Cave, Technical and Dual CCR diving training and guided cenote diving in the Riviera Maya, Mexico, with IANTD and IDF Instructor Trainer Alexander Vronsky. GBM, S7, JJ, Fathom and SF2 rebreathers. Playa del Carmen
Nicte Ha Cenote is another stunning cenote in the pleiad of the Dos Ojos cave system cenotes. The entrance to this famous cenote is approximately 48 km south of Playa del Carmen. A 1 km dirt road leads from the highway to the cenote and parking.
The name โNicte Haโ means โwater flower.โ It originated from the nice lily flowers growing inside the cenote's open water. Behind the name, a love story marred by tragedy explains the existence of a beautiful white flower in the cenote.
Nicte Ha Cenote is part of the Dos Ojos cave system of the same name. Connected system Sistema Sac Actun-Nohoch-Dos Ojos today is the world’s second-largest underwater cave system, 376,7 km (234 miles) of underwater lines, with a maximum depth of 119.18 mts (391 ft). Dos Ojos section is an anchialine cave system connecting to naturally intruding marine water and tidal influence in the cenotes. This cave system’s coastal discharge point(s) has not yet been humanly explored through to the ocean. Large volumes of groundwater were demonstrated by dye tracing to flow towards Caleta Xel-Ha, a nearby coastal bedrock lagoon.
Known for its shallow dives, Nicte HaCenote offers cave divers plenty of time to enjoy the beautifully decorated system.
Nicte Ha Cavern line map
A cavern line is available for recreational divers to enjoy beautiful speleothems around the cenote entrance in the cavern zone.
Nicte Ha Cenote underwater view
The owners remodeled the cenote entrance in 2013. They removed the old deck and palapa, enlarged the cenote’s open water area, and installed safe, easy-to-enter stone steps. Afterward, it was offered for swimmers and snorkelers to enjoy.
Dos Palmas, Mott Mott, and Nicte Ha Cenotes cave lines map
Upstream and Downstream lines
Cave divers can explore two permanent cave lines from the Nicte Ha Cenote cavern line. Accordingly, an upstream line toward Dos Palmas on the North and a downstream line toward Motz Say Ha and Monolito cenotes on the South. Besides that, there is one more short sidemount passage near the upstream main line.
The Nicte HaCenote cave lines suit beginners who are Intro to Cave (GUE Cave 1) divers who want to grow their experience before continuing to the Full Cave (GUE Cave 2) pass. Undoubtedly, you should install the main reel from the open water area to comply with Intro to Cave (GUE Cave 1) rules.
Nicte Ha Cenote location map
The first explorers were Chuck Stevens and Robbie Osman. Additional explorers include Steve Gerrard, Hilario Hiler, Dan Lins, Buddy Quattlebaum, Gary, and Key Walten. It was recently explored and resurveyed by Zack Bloom, Alex Fraser, Rory O’Keefe, Alessandro Reato, Severan Regehr, and Nicholas White.
Dos Palmas Cenote is one of the most stunning cenotes in the Dos Ojos cave system. The entrance to this famous cenote is located approximately 48 km south of Playa del Carmen. A 2.5 km dirt road leads from the highway to the cenote and parking.
The name โDos Palmasโ means โtwo palm treesโ. It originated for the two palmas growing near cenote entrance. Few years ago one plam tree was died.
Dos Palmas Cenote is part of the Dos Ojos cave system of the same name. Connected system Sistema Sac Actun-Nohoch-Dos Ojos today is the world’s second-largest underwater cave system, 376,7 km (234 miles) of underwater lines, with a maximum depth of 119.18 mts (391 ft). Dos Ojos section is an anchialine cave system connecting to naturally intruding marine water and tidal influence in the cenotes. This cave system’s coastal discharge point(s) has not yet been humanly explored through to the ocean. Large volumes of groundwater were demonstrated by dye tracing to flow towards Caleta Xel-Ha, a nearby coastal bedrock lagoon.
Known for its shallow dives, Dos Palmas offers cave divers plenty of time to enjoy the beautifully decorated system. Four permanent lines can be explored directly from the Dos Palmas entrance platform. The most visited are the upstream and downstream lines. Dos Palmas cave lines suit beginners Intro to Cave (GUE Cave 1) divers who want to grow their experience before continuing to the Full Cave (GUE Cave 2) pass.
For your convenience, an equipment table is available where you can park next to the wood deck in the cenote. Walk down a flight of seventeen steps. There is a wooden deck platform with steps provided. Youโll also find bathroom facilities located behind the restaurant.
