Four days in San Ignacio, Belize: the Maya left their dead in this cave and nobody moved them

Walk up to Cahal Pech first, which takes twenty minutes from the main street and puts the whole area in context before you go anywhere else. It is a small Maya city, occupied for something like two thousand years and abandoned around 800 to 900 AD, and what has been cleared is a tight complex of plazas, courtyards, a ball court and stepped platforms under big trees. It is quiet, you can climb most of it, and there is a small museum with a site plan that is worth ten minutes before you walk in.

Come back down through the town and look at the Hawksworth Bridge, which sounds like a thin excuse for a sight until you see it: a green suspension bridge with two towers, built in 1949 and named for the governor of the day, and the only one of its kind in the country. It carries a single lane of cars up out of the town, high above the Macal, and the view up and down the river from the walkway is the best you will get here.

Then eat. For a town of this size, San Ignacio is disproportionately good at it, and the range is odd: Belizean stewed chicken and rice, a Sri Lankan restaurant, several Chinese places, and a farm-to-table kitchen that raises most of its own meat.

This is the day people book the trip for and it takes all of it. The van leaves early for the Tapir Mountain reserve, then there is a jungle walk of about forty-five minutes with three river crossings on foot, and then the cave mouth: a wide pool of clear green water with the entrance behind it, which you swim into. From there you are in the river inside the mountain for the best part of an hour, wading, climbing and squeezing between formations, with everything lit by the lamp on your helmet.

Then the cave opens out. A climb up into a vast dry chamber, socks on and shoes off so that nothing is damaged underfoot, and the floor is covered in the things the Maya carried in here more than a thousand years ago: ceramic vessels, many deliberately broken, cemented into the rock by centuries of drip. Beyond them are human remains, at least fourteen individuals, left where they were placed. The last and most famous is an almost complete skeleton, calcified into a sparkling crust and known as the Crystal Maiden.

Nothing has been removed and nothing is behind glass. You walk between it all with a guide telling you where to put your feet, which is why cameras are banned, why numbers are limited and why you go with one of a handful of people licensed to take you. It is an eight-hour day and it is the single best thing in Belize.

Xunantunich is ten kilometres west, and getting there is half the pleasure. Any bus towards Benque drops you at Succotz, where a small ferry crosses the Mopan river, turned by hand on a crank by a man who has been doing it for years. It carries a car at a time and it is free. On the far bank a road climbs a mile or so to the site, walkable if it is not too hot and easy to get a lift up.

The city sits on a natural ridge with a commanding view over the river valley into Guatemala, and its main structure, El Castillo, is one of the tallest buildings in Belize. You can climb it. On the east side there is a frieze of moon and sun symbols and a Maya ruler in stucco running across the upper level, restored from fragments, and from the top you look out over forest with the border a few kilometres away. Allow three or four hours. The main visitor centre has been closed for some time, though smaller display buildings on the hill are open.

On the way back, turn up the Chial Road towards Chaa Creek, where a lodge has opened its grounds to day visitors: a rainforest medicine trail through plants the Maya used and still use, and a small natural history centre with a butterfly farm attached. Further along the same valley, the botanic gardens run about three kilometres of paths through native palms, orchids and forest trees, which is a gentler way to end a hot afternoon than another set of stairs.

Walk out to Branch Mouth before it gets hot. It is twenty minutes along Branch Mouth Road from the middle of town, and at the end of it the Macal and the Mopan run together and become the Belize river, which then crosses the whole country to the sea. There is a small park with a picnic area and a bit of beach, a low hammock bridge over the water that swings more than you expect, and usually a few local families in the shallows.

Back in town, the market. The hall sells vegetables and everyday goods every day of the week, but Saturday is the one: growers and traders come in from across the Cayo district and the stalls spread well beyond the building, with produce, prepared food, tools, clothes and a great deal of standing about talking. If your four days can be arranged so that this is the Saturday, arrange them that way.

Then a bus. They leave for Belize City through the morning and afternoon and take a little over two hours, or west to the border in thirty minutes if you are going on to Tikal.