Nohoch Na Chich

When I posted about Dos Ojos I shouldn't have used all those superlatives. Wasted too many "can't be beaten" when in fact it could. And what lies beyond the unpossessing entrance to Nohoch Na Chich ( Maya for Giant Bird Cage) you see above, is proof of that.

What a ride! A 2hour+ dive thru a magical kingdom. And we could see but a fraction. A tiny fraction.

The formations are out of "alice in wonderland". In places you face a forest of columns all the way to where the eye can see. In other places the light shines and shines and you can barely make up in the distance, large columns or the entrance to yet another tunnel. Still, in other places, you see nothing at all, so big are the galleries and wide the tunnels.

Luckily I managed to get the most of my modest photo equipment, and thus, being worth more than a 1000 words, here you go:










Many places like the two immediately above, can't but recall imagery of haunted places inhabited by strange creatures...



...and how improbable is such a column? By the way, it's 18,000 years old. That's how long it has been since the last ice age, when these caves were above water.




Even amongst all this beauty and wide open inner spaces, one cannot be too careful. The closeness of different lines is all but a reminder. You snap a pic, become distracted, and when you look you don't know which line you were on...


Below, Bernie, my buddy, a few meters back, 1 hour into the dive...




And before concluding this blog, or more precisely, suspending it until my next cave dive expedition, here goes a picture of the author amateurelishy silting up (see the backscatter?) his surroundings trying to stay level off the floor while doing a tie in to jump to another line... Note the personal round cookie I had just put on the line, cancelling the permanent directional arrow pointing to the opposite direction of our exit.