The year, Fall, 1968. The place, the Texas Union Building, second floor, was the location of The University Underwater Society's monthly meeting.  I was one of the club's diving instructors and was there to see a program given by Joe L. Jordan.  Joe was just out of the Navy and had come back to college to finish his last year on a linguistics degree.  He was also a NAUI diving instructor.  During that time period, formal diver's training was just in its infancy. SCIP, YMCA, NAUI, NASDS, and PADI were the budding diver training agencies. Many individual and local diving groups issued there own certifications at that time. Indeed, our own University Underwater Society taught its own course of beginning diving and issued its own certification. Course cost was $25.  The club supplied the diving equipment.  Pool sessions were at the YWCA.

Anyone connected with the Navy and diving at that time was a big deal. Joe filled the image to a "T".  He had a full beard and commanded respect because of his knowledge of diving and world diving experiences through the Navy. He could add a bit of Texas Tall Tale to his diving stories and we would eat it up. That night he presented a program on all the dangerous sea animals that could kill or make a diver wish he were dead.  At the start of the program Joe stated that in June 1969, he had been hired to teach diving to students in the Field School of Mayan Archaeology on the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico.  Akumal, " the place of the turtle " in Mayan, was going to be the location.

My imagination was captured!  I knew this was what I wanted to do.  I would be graduating in May 1969 and going into the Army in November 1969.  What better way to end a college career!  The big world was ahead of me and I felt like I had it by the tail.  After the meeting, I rushed up to Joe and asked if I could work for him on the expedition.  I told him that I was a club instructor and also had my SCIP and YMCA instructor ratings.  He "hired" me on the spot and I walked home floating on air.

During that year I worked with Joe in getting ready for the expedition.  In the Spring of 1969, Joe was with our club on its second-ever Spring Break trip to Cozumel.  Cozumel then was in its infancy as a tourist destination.  "Pirate Joe" was the talk of the island with his Scubapro Deco-meter, bang sticks, 8mm underwater movie camera and Yak-Yak underwater communication device.  As the summer drew closer, Joe and I would make trips to Academy Surplus (now Academy)  in Austin to buy cans of C-rations, mosquito netting, and what have you to get ready to go.

Finally, the big day arrived.  I was driving to Joe's house in Houston.  Upon arriving the air was full of excitement.  The plan was that other diving instructors were to arrive at Joe's mother's house and then we would drive down to Merida on the Yucatan to meet Jerry Griffin of the Ft. Worth Children's Museum.  Jerry was to be the Director of the Field School of Mayan Archaeology.  The previous year he had participated in the archaeological diving expedition to the Sacrificial Well of Chichen Itza.  Rumor was that we too would dive The Well.  At that time, this was pretty heady stuff.

Plans started to change.  Jerry had called Joe and said the turn out for the Field School had been very small and that everyone had to pay their own way versus getting paid.  Joe's mother threw a big going away party and we started discussing the new changes.  All the other instructors thought things were getting too shaky.  One instructor who had pulled a portable compressor all the way from Michigan, went back home.  This was a real blow to our project, as Akumal was just a dot on the map with nothing but beach and jungle there.

This put a real financial crunch on our project.  To raise money, Joe decided to sell his sea shell collection that he collected while in the Navy.  During his world travels, he would buy all these exotic shells and the Navy packed them in crates and shipped them home when he got out of the service.  We visited various shell collectors and sold these shells. Joe was a real " wheeler dealer".  The most memorial event was to go to J. Rich Sports in Houston and talk to Jack Rich, the owner.  Joe had a pair of giant clam shells, the kind in sea stories that native skin divers would get their foot caught in and drown.  Joe suggested that Jack could put one shell above one another and create a water fall for his store or have two unique wash basins for his house.  These two shells were traded for a Honda portable electric generator.  Jack's last words were " I must be crazy! ".  Where we were going had no electricity. This  generator did come in very handy.

Leaving Houston was Joe, myself, and Jay, a graduate student in archaeology and Jay's giant German Shepherd dog.  We loaded Jay's 1965 Ford Fairlane to the gills.  The trunk had diving equipment, tanks, and the back floor-board was full of tanks.  Two people, in the front seat and the third person, dog and tanks were in the back.  This car was a mobile bomb that could bite!

