The Maya Corridor

We begin in San Salvador with an early transfer west toward the volcanic highlands. The morning brings Cerro Verde National Park: cloud forest, sulphur vapour, and exposed lava fields. The main event is Santa Ana, known locally as Ilamatepec: El Salvador's highest active volcano, rising just above 2,300 metres, with a crater lake that shifts between pale green and turquoise. The two-hour ascent offers views to the Pacific on one side and the lake-filled Guatemalan border on the other. The late afternoon is for the view across Lake Coatepeque (a flooded caldera far below) before we settle in Santa Ana city for the night.

The border crossing into Guatemala is straightforward and brings us into the eastern highlands. We make the long arc west and south around Guatemala City to Antigua, a city whose formal name, La Muy Noble y Leal Ciudad de Santiago de los Caballeros, tells you how seriously it took itself in the colonial era. The approach, with the three volcanoes of Agua, Fuego, and Acatenango arranged behind the tile rooftops, is one of those arrivals that earns its reputation. We arrive by early afternoon, leaving time to walk the cobblestone grid, see the famous ruined façade of La Merced, and settle in before the most demanding day of the expedition.

This is the day the expedition is built around, and the reason we keep nothing else in the schedule. Acatenango is a stratovolcano at 3,976 metres, the third-highest in Central America, and its neighbour is Volcán de Fuego, erupting every twenty to forty minutes. We depart Antigua late morning for the trailhead at La Soledad: six to seven hours of steep climbing through farmland, then forest, then open scree, gaining 1,570 metres before reaching base camp. Dinner is cooked at altitude. After dark, Fuego takes over: eruptions lighting the underside of the cloud, the deep percussion arriving seconds after the flash, the lava flows visible in the clear gaps between. Sleep is optional.

The pre-dawn alarm is worth it. A summit push at 4 a.m. puts us on the rim as first light separates Fuego from the sky to the east, the Pacific coast just visible to the south, the volcanic chain of Central America stretching in both directions. The descent takes three to four hours and returns us to Antigua by midday, battered, exhilarated, and ready for a long lunch and the afternoon off. Antigua in the afternoon is its own reward: the Central Park, the yellow Cathedral of San José, the rooftop views from the Santa Catalina Arch, the textile markets, and the particular quality of light this city manages in the late afternoon.

The drive from Antigua to Esquipulas takes four to five hours, heading east across the Guatemalan highlands and then dropping into the drier valleys near the Honduran and Salvadoran borders. Esquipulas sits in a bowl-shaped valley at 920 metres, its gleaming white Baroque basilica visible from the road well before the town appears. The Basílica del Cristo Negro is the largest Catholic church in Central America and one of the continent's most important pilgrimage sites, around 4.5 million visitors a year. The statue of the Black Christ at its centre was carved from dark wood in 1594 by a Quiché Maya craftsman and credited with miracles since the seventeenth century. The interior is spare; the figure does the work. We spend the afternoon here at a considered pace.

The border crossing from Guatemala into Honduras at El Florido is a short drive from Esquipulas, one of the easier land crossings in the region, and just fourteen kilometres from the Copán archaeological site. The town of Copán Ruinas, which grew up around the ruins, has the unhurried pace of a place that knows it has something worth staying for: cobblestone streets, good coffee, and the scarlet macaw (Honduras's national bird) at the nearby Macaw Mountain reserve, where canopy walkways bring you eye-level with creatures that would otherwise remain a distant flash of colour. The afternoon, once settled, is yours for the town or the reserve.

The Maya city of Copán was at its height in the eighth century, a sophisticated astronomical and ceremonial centre whose rulers commissioned some of the most detailed carved stonework in the pre-Columbian Americas. The UNESCO site covers the main acropolis, the ball court, and the Grand Plaza, where seventeen intricately carved stelae (each a portrait of a ruler, precisely dated and captioned in glyphs) stand in the open air. The Hieroglyphic Stairway, with more than 1,250 glyphs constituting the longest known Maya inscription, is the centrepiece: an entire dynastic history carved into sixty-three rising steps. The on-site Sculpture Museum (entered through a doorway carved as the open mouth of a serpent) holds the original carvings and a reconstruction of the Rosalila temple found buried intact beneath the acropolis. We spend the morning here slowly. Departures connect to San Pedro Sula airport or back to Guatemala City.