The beauty of this soft adventure is pedaling along at your own pace. I stopped at times and surveyed my private kingdom encircled by treetops, then resumed pedaling because I knew the SkyCycle's wire ended in a cenote, with its natural pool of water where I could cool off and snorkel. During the return trip, I cycled through another cave and over cenotes, then peddled slightly uphill until reaching the landing area where a guide waited to take me to the next part of my adventure.
Adventures at Hidden Worlds Cenote Adventure Park
The family-oriented Hidden Worlds adventure park is tucked into a section of the jungle that covers Mexico's Riviera Maya, which borders Cancun. The staff is bilingual and many of the people working at the park are members of the local Mayan community, which owns the land where the park is located. This soft adventure park takes advantage of the terrain created sixty-five million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed on earth until an asteroid smashed into the Yucatan Peninsula. Gradually, rainwater filled the crater's basin and seeped through the limestone slab that covered the peninsula creating the cenotes that people snorkel and dive in today.Riding the SkyCyle at Hidden Worlds is a completely different type of aerial adventure than racing along a zipline, an increasing popular choice of adventure in this part of Mexico. But, Hidden Worlds has ziplines, too, and one drops you right into the cool waters of a cenote - or if you prefer you can rappel into the cenote. It's an easy first-time trip if you've never rappelled before.
Scuba Diving With Hidden Worlds
Scuba diving in a cenote - one of the limestone sinkholes filled with water in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula - opens up a world that relatively few have seen. Through Hidden Worlds, we arranged to go scuba diving in a nearby cenote, with the park's dive master who had made more than 1,500 dives in this cave system. Quite simply: It was an incredible experience descending into the Dos Ojos cenote and swimming among the columns formed by stalactites and stalagmites, lit occasionally by shafts of light from the sun peeking through holes in the limestone rock above our heads. To read more about this dive, see underwater images, and arranging diving in cenotes in the Yucatan Peninsula, click on my husband Richard's story about diving Dos Ochos. (Reportedly, parts of the IMAX film "Journey into amazing Caves" was filmed in this cave system.)Visiting Hidden Worlds Adventure Park
Plan on spending a whole day at Hidden Worlds. If you book the Ultimate Adventure, you'll have unlimited access to the SkyCycle, ziplines, guided cenote snorkel tour and the Monkey Habitat. It's also possible to create a Make-Your-Own-Adventure day. Inside the park, you ride around in the novel Jungle Buggy, which looks like a torn-apart truck on steroids. If you don't have a car, arrangements can be made for transportation from your hotel in the Riviera Maya or Cancun, for a fee.One of this park's special features is the guides efforts to educate visitors about the jungle eco-system, so you leave knowing more about the Yucantan Peninsula. The goal of the park's creator, Gordon "Buddy" Quattlebaum (who lives in a treehouse) is to better help visitors enjoy the beauty but understand the fragility of the Mayan Jungle and its inhabitants. Hidden Worlds is a nonprofit business. All profits go to benefit Third World education efforts and world peace projects. To learn more about Hidden Worlds and the soft adventures that await visit Hidden Worlds.
More Adventure Travel Experiences in the Riviera Maya, next to Cancun, Mexico
Visits to the adventure parks, and snorkeling or scuba diving, are easily arranged for adventurous travelers staying in the Riviera Maya or neighboring Cancun. At Xplor there's an entire world of underground adventures including swimming and rafting in underground rivers. Above the earth's crust, there's a network of zip lines that looks like freeways in the sky, and a three-mile track where you can drive an amphibious buggy through the jungle, into caves and on suspension bridges over water.If you want to scuba dive or snorkel in a cenote while you are in Cancun or the Riviera Maya, read Scuba Diving and Snorkeling in the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico.
