In the Caves of the Tiger
The Second Labna Ha Expedition
September 20-26, 2005
by Jason Brauhn

Flight Cancelled

I felt my stomach drop as I saw those two words blinking at me on the departures screen at Ft. Lauderdale International Airport. I had tried to beat Hurricane Rita and lost. I made it from Tampa just in time for them to shut down the airport and cancel my connection to Cancun. I would have to spend the first day of my Labna Ha Cave Exploration Expedition watching Dr. Phil in a Ft. Lauderdale Best Western while a hurricane brushed past.

My first concern was making sure that my partner in the expedition, Richard Hicks, hooked up with our two guides, Sergio Granucci and Pepe Linares. As I was waiting for the shuttle to my hotel I left two voicemail messages and a text message for Richard on his cell phone, all of which were completely useless because Richard’s cell phone doesn’t work in Mexico. Fortunately Sergio and Pep found Richard wandering around Cancun airport and figured out that my flight hadn’t landed yet. They called me from a pay phone, we all touched base and Richard was on his way to the hotel. I was relieved that he got where he needed to be.

The next day Hurricane Rita had gone on her way and I was able to make the hour and a half flight to Cancun. I met Pepe at the airport and we quickly headed to the Labna Ha Adventure Park.


The Park

Labna Ha Adventure Park consists of 200 hectares of land leased by Sergio Granucci and Pepe Linares. Located just north of Tulum and smack in between the NoHoch Nah Chich and Sac Aktun systems, this park could quite possibly be the key to making the connection between those two huge systems. If accomplished, this would create a single cave system over 150 kilometers in length.

Sergio and Pepe are committed to developing this park with the traditions of the Mayan people in mind. Everything in the camp has been constructed from materials found in the surrounding jungle. The buildings are topped with thatched roofs and they’ve built a stone barbeque from materials in and around the camp.

Throughout the park there are hundreds of cenotes both discovered and undiscovered. In the search for cenotes we have found numerous ruins of Mayan buildings and many cave entrances that have been fortified with man-made walls. Not being an archaeologist I’m sure I don’t fully appreciate all of the discoveries that can be made above ground. Being a cave diver I’m also sure that I do appreciate what’s available to explore below ground.

The park also has several cave systems that have been discovered but have yet to be fully explored. In order to expedite exploration, Sergio and Pepe have taken a unique approach. They are offering the opportunity to explore these caves to qualified cave divers by organizing periodic exploration expeditions. I have been fortunate enough to participate in two of these expeditions.

The Expedition

After arriving to camp twenty-four hours later than anticipated, I was eager to get started. Richard and Sergio made a dive in Sistema Caracol earlier that morning for a shakedown and now it was time to get to work. We spent the afternoon replacing one of the two cavern lines in Caracol with gold line. The NACD was kind enough to donate approximately forty-five hundred feet of gold line and two stop signs to the expedition. In addition to finding and mapping new cave passage, the second goal of the expedition was to place gold line and stop signs in the Caracol system.

The next morning we completed the line replacement in the cavern zone and prepared to move out into the jungle and explore some new cave. Part of this preparation was a crash course on repelling and using ascenders. This crash course taught me two very important things:

1. Climbing a rope with ascenders is very easy for skinny people
2. I am not a skinny person

This was the first time I had ever tried climbing ropes with an ascender and a gri-gri and after fighting my way up ten feet of rope I realized that there was no way that I could complete a cave dive and still have the stamina to climb out of the cenote. This was the first of many humbling experiences handed out by this expedition.

There is a difference in “being in pretty good shape for your age” and “being in shape for an exploration expedition”. The rope exercise brought that crushing fact into crystal clarity for me. Before going out to the cenote I swore that I would never go on an expedition in such poor shape again.


Balam Nah (“House of the Tiger”), Balam (“the Tiger”)

Meaning “house of the tiger” in Mayan, Cenote Balam Nah lies approximately a quarter mile due south of the main camp. This cenote has a classic sinkhole appearance with a thirty-foot drop from the rim to the bottom of the breakdown area. This was to be the first cenote explored by the expedition. After a short hike from camp, Richard and Sergio rappelled to the bottom of the first drop and began their exploration of the dry portions of the cave as our Mayan sherpas, Polo and Ponzo cut down trees to construct a ladder for the rest of us. To my amazement, it only took them thirty minutes to find three trees, cut them down and turn them into a ladder that would support a diver with doubles on his back.

