Ten days from the Yucatán into Belize: cross one border and the ruins empty out

It is an hour south from the airport. Get there, drop everything, and walk to the water, because tomorrow starts early.

Quinta Avenida runs parallel to the beach for about four kilometres and is closed to traffic for most of that. It is a shopping street and makes no claim to be anything else, but it is a pleasant hour in the evening and the food gets better the further north you go from the ferry pier.

At the south end, where the street meets the sea, there is a large bronze arch of two figures holding a child up between them. It went up in 2012 and has become the thing everybody photographs here, mostly because the beach behind it is where the ferries to Cozumel come in and the light at six is very good.

Leave at seven. Tulum is an hour south and it is the only Maya city built on the coast, on a cliff above a beach that you can still swim from, which is why it is on every poster of Mexico ever printed. It is small, it takes ninety minutes, and after about nine thirty the coach parties arrive in numbers that make the walkways single file. Being at the gate when it opens is the whole trick.

Then go inland to Cobá, which is the opposite in every way: 45 kilometres into the forest, spread over several square kilometres connected by raised stone causeways, and mostly still under trees. Its main pyramid, Nohoch Mul, is 42 metres high and was one of the last in the region you were allowed to climb, until that stopped in 2020. You can still stand at the bottom of it, which is enough.

Bikes and pedal taxis run the causeways inside the site and are worth taking, because the distances between groups are real. Stop at a cenote on the road back.

Four hours south, past the turn-off for the Costa Maya and into a part of Quintana Roo that has no resorts in it. You arrive in the early afternoon at a town of about eleven thousand people on a ridge above the water.

The Fuerte de San Felipe sits on that ridge with its guns pointing east, and it was built in the 1720s and 1730s for a specific and unusual reason: English logwood cutters and pirates operating out of what is now Belize kept sacking the town, which sits on a channel that connects the lagoon to the Caribbean. The small museum inside covers the raids and the Caste War that came later, and the ramparts give you the first proper look at the water.

Then walk down to it. The Cenote de la Bruja is in town at the edge of the lagoon, is dark blue against the pale shallows around it, and is the easiest swim of the trip. Sunset is from the fort or from any of the docks below it.

Get on the lagoon early, while it is flat. Sailing boats go out from the docks below town for three or four hours, tacking north up the channel with stops to swim, and it is the only way to see why the water changes colour: the bed is white limestone at the edges, drops into deep cenote holes in the middle, and the two produce every shade between turquoise and navy within a few metres of each other.

In the afternoon, drive twenty minutes south to Los Rápidos, where the lagoon narrows and the current runs fast enough to carry you. You walk upstream and float back down, over beds of stromatolites, which are mounds built by cyanobacteria and are among the oldest forms of life on earth. They are also fragile and slow-growing, so the rules are strict and worth keeping: no sunscreen, no repellent, no standing on the pale ridges.

That leaves the evening for the town, which is small, has one good mezcal bar and gets dark early.

The border is fifty kilometres south. You leave Mexico at Subteniente López, hand back the tourist card, walk across, and enter a country that speaks English and drives on the right and feels immediately less organised and considerably friendlier. A shuttle covers the whole run to San Ignacio in about four hours including the crossing.

San Ignacio is a hill town where two rivers meet, and the thing to do on the afternoon you arrive is walk up to Cahal Pech, which sits on the ridge directly above it. It is a small site by the standards of what is coming, thirty four structures around a set of tight courtyards, but it is one of the oldest in the Maya lowlands: people were living up here more than three thousand years ago, long before the big cities existed. It is usually empty and the forest has been left close in around it.

Come back down over the Hawksworth Bridge, a green steel suspension bridge from 1949 that is the only one of its kind in the country and is one lane wide, and eat on Burns Avenue.

Xunantunich is eleven kilometres west, and getting there is half of it: the road stops at the Mopan River and a flat steel ferry, cranked across by hand on a cable by a man who has been doing it for years, takes you and any vehicle over one at a time. It runs from eight to four and costs nothing.

The site is on a ridge on the far side. El Castillo, the main pyramid, is forty metres high and you are allowed to climb it, and the reason to is the frieze running around the upper structure: a band of carved stucco with the sun god, moon signs and captive figures on it, restored on the eastern face. From the top you can see into Guatemala, which is four kilometres away.

In the afternoon, go back east along the river to the botanic gardens, a hundred and forty hectares of collected Belizean plant life laid out along paths with a Maya medicinal trail through part of it. It is calm, shaded and the antidote to a morning on a pyramid in full sun.

This is the early start. Caracol is eighty kilometres south and the last fifty of them are slow, climbing through the Mountain Pine Ridge on unsealed road, so tours leave around half past seven and get back after five.

What is at the end is the largest Maya site in Belize and one of the largest anywhere: at its height around 650 AD it held something in the order of a hundred thousand people, more than live in Belize City today, spread over sixty five square kilometres with causeways running out to satellite centres. Caana, the sky palace at the middle of it, is forty three metres high and is still the tallest structure in the country. You climb it, and there is nobody else on it.

The Mountain Pine Ridge on the way is a granite plateau covered in pine rather than jungle, which is startling in this part of the world, with waterfalls and cold swimming holes in it. Most tours stop at one on the way back, and after a day in the ruins it is the right order to do them in.

Two hours east to Belize City, then a water taxi. The boats leave from the terminal at the north end of the swing bridge, run several times a day, take about forty five minutes and are open at the sides, so anything that must stay dry goes in the middle of the bag.

Caye Caulker has three streets, all sand, no cars, and a channel through the middle. Hurricane Hattie cut that channel in 1961 and it has been widening ever since, and the north side of it is where everybody swims, from a set of docks and a bar built on the water.

Do nothing else today. Eat fryjacks, which are pillows of fried dough split and filled and are the national breakfast, sit on the dock, and book tomorrow's boat while you are there.

The barrier reef is a kilometre and a half offshore and runs the whole length of the country, the largest reef system in the northern hemisphere, and the full-day boat is the reason to have come this far south.

The standard trip is three or four snorkelling stops on a sailing catamaran: coral gardens, a channel cut through the reef where the fish stack up because they are protected there, and a shallow bank where nurse sharks and southern stingrays come to the boats. The sharks are two metres long, entirely harmless, and swimming among a dozen of them takes some getting used to.

Pick the operator on how they behave rather than the price. The good ones do not feed the sharks to draw them in, do not stand on coral, and carry a lot less than thirty people. Back by five, sunburnt, and there is a bakery on the main street that sells cinnamon rolls until they run out.

The last morning is a swim and a coffee. Water taxis to Belize City run from early and take forty five minutes, and the airport is another twenty minutes north of the terminal by taxi.

Allow three hours between the boat and the flight. The boats are reliable and the road is not, and the international airport does not reward optimism.

If you are flying out of Cancún instead, there is a small airstrip on the caye with flights to Belize City, and from there it is a long day back up the coast by road. Doing it in one hop is worth the extra fare.