March 2004

UPDATED 31 March: The British caving expedition team held in Mexico since Friday have flown home after being expelled for allegedly breaching the terms of their tourist visas. BBC News Online reports that the men were escorted to the airport by two police trucks with dozens of armed guards. They have been barred from re-entering Mexico for two years.

The cavers left Mexico City aboard Monday’s scheduled British Airways flight 242 and touched down at London Heathrow at 14:24 on Tuesday afternoon.

See also:
Cavers’ news briefing [video, BBC] at Heathrow airport.
Cavers ‘were denied sleep’ while detained in Mexico. Daily Telegraph

John Rice is probably right to imply that Mexican tourism officials were caught off balance when immigration officials detained the British cavers last Thursday.

“We’re astonished because we don’t know how so much was made over this [incident],” Lilia Rueda, director of alternative tourism for Mexico’s Tourism Ministry, told The Associated Press. The San Diego Union-Tribune ran the story in its online edition on Saturday.

Last night, one of the six British cavers suggested the group had been detained because of “bureaucratic incompetence and inefficiency”. Trapped cavers hoping to fly home BBC News Online

The British cavers missed their originally intended return flight home last night and continue to be held at a Mexico City detention centre while an investigation is conducted into whether the group violated the terms of their visas.

All rather bizarre, especially if you follow the ukcaving forum and statements posted on behalf of the expedition.

“British cavers have been exploring caves in the Cuetzalan area alongside Mexican, American, Canadian and Belgian groups since the 1970′s. In that period over 100km of cave passage has been mapped & surveyed. Many of the expeditions of recent years, including those by the Combined Services Caving Association [CSCA], have been joint British & Mexican ventures with Mexican cavers well represented on the teams and involved in many of the major discoveries. The vast majority of these expeditions have involved civilian cavers, in fact the members of the current expedition are there in a civilian capacity, as their love of caving and their participation in this activity is borne out of the same desire to visit and understand the unknown as it is amongst their civilian counterparts.”

Statement by the CSCA.

UPDATED 22:58 GMT: As specialist divers rescue the six Britons from the Mexican cave where they have been stuck for eight days, the diplomatic fallout continues. This morning, BBC News Online reported that President Vicente Fox had instructed his foreign minister to seek clarification about the cavers’ visas from the UK government.

This is probably a bit hasty and a knee-jerk response to public opinion fanned by some sensationalist reporting by many Mexican dailies. Some comments posted on the website of El Universal are, to be frank, bonkers. Were they really conducting scientific investigations, “or are they spying?” asks someone calling himself ‘Fox Mulder’. Another hypothesises… “…the caves in Puebla are similar to those in Afghanistan.” Hmm… “What a coincidence,” ponders ‘Jannine’, “they have enough food and equipment to last more than a week, as if at war.” The English language edition of the same newspaper runs an altogether more balanced report. Most of the more flowery reports ignore comments made by the head of the Mexican Union of Speleologists, Juan Antonio Montano Hirose: The group “is internationally renowned and has regularly collaborated with Mexican researchers”, he said.

More on the Mexican press coverage.

No Pasa Nada

The BBC seem to have the measure of the whole affair with this summary of what the cavers where doing in Alpazat [mapping a cave system], plus some details regarding the history of exploration in the area pieced together from information supplied to the ukcaving.com forum.

Photo credit: Cueva Alpazat – the entrance series © Combined Services Caving Association 2004

A spokesman for ukcaving.com who is in contact with the expedition at the Cueva de Alpazat, says he’s been told the team has managed to make a pack of cards from their survey notes, to help stave off boredom!

“Although six cavers trapped inside the cave conjures up images of a dramatic situation,” the spokesman said, “this eventuality is just part of the logistics of exploring [the Cuetzalan] cave system and was planned for with great care”.

The cavers are communicating by means of a Heyphone, a radio system that allows communication through solid rock.

Meanwhile, the BBC now report some tension at the caves as the group has refused assistance from a 20-strong Mexican rescue team preferring to wait until two British rescuers arrived.

BBC News Online is reporting that six members of the British armed forces have been trapped 37m (120ft) underground for five days in a cave in Central Mexico.

They were among a group of twelve from the Combined Services Caving Association on exercise in a cave system near Cuetzalan, which is 174km (108 miles) north-east of Puebla, when they were trapped by rising water levels. The region is well-known to cavers for its network of subterranean caves. Experienced cavers sometimes expect to spend as long as a week underground.

Last year I was up before dawn and waited in the dawn mist at Dzibilchaltun to greet the new sun. This weekend, thousands converged on the ancient pyramids of Teotihuacan, near Mexico City while the usual hordes gathered at Chichén Itzá in Yucatán to witness the Feathered Serpent descend El Castillo. Others danced at El Tajin. At Bernal, where the average longevity of the locals is 93, they are drawn to the 350m-high Peña de Bernal, a craggy monolith an hour’s easy drive or bus ride from Queretaro.

A reminder that Mexico sets the clock forward one hour at 2:00am on Sunday 4th April, one week after we do the same this side of the Atlantic.

The 32nd Festival Internacional Cervantino will take place in Guanajuato and other locations in central Mexico from 6 – 24 October.

Desmond O’Shaughnessy in the Guanajuato tourism office informs me that the programme will be posted on the official Festival website from 15 July.

Photo credit: Minstrels – Guanajuato © Kelly Sax; Thanks to Kevin Atkins

Further to my report on 6 February, I’ve spent some time this evening reviewing Jim Lovett’s blog chronicling Monarch Watch’s 2004 trip to Mexico earlier this month. Cheers, Jim.

I’ve been exchanging emails with author Jim Brumfield for three years, eager to get my hands on a copy of “A Tourist in the Yucatán”, his debut novel. Now, at last, it’s being republished.

The plot unfolds in parallel strands which take place alternately in the tangled selva of the Yucatán Peninsula and the hush-hush of behind-closed-doors intrigue in Washington DC. After a rampaging shootout on a Cancun ferry in Chapter One, the story proper starts with tourist couple Jack and Josephine Phillips taking a sticky bus ride to Chichén Itzá with a mysterious stranger. The Phillips’ are caught in the wrong place at the wrong time and their world is turned upside down by threatening federales and bloodthirsty thugs belonging to a drug kingpin whose tentacles reach as far as Capitol Hill.

The ancient cities of the Maya, the hurried colonial streets of Merida, and a deserted beach provide the sultry backdrop. After ‘Jo’ disappears and her husband becomes a murder suspect, the pace slows in the middle part of the book, but rewards the reader with a quest to uncover the secrets of an unexcavated pyramid. Jack clings to archaeologist Hector Flores as he, literally, lifts the lid on an ancient Mayan mystery.

Was it worth the long wait? A qualified ‘yes’. The occasional weak chapter is compensated by some really rather good passages and characters that grow with each page. I particularly warmed to the melancholic and middle-aged Nelson Carlton, a boozy but sharp-witted spook. The moderately suspenseful plot is sometimes violent and I was at times a little surprised (shocked?) just how much I enjoyed a novel featuring no fewer than five slayings in its opening scene.

In short, no great classic. But if you ignore a sprinkling of editorial errors and don’t take the stereotypes too seriously, then what’s left is a pretty good political thriller – in a clever setting. Stow it away in your backpack on your next Yucatán adventure.

Now available from Tres Picos Press, and from Amazon in May… just as the mercury shoots up in Yucatán. Jim tells me to expect a sequel based around one of the key characters in “Tourist” who will end up back in the Yucatán.