Guatemala & Belize

What follows is arranged so the hardest part comes while you are freshest, and the freedom comes once you have earned the appetite for it. Two nights in Antigua first, which is less a sightseeing stop than an acclimatization one at five thousand feet: a morning walking the cobblestones with a historian who has spent her life on them, an afternoon loose, a trek briefing over dinner. Then four days across the volcanic cordillera. The camps travel with you, struck and reset each day by a crew that moves ahead, so you walk with a day pack and arrive to a hot shower and a fire. The first day tops out near eight thousand seven hundred feet and drops through cloud forest. The second loses nineteen hundred to a hanging footbridge over the La Vega and climbs twenty-four hundred back out through coffee, ending at a camp that faces Fuego, which has erupted more or less continuously since the Spanish arrived and most nights puts lava in the sky while you eat. The third is the high point, just over nine thousand, a ridgeline with six volcanoes in view. The fourth ends at the rim of Atitlán, by way of a coffee farm.

Then it loosens, deliberately and in stages. Two nights on the lake and a boat across to San Juan la Laguna, where the cooperatives are weaving, coffee, chocolate and honey. A Mayan shaman reads the calendar on the morning you fly north, and the next day is Tikal — temples pushing up through the canopy in a park large enough to hold jaguar and tapir. Chaa Creek gives you three nights on its own reserve, with Maya ruins, a butterfly farm and the Macal River all inside the boundary, and no obligation to do anything with any of it. The last five nights are a private catamaran with a crew, a chef and no other guests aboard, where you decide when the anchor comes up and whether today is three islands or none. It begins with somebody else carrying the tent and ends with nobody deciding anything but you.