This vlog documents Nate and Kara Buchanan’s cenote diving day in Tulum, Mexico. They visit two cenotes — Ponderosa (Garden of Eden) where they swim through an overhead cave connecting two cenotes, and Dos Ojos where they join a photographer and experience exceptionally clear water, dramatic light rays, and distinct fresh/salt water layering. The hosts share personal reactions, brief background anecdotes (including a 2015 prior visit), and sensory details about visibility, temperature shifts, and memorable visuals.
Questions this video answers
Ponderosa (also called Garden of Eden) and Dos Ojos.
Nate Buchanan and Kara Buchanan.
Chapters
In the last video, we showed you what our perfect idea of a relaxing vacation looked like. But the truth is there's only so long that we can sit around and relax.
So today we are up with the sunrise and we are pulling ourselves away from this resort and driving an hour south.
We just arrived in Tulum and today we're doing something that we've wanted to do for so long. For our two year wedding anniversary, we came to Mexico and we discovered cenotes for the first time. Like, I remember googling how to pronounce cenote.
I vividly remember as we were snorkeling in one, looking down and seeing the bubbles from the divers coming up and thinking just how cool it would be to be able to get down there and like experience the whole thing.
These light rays that you see coming through the trees behind me with the smoke, this, this is what we're hoping to capture underwater today. Never thought burning trash could be so beautiful.
We just got to our first cenote of Ponderosa, otherwise known as the Garden of Eden. The water is already so blue and clear, but this is a super unique dive for us because we're starting in this cenote and swimming under a cave and then into another cenote. We've never done anything like this, so.
Kara hasn't gotten the dive brief yet. I'm a little bit ahead, but did you know this wall that we see behind us, we're literally swimming underneath that.
You can't see the other side. You can't see where the other cenote is from here, but apparently it's just like 100 meters that way.
100 meters with no way to surface.
So you can see, you can see light on both sides, but there's going to be a ceiling over us the entire time.
Even though we've done quite a bit of diving in the past, I was pretty nervous to do this dive.
Not only were we going to be under a rock, unable to surface for 100 meters, there was going to be very little light and it got dark very quickly.
All we could see were our light beams and all we could hear were our bubbles.
Any fears we still had completely disappeared as soon as we got our first glimpse of white rays shooting down from the surface.
After quickly servicing in the second cenote and talking to each other about how mind blowing the dive had been, we descended back down and headed back to where we started.
That was so good. I mean, I knew we were coming to swim in some of the queerest water of my entire life, but like, my expectations were here and they Were vastly exceeded.
It was so amazing. The light rays were incredible. Like, you sometimes see rays like that when you're coming up in the ocean, But I've never seen them like that. And seeing all the roots of the trees and the stalagmites and tights, it was awesome.
It was so cool. And another really neat thing about diving that I'd never heard before is that saltwater and fresh water don't mix. And so when you got down to, like, 414 meters, there was like this weird, like, I don't know, like, blurry blurriness. Yeah.
You could see the line where they weren't mixing. And then if you were swimming right behind somebody, their flippers would kind of mix it together, and it would just be this beautiful blurriness.
But then, like, the person in front of you would just kind of like, turn into a shape. Like, it was like your eyeballs were going out of focus or like when the camera was going out of focus.
Yeah, I kind of loved it.
So I'm not sure what it'll look like in the camera, but, like, if during the dive the camera goes blurry, it's. It's not the GoPro. It's actually the water.
Yeah, it was really cool. And then the warm patches, I think was the salt water. All of a sudden, we'd be in this really warm water, and I'd be like, oh, I just want to stay here. Because the fresh water was really cold.
I just thought we were going to swim in clear water. And it was so much more of an experience than that.
Tamale for a mid dive snack. Get any better.
Nose?
And now we have just arrived at our second cenote dive of the day. It is Dos Ojos, which is maybe one of the most famous cenotes in all of Mexico and also one of the largest.
We're gonna follow this line. All of this dark yellow color is the overhead environment, and all of the white is the open water area. We're gonna cross the other eye back into the overhead environment. It's right on the edge, so you're always gonna have the light. And then we're gonna get to this point.
Okay.
We got an email from a couple of divers who had over 500 dives under their belts. And they said that Dos Ojos was by far their favorite. So we had super high expectations.
It did not disappoint.
The water was so clear, it didn't even feel like we were looking at water. It was like we were just suspended in.
We were lucky enough to get to dive with a Photographer who has worked with National Geographic. And thankfully, his bright lights allowed us to see way more of the cave than we would have otherwise.
Plus, we got some really cool photos.
Do I even need to say how amazing that was? Couple who emailed us, you did not lead us astray. Dos Ojos is the coolest dive that we have ever done. It was so, so much cavier than the first one. Like, the first one was awesome, but this one had all of these things to look at and light rays. It was so cool.
Fun fact about Do Ojos is it was actually found by the US Air Force. Was it the Air Force?
It was Air Force. There was a hurricane in the area, and they were looking for survivors, and they saw these two circles that looked like eyes. Two eyes Dos Ojos. So that's how they were found.
But I actually put the drone up thinking I was going to get this really cool shot of, like, two eyes in the middle of the jungle, and they had to be looking very closely to see these.
Another fun fact about Dos Ojos that has to do more with the two of us is when we came here the first time in 2015, we were like, oh, we're gonna go snorkeling in Dos Ojos because it's the coolest. And that's what Lonely Planet says to do. And we pulled in the parking lot, and we saw the entrance fee, and then we got back in the car, and we went to a free one down the road.
I don't think it was free, but it was run by a local, and it was like, $2. We've come a long way in our.
Travels, but it's so worth it.
And now we're gonna end the day. The best way to end the day, diving in Mexico.
There we go. There we go. There we go. Wow.
That's supposed to be, like, a slow mo. Sorry.
Oh, I thought it was, like, an excited.
We're going dining.
My ears. Yeah, I keep yachting because I'm trying to pop my ears. They're still a little stuffy.