We drove three days continuously from Houston to Merida with an eight hour delay in the mountains outside of Mexico City at night.  The car's alternator which charges the car's battery went out and our car lights got dimmer and dimmer in the night.  We stopped the car and connected the portable electric generator and recharged our battery until morning. Roads were narrow and the big trucks shook our car as they passed in the night.   The next morning we drove on to a primitive garage where they repaired our alternator, then on to Merida.

At Merida we met up with Jerry Griffin and his students.  From there we started to Akumal.  On the way we stopped at the Mayan ruins of Chichen Itza and he gave us a tour.  We did not have permission as it worked out to dive the Sacrificial Well, but I am glad.  This cenote had a long vertical drop to the water and the water was pea green.  Eventually we arrived at Akumal.

The only people living in the area were Mayan .  There was one small house where an architect was temporarily living. He was working for Pablo Bush, an Mexican explorer who happened to also own the Ford dealership in Mexico City.  We learned that a resort was going to be built at Akumal and looked over the plans of what was to come.  But at this point, Akumal was a beautiful white sandy beach lined with palm trees and located in a small cove.  The Mayan Indians built us a grass hut on the beach where we hung our hammocks and slept.  What an adventure!  I would go to sleep listening to the ocean and wake up looking at it.

In the mornings, we would hike a short way down the road and go off into the jungle and work with the archaeological students on the small Mayan ruin.  We were doing what is known as survey.  The mosquitos were very thick and by 10 A.M., it became too hot to continue.  We would hike back and eat lunch and take a siesta to beat the heat.  In the late afternoon, we would give the students diving lessons in the cove and at nearby coastal spots.  In the Akumal cove, was the first time I had ever seen a sea manatee.  I thought it was a walrus without tusks that was extremely lost.  Later one of the Mayans told me what it was.  On one evening, the natives took us on a lobster hunt.  They had burning torches in their hands and would wade in the shallow waters.  When they would see the lobster, they would hit the lobster with their machetes.  Another evening the natives caught a sea turtle that had crawled ashore and butchered it for turtle steak.  This was their way of life.  Another evening, we went on a jaguar hunt.  No luck, but spooky!

Fresh water was a precious commodity here.  Rain water was collected from a roof cistern.  All the local natives shared this water supply.  We added halazone tablets to purify it.  Because fresh water was in short supply, we could not take baths.  Your skin gets very salty from the ocean in short order.  However, when it rained, we grabbed a bar of soap and stepped out in the rain and showered.  It felt great to get all the salt off, but you got extremely cold showering in the rain.

A short ways away from Akumal is a little lagoon called Xel-ha.  After swimming across the lagoon toward the ocean, we swam into a small cave that had sky lights through the ceiling.  At the back of the cave was a little Mayan altar of a jaguar. Joe took a picture of some students with Scubapro regulators in their mouths while kneeling in the water in front of this altar.  His idea was to sell photos to Scubapro to show how adventurous their customers were.

One day I walked south along the beach from Akumal to where the wreck site of the merchant ship, Matanceros, was. A few years earlier the archaeological group CEDAM had a big diving expedition here.  In March of that year while on a Spring break dive trip with the University Underwater Society, I had seen various artifacts in Cozumel from this wreck for sale.  I always wanted one of the curcifixes found on the wreck.  I snorkeled out from the beach, but the surf made the water so turbid that the only thing I saw was a fleeting barracuda.

Another neat adventure that I got to go on was to see the ruins of Tulum.  Previous to this, the only way to see Tulum was to fly in and land on a dirt strip.  However, a dirt road had just been carved through the jungle to Tulum.  We bounced down the road in the back of a pick-up truck to see this wonderful Mayan coastal based ruin.  " The Voyage of the Mimi II " on PBS television captures the spirit of adventure that I experienced at Tulum and Akumal. Some of our group got to see a ruin near Akumal where the carved figures had been recently sawed off with wires by artifact thieves. There is a black market in Mayan art for collectors.

