belize—cayo district

We ran into some difficulty in the Crystal Cave, a watery subterranean cavern with glistening white walls that twinkle as if dusted with sugar. Stalactites and stalagmites fill the cave system, and everything is, well, crystalline and beautiful. Our guide, the one whose feet were gripping my midsection, wanted us to turn off our headlamps to experience the pitch-black silence of the cave, once a ceremonial site of the great Mayan civilization that flourished in Central America between 2,600 BC and 250 AD.

But six-year-old Esmé was having none of it. “I am NOT turning off my light in here. No way. We are going to die if I do.”

She muffled the light with her hand and said, “This is it. And that’s final.”

Esmé, her dad, our guide, and I were in a train-like formation, floating on inner tubes, using our feet to link to the person behind us, propelling ourselves through chest-deep water with our hands. We’d been in the cave for an hour. The cave was full of turns and secret caverns and there weren’t any openings for daylight to creep through. (photo) I could understand her fear of the dark.

We were in Jaguar Paw Resort (jaguarpaw.com; you don’t have to be a hotel guest to sign up for their tours), in a jungle about an hour from San Ignacio. We’d gone zip-lining through a rainstorm, gotten eaten alive by mosquitoes, and now, since a flash flood had cancelled our plans to tube down and through the Caves Branch River (which would have allowed us to drift downriver and through