I have always enjoyed visiting caves as a tourist. I lived in the State of Indiana before I went to Mexico. Indiana has more than 2000 limestone (karst formation) caves, all of which have been named, explored and most of them mapped. The whole Yucatan peninsula is a limestone shelf which only arose from the ocean floor 22,000 years ago. As I drove south from Merida towards Tekax the low foothill-type mountains called the PUUC appeared obvious to me as cover for hidden caves. The rain water filters through the limestone beds, and underground rivers flow towards the sea, carving caverns with magnificent formations in the underground world. My very limited knowledge of the "lost Maya population" evoked my curiosity enough to ask the local Maya in San Marcos if there might be caves on their properties. Not at all uncommon or unusual to them, they readily showed me a cave which we explored with a crude rope and sticks ladder. We entered by dropping the ladder down through a hole in the rock and descended twenty-seven meters to the cave floor. One cave led to another and another. I formed a local group from Tekax to begin to explore these caves to look for one suitable for tourism development leading to sustainable economic development for the region. The National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) was visited and their endorsement was given for preliminary exploration and photography. Two hundred caves later I formed and co-led an expedition into twenty of the caves. Thirty-five international spieliologists, including a team of nine from Brazil, led by world renowned cave explorer, Clayton F. Lino, came for two weeks to identify and map a cave best suited for tourism. We gave all caves a Mayan name appropriate to their locale and contents. Some of our discoveries led INAH to two very special caves with ancient Mayan artifacts and paintings. They performed recovery expeditions to document the findings. Sr. Alfredo Barrera Rubio, Regional Director of INAH, was most helpful in all our efforts. Part of the cave contents can be viewed in archeology archives in Merida.
The cave whose picture appears at the top of this page is my personal favorite. We gave it the Mayan name Zas tun tun nich, which means white brilliant stone. This was cave number 201. After documenting this cave, I stopped looking. The cave is a cave within a cave and almost impossible to find and to reach. You have to crawl on your belly for over two hundred meters and squeeze through pillars and columns formed of rock to reach the vista shown above. I was never personally able to reach it. So my team photographed it for me. An American photographer, Lisa Rock from Pella, Iowa took specialized gear through that passageway, with a skeleton crew from our team and documented the complete interior of this wondrous cave. We made the decision that since no one had ever walked upon this pristine and delicate surface, no one ever should in the future. The only way someone can see that beauty is to view personal photographs and a slide presentation owned by Ms. Rock. This is the true meaning of ECOTOURISM which is to take only photos and leave only footprints as you explore.
