Cuzama cenotes in Mexico - a wild story
One of my absolute favorite things about Mexico is the cenotes. They are honestly tied with margaritas if you can believe it. That’s how much I love them. If I could have margaritas in a cenote, I would be just purely happy.
My oldest sister, Elli, lived in Merida for 3 months in 2019 to study Spanish. My other older sister, Keighlin, and I decided to visit her her first weekend there.
We went to Hacienda and Cenote Mucuyuche first and it was high end, yall. It was so nice. There were 2 cenotes and they were connected by a lazy river. However, this was where I got my first bit of Montezuma’s Revenge….
After Mucuyuche, I was begging Elli to go to another cenote. Her friend, Charly, took us to one in the middle of nowhere. It was authentic, but it was honestly off a dirt road about an hour away from where we were staying. We get out of our cars and there are some sweet dogs running around what is truly just tailgate tents and a grill and some horses that look on the brink of death.
They hook up these carts to the horses and we are pulled on a train track system through the jungle. It is bumpy and hot and humid and not super fun. There are 3 cenotes they are taking us to see and the first one is 30 minutes by this horse-train.
The horse-train
We get to the first cenote and we had to walk down these open air stairs into this giant cave. The stairs were pointed where your toe was higher than your heel, so it was very hard to walk down it, especially when if you fell, you’d land on rocks.
The water in cenotes is freshwater and usually very cold. This one had a rope along the middle of it so we just held onto that so we didn’t have to tread water.
After we finished the first cenote, we went to the second one. I have never been so brave in my life. Truly. It was a ladder into a hole in the ground…. Maybe 2.5 feet in diameter. It was unreal. When we got inside the cenote, it was pitch black minus one tiny skylight. We jumped in this water and it was FREEZING.
About 15 minutes after we arrived at this cenote, it started raining. The tour guide offered to take us to the last cenote, but with a 45 minute ride back just to our car, and Keighlin having seen a tarantula in real life, we were done. We got back on the horse-train and took off.
It is a HURRICANE outside at this point. It is thundering, lightning, pouring down rain. Elli, Charly, and I are freezing because we were swimming in a coooold cenote, my teeth were killing me (I was having a toothache the entire trip). It was bad. We finally got back to the car and it stopped raining…
All in all, it was a great experience because of this story. Would I go back? Maybe to make someone else experience this shit show lol. There are so many cenotes around Mexico though, so unless you want to be dragged by horses for an hour, go somewhere else.