Some years ago, I began to include GPS coordinates in some of my articles and noticed they were mysteriously vanishing once the article reached the editor’s desk. When I asked the editor about this, he suggested that long strings of arcane numbers might make readers suspect that the place was hard to find, but added: “Why don’t you write us an article on the GPS and explain it all?”

There are 89 caves in the world that are over a kilometer deep (nine of them in Mexico, by the way) but only one which passes the minus 2,000 mark. Kruber-Voronja,  located on the eastern coast of the Black Sea, is a very vertical cave with many big drops, one of them measuring 152 meters.

Gustavo Vela Turcott was born in Mexico City in 1973. He is the author of “Un Viaje al Mexico Profundo” (A Voyage to Deepest Mexico), published in 2005 by Editorial Santillana. The volume is considered by many to be the finest book on Mexican caves and caving ever  produced. The Reporter’s  JOHN PINT recently caught up with Vela during an International Congress of Speleology and asked him a few questions about his passion for exploring deep caves.

Hiking through the pines and oaks of the Primavera Forest, I came to a clearing. At that very moment, the thick cloud cover parted and the clearing suddenly glowed with sunshine and warmth, both of which were most welcome on this cold (by Guadalajara standards) January day.