Once the ladder was in place, Pepe, Karl Fritz, the videographer documenting the expedition, and I all scrambled down to take a look. Sergio and Richard did not disappoint. In the half hour they had been exploring they had found three pools that looked like they could be promising leads for underwater tunnels. They also found a dry traverse between Cenote Balam Na and the next cenote south of camp, Cenote Balam (“The Tiger”).

The most exciting discovery came when Sergio and Richard showed us the pool that contained several jawbones from what appear to be big cats. We also found some rib bones and vertebra. We saw the sun beginning to set so we decided to start back to camp. We had made several exciting discoveries in this cave but we would have to wait until the next day before continuing our exploration. As we walked back to camp the conversation was filled with speculation of what may lie underwater in this cenote. More bones? Going tunnel? Something better?

The next morning we hiked our gear out to the edge of the cenote and went down the ladder. Sergio and Pepe were going to explore the leads to the south and Richard, Karl and I went to the north. Richard and I found two pools that looked like they had some going tunnel after a tight squeeze to get in. The first dive went all of 100 feet before pinching out. Richard, Karl and I exited in zero visibility, disappointed but not defeated. The next lead we had turned out to be even tighter than the first. After a brief recon, Richard called off the exploration of the second pool.

Checking with Sergio and Pepe, we found that they too had struck out but had taken two tanks through the dry tunnel to Cenote Balam to check leads there. After getting out of our wetsuits, Richard and I decided to survey the dry passage between Cenote Balam Nah and Cenote Balam. We found that it was 533 feet between the two cenotes culminating in a belly-scratching crawl of 50 feet. Once we made it to Balam, we decided to explore a little bit and found another pool that had a larger entrance. Richard called dibs on it and we crawled back through to Cenote Balam Nah.

We were greeted with news that Sergio, Pepe, and Karl had found several exciting things. Along the walls of the cenote they found a number of flat stones stacked with one standing on end. They believe that this was a Mayan gravesite. This was the first time I had ever seen anything like it but that was just the beginning. In exploring some more of the dry cave passage we found a pool with a unique carving in front of it. The previous “owners” of this cenote had carved a tiger’s head out of a stalagmite on the floor. The stalagmite had been regenerating itself over the years but hadn’t completely erased the carving. In looking at the pool behind the carving we found a very large entrance. Unfortunately it was impossible to enter the pool without creating complete silt out conditions. Sergio and I suited up and went about 100 feet in before calling the dive due to poor visibility. This was a good call because even if there was going tunnel we wouldn’t have been able to see it. We decided to leave our gear there and check the next morning to see if the visibility had cleared up.

While this was a day filled with new discoveries, I couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed that we hadn’t found any going underwater tunnel. I was scraped, bruised, sore, and beat up from crawling through passage that really wasn’t designed to be crawled through. All I wanted to do was get back to camp, swim in the cavern pool in Caracol, and relax.

Once back in camp, Sergio and Pepe said they had to go into Tulum to get some supplies and post some things on the Internet. Richard and I talked them into taking us into town for dinner. Some tacos and a couple of cold beers were just what I needed to recharge for what would prove to be the most taxing day of the entire expedition.

Cenote Balam Nah (“House of the Tiger”), Cenote Balam (“the Tiger”), Part II
The morning of day four dawned to a team of explorers that weren’t in the best of shape. The heat and humidity of the previous night made it hard to get good rest. I was sore from squeezing through dry cave passage and the fact that I’m starting to get old. Richard was also having some problems. A run in with a tarantula on the inside of his mosquito netting had provided some excitement in the camp but left him a little unnerved and unable to get back to sleep. That coupled with the fact that Montezuma had found Richard was starting to extract his revenge had left him in questionable shape at best.

We were all quiet and moving a little slow at breakfast. The plan for today was for Sergio and me to check and possibly explore the pool behind the tiger’s head in Cenote Balam Nah. Then to move to Cenote Balam where Richard would explore the lead he had discovered yesterday. After that all three of us were to meet up with Pepe, Ponzo, and Polo who were spending the morning blazing a trail and hauling equipment another half mile into the jungle to our third exploration goal, Cenote Mol Balam (“Print of the Tiger”).

Upon arriving at Cenote Balam Nah, Sergio and I crawled into the chamber containing the tiger’s head while Richard hung out at the top of the cenote. We reconnoitered the pool and made the decision that the visibility was still too stirred up to risk another dive. We disassembled our gear and extracted it from the cave. The difficulty of crawling through cave passage with a set of manifolded doubles had me promising myself to learn how to sidemount as quickly as possible when I got back from this trip.

