave walls and lit the leaves so that they glowed a vibrant green.
We swam and jumped into the refreshing water, but the literal un-known depths frightened me a little.
A cenote is a natural pit, or sinkhole, resulting from the collapse of limestone bedrock, exposing groundwater.
Perhaps due to the lack of lakes and rivers in the Yucutan peninsula, cenotes attained a religious status for the Mayan people. They believed the cenotes were portals to the underworld, where the veil between the living and the dead was thin. Andrew Evans, in his National Geographic article, phrases the Mayan relationship with the underworld expertly;
“For the ancient Maya, water was life—it was cleansing and brought life to crops and whole cities. At the same time, water was death—the cenote was a place of sacrifice and a window to the underworld. Life was pulled up from the well and death was pushed back down into it to ensure the cycle continued.”
After spending an hour or so at the cenote, we hopped on the bikes and made our next stop at Cenote X’canché, which had a similar feel to Oxman, but was broader and boasted small zipline that took you across the diameter of the opening. We admired the long vines, wooden walkways, clear blue water, and a small waterfall. Outside the cenote, we chilled in hammocks and ate leftover fajitas.
Once again, we fired up the bikes, and took the backroads through a number of authentic villages, where a few of young local boys flagged us down. One sprinted ahead, and another hopped onto his friend’s push-bike to keep up with us.
‘Cenote! Cenote!’, they shouted, and waved us to follow them.
We passed several signs to a cenote I regretfully can’t remember the name of, and the boys continued to ‘direct’ us to the remarkably well-sign posted car park. Once there, they each held out a palm and grinned at us hopefully, and we willingly gave them our coins and thanked them for their help.
This cenote had none of the tourists of those previous to it, and as a lady led us down the impossibly steep, slippery, stone steps into a nearly pitch-dark cave, I gripped the rope handrail tightly. I realised the only sunlight came from a single hole, about a metre across, in the ceiling of the cave. Below the hole was a large sheet of cardboard covered in tin-foil, which served to reflect the light around the cave. Stalagmites poured from the ceiling, frozen in place, seeming to defy gravity. The water was much colder than the other cenotes, and as dark as midnight, apart from in the single spotlight shining from the ceiling, where it was illuminated a brilliant turquoise.
In order to get to the only visible section of water, it was necessary to swim through the inky blackness of the cave, which I had managed to convince myself resembled a combination of the lake in the Lord of the Rings where the tentacled monster lives, and the cave where Dumbledore drinks the horrible potion in Harry Potter. I was shitting myself, but Amy helped me swim out to a stone column protruding from the water in the patch of light. We chatted with a Dutch couple – the only two other people there. It was breath-taking, if terrifying. The cool water also helped to ease my increasingly evident sunburn, which I am thankful to say was the only damage I suffered from my first experience on a motorcycle.
Image credit: History’s Histories
Image credit: Tripadvisor
The journey back to the hostel hammered home the realisation that I had a dangerous fondness of the scooter. I was even considering the likelihood of being able to convince my parents of the benefits of riding a motorbike back home, in Bristol. Despite y optimism, I think it’s safe to say that they’d sooner see my little black scooter at the bottom of the deepest cenote in Mexico, preferably with me no longer attached to it.
Thank you for reading about my adventures in Valladolid; I hope it inspires you to visit the Yucatan peninsula and explore this gem of a city! For more about my travels see the rest of my blog posts here. Thanks again and until next time, stay groovy :)