Dos Palmas, Mott Mott, and Nicte Ha Cenotes cave lines map
Upstream and Downstream lines
The maximum depth of this cenote area is 34 ft (10.4 m). It is a 3,500 ft (1,067 m) swim upstream (against flow) to Cenote Dos Ojos or a twenty-eight-minute swim downstream to Cenote Nicte Ha (High Voltage).
Dos Palmas Cenote location map
The first explorers were Steve Gerrard, Mark Grant, George Irvine, and Bill Mee in September 1992. Other explorers were Gary Walten, and others were unknown.
This Dos Ojos exploration story is a retelling, not a reprint. It follows one chapter of Steve Gerrard’s 2016 edition of The Cenotes of the Riviera Maya. The dates, distances, and names are his. The wording is ours, so read the book for the full first-hand account.
Dos Ojos exploration: the first years
Jim Coke and Johanna DeGroot found Sistema Dos Ojos in 1986 and ran the first dives. Their only way in was a 1954 Willys jeep, until the jeep died in 1988. After that, the cave sat untouched until 1992. As of June 2015, the system stood at just over 83 km (273,294 ft) with more than thirty cenotes.
The name means two eyes in Spanish. The cave lay under the land of the Ejido Jacinto Pat. Buddy Quattlebaum, a newcomer at the time, saw what it could become. However, the ejido was an old communal form of land ownership. More than 180 Maya families owned the 8,400 hectares together, and each family worked its own parcel. Some sections stayed in general use under the ejido’s control.
Quattlebaum and his business partner Marco Rotzinger ran a dive operation. They saw income for the ejido in snorkel and cavern tours at the two Dos Ojos cenotes, east and west. So the ejido agreed to improve a bulldozed trail for vehicles, and that trail reopened the cave to divers.
Nobody ran the Dos Ojos exploration as a project in those years. Individuals and small teams added line here and pushed a lead there. Slowly but steadily the cave grew in pieces. In one four-month stretch in 1994, it passed Nohoch Nah Chich by 3,636 m (12,000 ft). Nohoch answered with its annual expeditions and stayed ahead. Meanwhile, the two systems were creeping toward each other, and at first nobody noticed.
The 1996 project and its aftermath
Size, money, and logistics slowly wore down the volunteers. Then a technical diving magazine framed Dos Ojos and Nohoch as rivals. To restart the Dos Ojos exploration and to draw attention to the ejido, the explorers set up a formal project. It ran through the first half of 1996 with a two-week grand finale. Gerrard, Jill Heinerth and Buddy Quattlebaum directed it.
The finale brought together sixty cave divers and support personnel. In total, the project surveyed 21,749 m (71,772 ft) of passage. Of that, 14,190 m (46,827 ft) came during the two-week finale. Nobody got hurt, and nothing went wrong. Gerrard calls that remarkable, because the logistics for sixty divers were anything but simple.
The press reaction, however, cut the other way. Some diving journalists described the project as a threat to the cave rather than an effort to map it. Many explorers took that badly; the group lost its cohesion, and interest in pushing Dos Ojos dropped to nothing. Today the Dos Ojos exploration is open to any qualified cave diver. The only request is to submit your survey data to the Ejido Jacinto Pat and to the QRSS.
Dos Palmas, 1991
In 1991, Hilario Hiler of Akumal found a cenote roughly halfway toward Dos Ojos, near the bulldozed trail. Two palm trees stood in it, so he named it Dos Palmas. Hiler knew that Gerrard had run small exploration trips before and wanted a new hole to jump into. This was it.
Gerrard still lived in Florida then. Since October 1986 he had run week-long trips for cave divers out of Villas DeRosa. That week his group came to explore, not to tour. With him were Mike Cameron of Toledo, Mark Grant of San Jose and Jim Mellon of Kansas City. Bill Mee and George Irving III of Boca Raton were also there. They had hired Hilario for the week to find and explore new cenotes.
They loaded, or rather overloaded, a DeRosa Dodge van with twelve sets of double 80s. Somehow the van still made it to the new power lines. From there hired porters carried the gear the last 300 m (984 ft) to the cenote. The Maya built a sturdy ladder, and everything went down into the water. Two days of the week remained. The earlier days had gone to a cenote on Don Camilo’s land near Toucha Ha. That one proved a dead end.
At Dos Palmas, they pushed upstream for more than 548 m (1,800 ft). Downstream they added at least 366 m (1,200 ft). Unbeknownst to them, they had opened the River Ride branch of the Dos Ojos exploration.
