Wind Star 
cruises
The Caves Branch River
Jaguar Paw, Belize  

Thinking back on it, I wish I had eaten that termite. "They taste like mint," Pedro said, popping one into his mouth. I didn’t doubt him, but squiggly appendages put me off. Pedro, a slim, muscular young man, is Mayan Indian and a Belize rainforest guide. He was introducing me to the traditional uses of the rainforest’s flora when he spotted these insectival delicacies. Perhaps disappointed that we weren’t sitting down to a feast, Pedro pointed out the strawberry-pink and white epiphytes that grew from crotches of the trees. Epiphytes also eat insects—small ones that are washed into their cores by the rain. Shiny dark-green philodendra, big enough to decorate the Golden Gate Bridge, dropped from the treetops. Tarzan-like vines called lianas hung ready for a tree-to-tree swing.

Rather un-Tarzan-like, a big black rubber inner tube was slung over my shoulder and a headlamp was tangled around my neck. Pedro was taking eighteen Wind Star cruisers tubing on the Caves Branch River through a chain of limestone caverns. Three hours before, we’d disembarked in Belize City to joggle our way by van through the rainforest—stopping at one point to let a CAT fix the road ahead—to the Jaguar Paw Resort’s corner of one of Belize’s many wildlife sanctuaries. No jaguars there however, the resort was named after the Mayan leader, Jaguar Paw. Thus began another ordinary "off-the rack" Windstar shore excursion.

"Put your eye there, before your hand there," Pedro advised, to keep us from attacks of biting ants and the odd poisonous snake. Although with so much to see, it seemed problematic. Miniature coconuts hung from the feather-leafed Cohune Palms, but Pedro said they were actually fruits and the Mayans used the oil from the nuts for cooking. Cohune fronds were used to thatch roofs and the palm hearts were eaten or brewed into palm wine.

Looking down, I was astonished to see ferns walking by. A closer look revealed leafcutter ants carrying pieces of fern so large they hid their bearers. We saw banana-yellow butterflies, heard rowdy birds and listened in vain for holler monkeys. The only actual fauna I saw was Piranha, the resort’s black lab.

Piranha had crossed the forty-foot Caves Branch River with us, had climbed the steep bank to reach the rainforest trail and had sidestepped the potholes created by rotting tree roots on the rain-slick mud trail. The trail wound through a mile-wide valley with white cliffs of cockpit karst limestone on either side. Cockpit karst is a soft, irregular limestone. When it erodes, it leaves fissures, sinkholes, caverns and underground streams, not to mention our destination, the river that runs through it.

After climbing and sliding down an incline, we found ourselves standing on a rocky outcropping about fifteen feet above a marine-blue swimming hole. The noonday sun broke through the overstory creating patches of glittery green amidst the jungle-cool shade. Off to the left, the pool became river again as it flowed into the inky mouth of a cave. Pedro and the venturesome leaped after their inner tubes into the pool. The rest of us shimmied down a guide rope Pedro had set up. We tossed him our inner tubes, repelled down, stuck our butts way out, let go and crashed butt-first into Pedro-held tubes. The water was blessedly cool. We hooked onto one another (mainly by foot, but sometimes by crook) until the last one was afloat. The excited Piranha splashed in for official start of the tubing.

We turned on our head lamps and let go. As the gentle current captured our tubes, we slid out of the bright jungle day of bird songs and sunbeams into the damp-cavern dark of swallows and bats. Pedro had already told us that bats are good and we were to love them. For starters, they eat mosquitoes so we weren’t being eaten alive. Furthermore, these gracious hosts don’t even suck your blood or get in your hair.

The mouth of the cave, swooped across by the occasional swallow, receded until it was just a light at the end of the tunnel. We’d become a flotilla of small lights scattered across a shiny black river and lead by a swimming black dog. Floating along, our headlamps pick up stalactites forming, drip by drip, off the ceiling. Every so often, a huge tree root had broken through and was heading for water. We ahhhh, but talk little. There was something awe-inspiring about flowing through a cathedral-sized cavern.

It was clear why the Mayans had a special respect for these caves. Pedro explained that they believed they were the entrance to the underworld and that their deities inhabited them. The Mayans also collected "pure" water from the caves—water that dripped off the end of stalactites, having never touched ground.

"Butts up, lights out" Pedro commanded. Among nervous giggles, the lights fadeout. Drifting now in complete darkness, my eyes seemed to be playing tricks on me. An indistinct and hazy light faded in and out in the distance. We curled around a bend in the river and suddenly before us the river banked into a sunken room of sun-bright jungle. Three majestic stalactite-stalagmite pillars rose alter-like out of the river. They were backed by palms, vines and all manner of jungle that climbed so steeply,  we could not see the sky.

The small rain forest chapel passed and soon we were watching river bank butterflies as we moved out of the first cavern and into the next. Our points of light darted around as we checked out the bats, the hanging roots and each other. Eventually the light at the end of the tunnel grew bigger and with a swish of swallows and a buzz from the bees, we were back where we started. Piranha bounded out of the river and shook himself on the rest of us who were squishing up the path to the dry clothes. There was just enough time to play with a pet monkey, eat lunch and take a quick peek at this fantastical resort before leaving to board our Windstar schooner.

And to think we could have been crowded into buses with dozens of people, listening to condescending guides while looking at (or is that like?) caged baboons. I’ll bet no one offers them termites.