Our final destination in Guatemala is beautiful Antigua, where we’ll spend the weekend, having covered over 1400kms on this leg of our travels, with our Intrepid group tour from Playa Del Carmen. Due partly to its geographical location in the valley but also to deliberate decision-making, there is no modern urban sprawl on the outskirts of Antigua, its city boundaries remaining as they were in 1776. So modern day Antigua is rebuilt as it would have been at the height of its colonial power, although with subtle changes. 

Whereas the journey across had been reasonably placid, the anchored boats are now bouncing around on the surging waters. Aquilino talks to the skipper and then beckons us all to get on the boat. There’s an increasing degree of worry etched on many of our faces, with Coman in particular not a happy person on rough waters. Everyone is instructed that they must wear a life jacket and we are redistributed around the boat for the weight. 

A few hours beyond Antigua lies the town of Chichicastenango. It’s home to the K’iche Maya, and along with a number of other neighbouring villages in the hills and valleys that surround it, has preserved the Maya’s unique living culture and beliefs in tandem with European and Christian influences. Over the next two days, and in particular tonight, we will be interacting closely with them and the other two Maya groups - Kaqchikel  and Tz’utujil- who inhabit the western Guatemalan highlands. 

Towards the end of the river is a sweeping canyon, along whose fringes pirates used to write their names on the limestone walls. And beyond that is Livingston, not named after the 19th Century British explorer but an American politician. The town is famous for being home to Guatemala’s Garífuna community, who are a distinct ethnic group within the country centred in this town, and they refer to Livingston locally as Buga, meaning mouth of the river.  

It’s a great experience to feel hot, hot water cascading down upon us and a party-like atmosphere descends upon us, with beer and canned cocktails flowing and sludgy volcanic mud being used as face masks. Eventually we all clamber back up the pathways to the minibus and drive back through the beautiful countryside to reach the wide Rio Dulce, or ‘sweet river’, where loading all our bags into a groaning boat we motor across the water to our lodgings for the next two days, Hacienda Tijax. 

What is now jungle was actually fully deforested and developed by the Maya with grand plazas, streets, homes, shops, official buildings and general city life. The eventual abandonment of the entire city in 900AD has never been fully explained but is likely to be associated with drought, possibly exacerbated by the deforestation that had occurred. Ironically the Maya knew the city as Xatamutl, meaning ‘place you can find water’, and it only became known as Tikal when the Austrian explorer Teobert Maler during its excavations realised how the buildings had been designed to create specific acoustics and named it ‘place of voices’ or Tikal in the local modern Maya tongue. 

The tour we have chosen is to the Actun Tunichil Muknal, or Cave of the Sacred Sepulchre. It promises to take us hiking through the lush subtropical forests of the Tapir Mountain Reserve to the crystal blue waters surrounding the entrance of a remarkable limestone cave system. We’ll then explore its underground passages, past sparkling millennia-old stalactites and stalagmites to discover hidden chambers full of Maya artefacts and remains that reveal the rituals and ceremonies of a lost world. 

Our next stop is Shark Alley where we make anchor and are immediately surrounded by a school of nurse sharks. Assured that they’re not interested in eating us we all get into the water and spend fifteen astonishing minutes swimming amongst them. It really is magnificent, as is our third stop, named the Coral Gardens, for all its different coral growths. We’re encouraged to dive here just in pairs, without a leader needed, and Coman and I have a wonderful experience where a large green turtle swims slowly with us for a couple of minutes. 

Once our group have all made it through immigration and changed our money we all board a waiting minibus and start our journey through the country. Rain starts to fall as we drive through Corazol, the first town after the border, which is on the edge of the Caribbean, and dark clouds briefly threaten storms overhead but within minutes the sun blazes back down again over fields of sugar cane and palm trees. 

We are stopping for the night at the small coastal city of Chetumal on the Mexican side of the border with Belize, but before we reach there Aquilino has arranged an unexpected detour for us to Bacalar, which boasts a gorgeous lagoon, famed for having seven colours of water. It’s a spectacular nature reserve which had been on my wish list to visit, but I didn’t think we’d have the time.