Cenote Carwash

Kit up at a table, walk a few metres and giant stride off a wooden deck. Two ladders bring you out again, the car is parked within sight of the water, and for the first ten minutes you are in a garden. Four to six metres of water, lily pads overhead, roots and branches standing in it, small fish working between the stems, freshwater turtles. Some days a small crocodile on the far side of the pool.

Then you swim west towards a fallen tree and the open water ends. Trunks and roots make a barrier across the cavern mouth, and behind it the space opens into big rooms with chestnut coloured columns and walls stained close to black by tannin. Daylight stays in sight the whole way. A thin layer of sediment lies on the floor and the passage is wide enough to stay well above it.

One permanent line runs upstream from the entrance and it is the route almost every group dives. It drops out of sight to about 15 m under shallow fallen trees. A downstream side exists and a few centres offer it. Anyone doing only Car Wash in a day swims the same line twice.

The line ends at a stop sign, which marks the limit of the cavern and the start of the cave proper. Behind it the main cave line runs about 150 ft upstream to Cenote Zacil Ha, also called Luke's Hope, and on to named rooms such as the Room of Tears. That is cave diving, for full cave divers, and the recreational dive turns at the sign. Facing the other way is the view people remember: trunks in silhouette against a bright opening, light coming down through the roots. The safety stop is spent back among the lily pads watching the fish. Forty to fifty minutes in all, and the shallow half is the half people describe afterwards.

For months of the year this pool wears a green lid, and the dive begins by dropping through it: two or three metres of opaque water, then clear. From inside the cavern looking out it tints the whole cenote, so the same deck gives a different dive from one month to the next. A cave school puts the green between late March and late October, and heavy rain can move it within hours, so the weather matters more than the calendar.

The cave behind the pond has a survey of its own. The cave is its own surveyed system, Sistema Carwash, separate from Sac Actun: 3,232 m of passage, 26.5 m at its deepest and three cenotes linked together.1 The recreational dive sees only the opening stretch of it.

The cavern itself is short, has one line and is where cave courses on this coast do their line work, which has worn it. It suits photographers better than divers after a long stretch under a ceiling. The draw is the garden, the shot looking back out and the history under the pond.

Operators tell of Tulum taxi drivers washing their cars in the cenote, and they did. The published history of how the caves of this area were explored puts foreign campers there first, using the pool through the mid 1970s for washing their vehicles, diving and bathing, with the taxi drivers arriving afterwards to have their cars washed there too.2

The same account tells the 1982 story. In 1982 a group of open water divers from California, kept off the sea by wind, swam in a pond beside the road and found an enormous opening in one side of it. They went a few feet in, remembered what they had read about the caves of Florida, and got out. The next day they came back with two hundred and fifty feet of ski rope, and that was the first line laid in this cave.2 The US Deep Caving Team had dived the same pool in the very early 1980s and declared there was no cave there.

Exploration proper followed under a group. Jim Coke, Tom Young, Johanna DeGroot, Parker Turner and Mike Madden are the names that recur, and who went first is not settled. The published account puts Car Wash among the systems that group worked, ahead of Naharon, Temple of Doom, Mayan Blue and Sac Actun.2 The survey that stands today came much later, from Phillips, Spangberg and Olsson in September 2016.1

Check which cenotes your morning includes before you match your card. Car Wash alone asks for Open Water, and the pairing with Angelita is advertised at Advanced Open Water or equivalent.

Guided dives are the norm here. Guides need a licence from the cenote's owners to lead at Car Wash, and the owners enforce it at their own gate. The gate is also where you pay: 300 pesos per diver, for this cenote only, with a camera charged on top by size.

The small crocodile lives in the open pool, where you kit up, enter and hang the safety stop. Give it a clear route away from you and keep the camera on the cavern.

Expect company. You kit up in a public swimming cenote with a café, lifeguards and a jumping platform, and cave students are on the line most days of the week. Sunscreen, cosmetics and insect repellent are banned at the gate, and mosquitoes are why people reach for them, so get into the wetsuit before you leave the car. Snorkels, knives, gloves and surface markers stay out of the cavern.