Photos from Yucatan expedition

[ethanb]

In early February, I went on an expedition to the Yucatan with Advanced Diver Magazine.  The goal was to find new cenotes and cave systems, do some biology research, and hopefully find some archaeological sites.  Most of the sites involved vertical access, so the trip is a combination of diving, rope-work, and a lot of driving!  We were joined this year by Dr. Tom Iliffe from Texas A&M University, an expert in underwater cave biology, and Dr Guillermo de Anda Alanis (Memo), an archaeologist from the University of the Yucatan in Merida. 

We didn't find as many new sites this year as last year, but working with Memo was extremely educational.  We showed him some of the sites we'd discovered last year and he was very interested in studying them further.  We found several 1000+ year old Mayan Walls and a Sac Be (white road) in caves, as well as some pottery and rock art.  Hopefully some of them will yield some significant discoveries in the future.

I've put my photos online here:


During the trip, I managed to get pulled over by a motorcycle cop for allegedly running a red light and having equipment stacked so high I couldn't see out the back of the jeep ($60 bribe took care of that), parked the Jeep too far off the road and dropped two wheels into the ditch (got stuck because the rental car place had disabled 4WD by removing a linkage - I climbed under the truck and banged on the transfer case with a 4 lb weight to shift it manually), and bought bad gas that required adding two cans of octane booster before we could again use 5th or 6th gear on the highway without knocking.

Ethan

[Tamara Thomsen]

Here are my expedition photos:


My absolute favorite is the one of Ethan on rope, descending into the town well in Kantunil, Yucatan, Mexico.  Every kid in town came running to watch the crazy gringo!

[stevenq99]

WOW! Great pictures. Looks like an excellent adventure.  What ruins were you at in the last pictures?

[ethanb]

They probably thought I was even more crazy when I explained, in broken spanish, that my helmet was to prevent rocks from falling into my mouth!  My vocabulary seems to have lost something in the ten years since high-school Spanish!

Ethan

[Tamara Thomsen]

Something lost in translation there, Ethan...and to think, I already turned in my journal to ADM about how well you were doing with Spanish and in comparison how I was speaking like a kindergartner!

Steve-  
On the last day of the trip, we left Homun early to do a bit of the tourist thing.  We hit the ruins at Coba - depicted in the last photos in our albums.  The Nahoch Mul pyramid is the tallest on the Yucatan Peninsula and the last one open for tourists to climb. There were very few tourists in the park and it was a fantastic view from the top.

The photos of the Mayan stone structures (house) and walls within a cave are at a site called Tixcalcal near Sannahcat- a site that we located on last year's expedition.  The photos of the Sac Be (Mayan hand-cut stone road or white road) are from a site called Ebiiz.  Sac Be's found in caves very closely follow Mayan oral tradition- so this turned out to be a very promissing site for future archaeological study.

Tami

[stevenq99]

Thanks for the information.  We are going to Cozumel in April and are trying to plan a day over on the mainland.