Tikal and Cave Diving in Mexico, 2-4th December

Monday was spent travelling across Guatemala to the town of Flores. This started with bit of confusion as I thought my bus was at 4am, but it turned out it left at 2.30am! fortunately I manged to sleep for most of the bus journey.
On Tuesday morning I had another early start catching the 5am bus to Tikal. This is a huge park containing the ruins of one of the most important Mayan cities. Hidden in the jungle are numerous temples and pyramids, several sticking up high above the forest canopy. I spend the first 4 hours or so there with a guide who took us round the main sites and up several of the temples. The site is very spread out so you spend a lot of time walking down remote jungle pathways. After the tour I spent another 3 hours or so wandering around the site on my own. It was surprisingly quit and it was quite easy to find a spot on top of a temple for yourself and just look at the scenery for a while. Another entertaining thing to do was to watch the howler and spider monkeys that live in the trees around the temples. They can quite often be seen swinging through the branches above you. Very difficult to take photos of though as they camouflage very well and have a habit of throeing things down at you if you get too close.
Yesterday was another travel day (my last long bus of the trip hopefully!), passing through Belize and arriving in a town called Tulum in Mexico. A small town only a few hours south of Cancun.
This morning I went on a cave diving trip to the Cenotes. The entire Yucatan peninsular is riddles with limestone caves, and around Tulum there are several networks which can be dived. The first place we dived was called Gran Cenote. Filled with fresh water the visibility is incredible at up to 200m Swimming between the huge stalactites and stalagmites is quite an experience, but sadly my camera is not waterproof so there are no photos. There was also a surprising number of fish, who would dart about in our torch beams. For the next dive we went to another cave called Calavera. This had a slightly more tricky entry as we had to jump a couple of metres into the pool. This cave had a layer of both fresh water sitting on Salt water giving some interesting Halocline diving. Lucas my dive master liked to call it diving with LSD, but without LSD. As you pass though the halocline (junction between fresh and salt water) you get a very strange optical effect, kind of like the shimmering above a hot road surface, however a lot more extreme. Everything goes incredibly blurry and I couldn´t even make out Lucas a few feet in front of me. From underneath the halocline however you get even better optical effect with a kind of fake roof effect.
In the afternoon I just read my book on the pristine white sands of the local beach, very Caribbean.
Tomorrow i´l head up to Cancun from where I will take a flight to Havana.
O