In 1996 me and two friends undertook our first backpacking experience. We traveled from Costa Rica to Guatemala in six months. We originally planned to travel for a year, but half way decided to do something more useful with our presence in Central America and applied for volunteer jobs in Honduras and Guatemala.

For many years the Mayan World has been a popular destination for adventure seekers. Early day explorers like John Lloyd Stephens discovered the region to be full of exciting surprises when he first stumbled upon great ancient pyramids in the early 19^th century. Only forty years ago a visit to the now well known ruins of Tikal, Guatemala meant a venturing on a two-day jungle hike over rarely trotted paths, after a dubious flight into Guatemala´s jungle capital, Flores.

A favorite among adventure travel and jungle tours, The "Mundo Maya", or Mayan World, is an area of roughly 300,000 square kilometers (116,000 square miles) in Central America, covering the whole of Belize and Guatemala and parts of Honduras, El Salvador and the Mexican states of Chiapas, Campeche, Yucatán and Quintana Roo. The ancient Mayans left evidence of their existence in the form of limestone constructions throughout this vast tropical region.