After packing up our gear, we all proceeded to Cenote Balam to assist Richard with his dive. The approach proved to be the most difficult part of this dive. To get to the water we had to hack through another two hundred meters of jungle, scramble down several rock escarpments, find the tanks that Polo and Ponzo had left for Richard, and find the crawl through that lead to the pool Richard found the previous day.

While Richard assembled his gear I took a dip in a nearby pool. I could tell that he was starting to feel worse. His normal patient demeanor had started to slip a little bit. He was beginning to get irritated with things that normally didn’t bother him. Before he got fully geared up he handed me his mask asked me to stick my head down into the pool and check out the lead a little bit more.

I came back and told him what we were dealing with. We had a big entrance leading to passage that slopes down about five feet. The right side pinches out after about ten feet and the left side goes for about twenty feet to a stalactite wall that may or may not have a lead going off to one side. It didn’t look like the big borehole tunnel we had hoped for.

This was enough for Richard to call the dive. He was hot, tired, and getting sicker by the moment. He had reached his limit. He went back to camp and then back to Playa del Carmen to a hotel to recuperate. After Richard left, Sergio asked me how I felt about pushing on to Cenote Mol Balam.

I took stock of my condition. It was hot and I was tired. But I was feeling better after cooling off in the pool in Cenote Balam. I knew I would have to hump my sixty pounds of gear another six hundred meters through heavy jungle and that there was no guarantee that there would be going cave at the end of the journey. I also knew that I would always wonder what was out there if I didn’t go. I took a deep breath and told Sergio “let’s go.”

Cenote Mol Balam (“Print of the Tiger”)

If there is one word that can describe this cenote it’s “huge.” A large dry cavern zone goes back about 50 meters to a huge pool. After arriving and gearing up, Sergio and I went through our pre-dive checks and began our descent.

Three seconds into the dive I knew that we had hit pay dirt. Sergio and I dropped thirty feet down into a huge room where he made his first tie off. This is definitely the deepest we had been all week and it was a very good sign. We proceeded downstream into rooms so big that our lights couldn’t make it to the walls in some places despite the crystal clear visibility. One huge room led to another. Huge white columns and reminded me of Nohoch Na Chich. About one thousand feet into the dive we surfaced in a small cenote that we named “Chan Cecil” or little light. On the way back I surveyed the line while Sergio looked for other leads.

We came back and pushed a little to the upstream side and into completely different cave. The upstream side is smaller and much more decorated much like the Cuzah nah circuit. We found a second cenote and named it Cenote Yolintkuba, the Mayan for “Great Relief”. After laying about four hundred feet of line into the upstream tunnel our reels ran empty. I was at thirds and it was time to go. The hardest thing for me was resisting the urge to deploy my safety reel and keep going. Sergio and I laid thirteen hundred and eighty feet of line in this system and I would have to say we’ve only barely scratched the surface.

The Last Day

We knew that the last day was going to be a late start, as we had to wait for Richard and Pepe to come into camp from Playa del Carmen. We weren’t sure if Richard would feel up to diving today or not. As we waited, Sergio and I busied ourselves with loading up as many exploration reels with yellow line as we could. The objective for today was to reline the main tunnel in Caracol.

Richard and Pepe arrived and Richard declared he still wasn’t feeling up to diving. Sergio and I descended into Caracol with six exploration reels and approximately one thousand feet on a spool. We did a two-hour dive and laid about three thousand feet down the main line in the cave.

On the way back to the hotel for our final night I was slightly disappointed about the small amount of line this expedition yielded but I was still pretty excited because we had made some significant discoveries. The stats for this expedition are:

Total feet of underwater cave surveyed: 1381
Total feet of dry cave surveyed: 533
Total feet of NACD gold line laid: approximately 4500
Fossilized animal remains found: several
Ancient Mayan carvings found: 1
Ancient Mayan Gravesites found: 1
Number of new cenotes found: 2
Percentage of expedition team afflicted with Montezuma’s revenge: 100%
Percentage of expedition team afflicted with Mexican poison ivy: 100%
Undiscovered cave passage left for exploration: Almost Limitless

As I sit here writing this (absentmindedly scratching and happy I don’t have to run to the bathroom every hour anymore) I can’t help but think of the amount of cave passage that remains unexplored in Cenote Mol Balam and the other cenotes at the Labna Ha property. Rough plans are already being formed for a return to Labna Ha. If you are interested in receiving more information on future exploration expeditions please email me @ Jason@bubblecheck.com.