from $3,255* per person	9 Days	Year-round
Luxury accommodations		Exertion level: 4
Operator: Geographic Expeditions		18 people max

As Charles C. Mann points out in his game-changing 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, in 1000 ce the Mayans of what is now southern Mexico and Guatemala were civilizationally right on a par with the Incas, with the Moors of Spain, with just about every human society (outside of China, it must be said).

Since most of us are New Worlders with Old World–centric attitudes about history, this fact often comes as a surprise. But after our well-guided wanderings in the fantastic ruins of southern Mexico and Guatemala, our consciousnesses will be suitably expanded (and, just as importantly, our souls will be enriched by an ongoing cavalcade of major-league jungle beauty).

Our route takes us roughly eastward, along the border region of Mexico’s southern Chiapas to the Petén jungle of Guatemala, with visits to a passel of World Heritage Site ruins along the way, culminating in marvelous Tikal, a place where history becomes thrillingly immediate (as it does in lovely, colonial, hip San Cristóbal de las Casas at trip’s beginning, where we’re reminded that, as Mann says, “Spain never fully subdued the Maya [and] the Zapatista rebellion that convulsed southern Mexico in the 1990s [now quiescent] was merely the most recent battle in an episodic colonial war that began in the sixteenth century”).