The governor of Quintana Roo was flown in to Akumal to view our field school.  Future projects were hoped for and his permission was necessary.  Our project due financial constraints finished up about two weeks early.  During our project, we drove north up the coast to Puerto Juarez to have some flat tires fixed.  There, I met a husband and wife school teachers who had pulled their boat down to the Yucatan to dive the virgin waters.  They asked me if I wanted a ride over to Isla de Mujeres while the tires were being repaired?  Of course, I said yes!  While on the island for about a two hour stay, I went to the local dive shop run by Pepe Maganya and asked in my best Spanish could I have a job in a few weeks when the expedition was over.  By being an American diving instructor, he hoped I could lure the tourist over to his shop. To the best of my knowledge, he said yes.

All too soon, the archaeological expedition was over.  Joe and Jay had gone back to Houston earlier.  I rode back in the camper shell of Jerry Griffin's truck down the dirt road to Puerto Juarez.  The jungle came right to the edge of the road. A cow stuck her head out of the jungle into the roadway and ripped one of her horns the right outside truck mirror off the truck.  Both the dizzy cow and we were surprised.

It began to pour down rain as I was let off at Puerto Juarez.  I unloaded my diving equipment and they drove off headed back for Texas.  I was alone; could barely say anything in Spanish, and thought to myself, " For a college grad, you ain't too smart ! "   I was waiting for a ferry to take me to a hopeful job at a primitive dive shop on Isla de Mujeres.  As I waited, I met a drunken, barefooted, one-eyed sea captain, Lado, who was going to take me to my first job out of college.

AKUMAL UPDATE :

Recently, I received an email from Dr. Singer concerning his adventures in the Yucantan peninsula area in early 1969. Others will enjoy reading of his past adventures and his recent return visit. Included is my response to his email which also presents another of my memories of Akumal of the past.

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Subj: Quintana Roo circa 1969 and today
Date: 11/11/2002 6:43:37 PM Central Standard Time


Paul,

I just read the "diary" of your trip to Quintana Roo in the spring of 1969 on http://members.aol.com/kfyi/akumal.htm, which I stumbled upon searching for Xel-ha on Google. I now am updating my own diary of Quintango Roo, having just spent a weekend there, 33 years after my first visit in Jan 1969.

On that occasion, my wife, another couple and I crashed through the jungle, starting at Isla Mujeres and ending at the ruins of Tulum. Along the way, we "discovered" Xel-ha, where we spent a night, and the ruins of Xel-ha, nearly destroyed by bull dozers clearing land for the impending highway. Then we proceeded along the " dirt road . . . carved through the jungle to Tulum," where we stayed several nights with the light-house keeper, Gumercindo. We also trekked into the village of Tulum, then a sleepy village of about 120 Mayan speakers, now a nondescript Mexican town of 12,000. Arriving hungry and thirsty at the ruins, we were greeted by two young boys selling Pepsi Cola. The boys were the children of the guardian of the ruins. We saw them again in their village several days later.

Last week, 33 years later, I visited the village and met one of the boys, Benjamin, now 42, father of at least two post-teens and owner of a small store in town. It was quite a time trip. I showed him some photos that I took in 1969; his kids chuckled seeing their dad as a kid. Further details would probably bore you, but I must say that today, both Xel-ha and the ruins are as magical as they were when I first visit them. Irwin Singer

PS. Another early visitor to the region, Carl Franz, has written extensively about travels in Mexico [see http://www.peoplesguide.com/ ] and has focused more recently on “La ruta maya.” If you haven’t read his book “The People's Guide to Mexico,” I highly recommend it - especially the first edition published in the early 1970's. You might also enjoy reading the book that turned us on to Quintana Roo: “The Lost World of Quintana Roo,” Michel Peissel (Dutton, NYC, 1963). Michel relates his adventures traveling around QRoo on foot for six months in the early 1960s.


Dr. Irwin Singer

MY REPLY :

Subj: Re: Quintana Roo circa 1969 and today
Date: 11/12/2002 1:01:01 AM Central Standard Time


Dear Dr. Singer,

It is very nice of you to stop by. I really enjoyed reading your email about your early adventures in Quintana Roo. My Akumal article was one of my first Internet articles and needs to be updated with some links. You may have already discovered the following articles. These also continue my early years in the Yucatan:

Isla de Mujeres - A Young Texan's Paradise

COZUMEL - THE EARLY YEARS

The Sleeping Shark Fiasco

Media Luna - Oasis in the Mountains

In updating my Akumal article, I was wondering if I could include your recent email documenting your travels predating the mass tourism of this area? I can remove as much or as little of your personal identifying information as you wish. Also, if you wish to share any photos of your trip, I could include those. I can edit them to the appropriate size. If you have an Internet address of articles you have written on your early travels in Quintana Roo, I can include those also.