High Voltage and the first connections
At the same time, Buddy Quattlebaum was pushing from a cenote further upstream. Hilario had named it High Voltage after the power lines and the tower next to it. Buddy connected into the downstream line that Gerrard and Jim Mellon had laid. Two connections, and the Dos Ojos exploration gained much more cave to dive and explore.
A note from the book: by 2016 Cenote Dos Palmas was in private hands. The owners had paved the basin with flat stone and built good steps. Meanwhile, one of the two landmark palms had died.
The connection dive, spring 1992
In spring 1992, Gerrard came back with another group: Steve and Marianne Gamble of Gainesville, and Mike Cameron again. Buddy had found a downstream lead from the east Dos Ojos cenote and wanted to push it with them. He read the strong flow and its direction as proof that the link existed. So the plan was simple: link downstream Dos Ojos to Dos Palmas. They picked a Wednesday, loaded the Buddy mobile, and drove to Dos Ojos.
Gerrard ran the exploration reel, Buddy sniffed out the way, and the rest followed for fun. The passage looked like a cave on top of a cave. Water had cut a gully through the floor when the cave was dry. The reel spun off line as fast as they could swim. Then, about 366 m (1,200 ft) downstream, another guideline appeared.
They tied in and followed it downstream. After 61 m (200 ft) Gerrard found his own arrow. It marked the end of his Dos Palmas dive with Jim Mellon months earlier. Everyone had plenty of air, so they carried on and surfaced at Dos Palmas twenty minutes later. One dive had closed a gap of more than 1,067 m (3,500 ft). The team then swam the whole traverse to make it official. The route stayed within air rules: maximum depth 10.4 m (34 ft), average 6.7 m (22 ft).
Tapir’s End and Monolito
Two months later, Chuck Stevens of X’cacel and Robbie Osman of Oakland pushed the downstream line from High Voltage. They came up in a new opening and named it Tapir’s End, or Cenote Motz Say Ha. A dead wild pig had fallen in earlier, giving the place its name. The shape of the cenote lets nothing on two or four legs climb out. Today a wooden platform with steps solves that for divers.
In August 1992, Gerrard was back with his fourth group of the year. With him were Bob Griffith, Rich Chapski and Hank Whittenberg of Boston, and Tim Brewton of Tallahassee. They dropped into High Voltage to push beyond Tapir’s End. The push worked until, after 518 m (1,700 ft), the passage became too small and too low for five divers. Chuck Stevens and Dan Lins later pushed it further. On that same dive the team found the official exit of the River Ride. Buddy later named that cenote Monolito, for the huge rock leaning against its opening.
The River Ride traverse
What grew like a patchwork quilt is now one continuous guideline. It runs from the east Dos Ojos cenote to Dos Palmas, then on to High Voltage (Nicte-Ha). From there it continues to Tapir’s End and exits at Monolito. Gerrard gives the swim as 95 to 105 minutes of bottom time. The maximum depth is 10.4 m (34 ft), and the average is 6.7 m (22 ft). Each opening sits within a third of your air supply, so the plan stays simple. Besides, the flow does most of the work, and the swim takes little effort.
One caution from the book. Once you start at Dos Ojos, commit to the whole traverse rather than turning around. The flow here is among the strongest in the area, though it is still nothing like the Florida springs. The cave is also decorated along the entire route. Speleothems from the dry period, some fifteen thousand years ago, line the passage. By Gerrard’s count, more than four thousand cave divers swam the traverse in the twenty-two years before the book.
Dos Ojos exploration after the book
The Dos Ojos exploration did not stop in 1996, and it did not stop with Gerrard’s book either. Later, in 2018, divers linked Sistema Dos Ojos to Sistema Sac Actun. The QRSS now carries the combined system at about 379.6 km. Its news page also reports a team resurveying and mapping the Dos Palmas area. Those are the passages where Gerrard’s groups laid the first line. Any survey data from a qualified cave diver still goes to the QRSS, as Gerrard asked.
We dive the Dos Ojos side of this system on most course and guiding weeks. The River Ride is a full cave dive, not a cavern tour, so cave certification is the entry ticket. Write to us if you want to swim the traverse with a Cave Ha guide. Likewise, write to us if you plan to add your own survey line to the Dos Ojos exploration.
Cenote Naharon (Cristall) is considered one of the most outstanding because of the tannic-stained walls and decorations above the 60-foot (18.3-meter) halocline.
Historically, the Naharon (Cristall) Cenote, the Mayan Blue (Escondido) Cenote, and the Jailhouse Cenote were part of the Naranjal Cave system. On March 28, 2011, Steve Bogearts of Playa del Carmen connected Sistema Naranjal to Sistema Ox Bel Ha. Support cave diver Bil Philips of Tulum assisted with logistics.
Naranjal Cave general map
Nestled south of Tulum and near the captivating Sian Ka’an Biosphere Reserve, the Ox Bel Ha cave system unveiled its mysteries in 1996 when a team of cave divers embarked on its discovery and exploration.
Ox Bel Ha Cave System from January 2023 (thanks to CINDAQ team efforts) becomes again the World’s Longest Underwater Cave. It boasts an impressive length of 496.8 kilometers (308.6 mi), securing its status as the world’s longest underwater cave system. As of the end of 2023, the cave system encompassed 160+ cenotes. The most notable ones are cenote Jailhouse, cenote Naharon, cenote Escondido (Mayan Blue). According to the latest CINDAQ annual report, the system includes 56674 survey stations, 615 sections, more than 2500 jumps, 1500+ T intersections, and 7683 cave line markers.
Ox Bel Ha Cave System map
Ox Bel Ha general map
The Yucatan Peninsula’s distinctive geological history, a testament to the Earth’s transformative power over millions of years, has given rise to a sprawling labyrinth of underground passages and cenotes. This unique geological formation, a gift to cave divers and geology enthusiasts, has established the Ox Bel Ha cave system as a paradise to explore and admire.
Cenote Naharon (Cristall)
Tannic acid intrudes into the aquifer from a huge swamp area 8 km further west into the jungle. Within geological time (thousands of years), the tannic acid stains the calcium carbonate into a dark brown. Because everything is so dark, the cave diversโ light is absorbed. The few saltwater areas are not affected, as the calcium carbonate is bleached by the saltwater.
It has decent snorkeling spots and is a great place to swim and enjoy the cenote atmosphere.
There are upstream and downstream passages. One other cenote is upstream.
Upstream and downstream areas
When you dive into this cave, you will find yourself in Guillermo del Toro’s film based on Tolien’s story “The Hobbit: or There and Back Again”. You will feel like you are going into the depths of the Lonely Mountain to the lair of Smaug, Middle-earth’s last “great” dragon.
The best dives are the main line to Chacโs Room and beyond, which involves one jump. To get to the Deconocido Dome line, swim to the main line, take the first jump to the left of 8 ft (2.4 m), and follow that line 2,100 ft (637 m) upstream to the Double Domes.
The Southwestern Sacbe passage involves two jumps. Go to the permanent main line, take the first jump to the left, follow that line for 200 ft (60.1 m), and jump down a steep slope for 65 ft (19.8 m) to this offshoot line. One more jump left will bring you to traverse to Mayan Blue Cenote (to tunnel A) through The Southern Sacbe passage. Follow the line to the South, take T-left, and arrive at tunnel A of Mayan Blue Cenote.
The first explorer was Jim Coke in 1985. In 2003, Steve Gerrard and Sergio Granucci added 1400 ft of the line using DPV past Chacโs Room. Other explorers during the late 1980s were Steve Gerrard, Mike Madden, and Parker Turner. Other explorers have pushed the lines beyond what is on the map, but they are unknown.
Robbie Schmittner considers the Monkey Dust Cenote (Dos Pisos) cave system one of the Riviera Maya’s most beautiful.ย If youโre looking to explore fascinating places in the region, it’s a hidden gem worth visiting.
Monkey Dust is one of five cenotes in the Dos Pisos cave system. This unique marvel spans 46,509 ft (14,176 m) and reaches a maximum depth of 80 ft (24.4 m). Additionally, it’s home to five distinct cenotes: Balam, Dos Pisos, Dos Pisos Norte, this cenote, and Cenote Zooz. When adventurers mention remarkable locations, this system always stands out as a must-see.
The permanent line is a bit left of the wooden platform and immediately guides you through the series of impressive chambers. The first T-intersection right brings you toward the Dos Pisos (next T left). Meanwhile, the left turn opens a whole set of the beauty of the this cenote cave area. Cave diving enthusiasts can also explore this part of Dos Pisos for exceptional views of the Monkey Dust Cenote.
No facilities are available on site.ย Keep this in mind when planning your visit the dive site.
Monkey Dust Cenote cave lines map
cave lines map
Monkey Dust Cenote location map
Gunnar Wagner and Robbie Schmittner were the first pioneers to explore this magnificent cave system. Explorers followed, including Nadia Bernie, Pat Cronin, Fred Devos, Phil Dotchen, Martyn Farr, Rob Greaves, Dig Hastilow, Steve March, and David Sieff.