"It was quite a time trip. I showed him some photos that I took in 1969; his kids chuckled seeing their dad as a kid. Further details would probably bore you, but I must say that today, both Xel-ha and the ruins are as magical as they were when I first visit them." Further details would not bore me as I would like to include them in my update or provide a link to your site. I really would like to hear more of your adventures.

The two books you cited are excellent material to give one the flavor of what we think of as early travel in Mexico. I have a 1972 copy of The People's Guide.... . The summer of 1969 when I returned from Quintana Roo, I checked out The Lost World... from the public library and was thrilled to read Michel Peissel's adventures. His descriptions were very similar to what I had experienced. I think I was sitting in my room reading The Lost World... and watching the television set and seeing man land on the moon. What a contrast! Then off to the Army. What a contrast!

Another early reference to Akumal is by treasure hunter Robert Marx in his book, Always Another Adventure. Publisher: World Pub. Place of Publication: Cleveland: Date of Publication: 1967, Edition: 1st edition.

Recently, I came across information on the history of Akumal since the fifties.

Centro Ecologico: Akumal, Mexico, Ocean Research, Environmental Education, Sea Turtle Protection, Marine Research

Once section reads, "Akumal, the place of the turtle in Maya, was then a coco plantation. The family Tun took care of the plantation and to do so they traveled on a path in the jungle from Valladolid to Akumal. " What is interesting to me is that when I was in Akumal in 1969, the head foreman of Akumal was Pepe Tun, a Mayan. During our stay, Pepe got stung on the leg by some type of wasp. His leg got infected. Once night, someone came to our hut and asked us to come and see if we could help him. He could not walk. All he could do was lay in his hammock. The head archeologist, Mr. Jerry Griffin, had Pepe's wife heat empty beer bottles in a pan of water on the stove. Then, cool just the mouth of the bottle with some room temperature water. The mouth of the warm empty bottle was placed over the sore on Pepe's leg. As the air cooled in the inside of the bottle, a vacuum was formed inside the bottle and the infected liquid was sucked from Pepe's leg. She kept repeating this process. In a couple of days, Pepe was back at work. Texas bar room medical miracles win international goodwill in Akumal's Mayan population.


A past hobby that I was active in was caving. I do keep up with the sport. Cavers in Texas are very active in exploring caves in Mexico which takes place largely in remote areas. They are still experiencing early Mexico described in The People's Guide.... .


Sincerely,
Paul Johnston

In a message dated 12/26/2005 11:49:57 A.M. Central Standard Time, ******* writes:

Hello Paul,

I ran across your site while looking up information on the Matanceros shipwreck off the coast of Yucatan. It was with some interest that I read your article as my brother and I spent about 4 months at Akumal during the Summer of 1971.

As you mentioned in the article, Pablo Bush was making plans for a resort there and by 1971 there was a single central building called the Comedore, which functioned as a place to eat and a couple of private condo type buildings a little way up the beach from the main area.

Other then that there were grass huts on the beach and this is where we stayed. My Uncle was hired to help get the facility started and so my brother and I spent the Summer down there helping out. I was 17 at the time and it was a grand adventure. We dove on the Matanceros, went to Xel-ha and found the little cave, seems I remember having to swim underwater for a bit to get in there, but that might be my imagination getting carried away. We also did all the corny poses on the alter. We went to Coba which was still just a pile of jungle, had Tulum all to ourselves, went looking for Jaguars, dove for black corral (still have some) ..... and on and on. I went back with my wife some 25 years later and boy the place had changed.

Anyway, I was trying to remember when the Matanceros sank and that was what led me to the search. Do you happen to know that date? [The Matanceros sank on February 22, 1741.]

Enjoyed seeing the site and reading about the adventures - brought back good memories.

Patrick Turner

Additional References

Early Akumal History

Under the Waters of Mexico - Pablo Bush

Wreck of the Matanceros

Xel-Ha Lagoon

kfyi@aol.com

© Copyright 1998 Paul Johnston

Updated 4-17-2006