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As mentioned previously, you can go do the marathon mission to the ATM Cave, or be ferried down to the Caracol ruins by the Belizean police.  But if you fancy doing something a bit more chilled out, there are a few fantastic options.

On the extremely bumpy road to Caracol, you’ll see a sign to Rio On Pools.  Turn down there and you’ll be able to wander through the undergrowth to a beautiful set of pools and mini waterfalls cascading over rocks.  The water here is really nice, though a little murky if there’s been a storm recently, and you can get a nice long back massage under some of the waterfalls – you know, the ones you can reach before the current swishes you away and back into the pools.  And after you’ve had a good splash around you can sunbathe on the warmed-up rocks.  Ahhh, heaven.  Watch out for the rocks hidden in what you would assume is a deep bit, though; my knees were all sorts of pretty colours a few days later.

Or there’s the Blue Hole National Park.  No, not the Blue Hole, where you scuba dive – there are several blue holes in Belize and this one is a deep blue pool in a protected jungle where you’re not supposed to jump off the rocks, let alone dive, but on the other hand it’s so deep we couldn’t find the bottom and it was a lot of fun, so hey.

But one of the most popular things to do in this region is to go cave-tubing through some of the numerous bat-filled caverns.  Now, you can do this on a tour from San Ignacio, but such is the close proximity of everything in Belize to everything else, you can also do it en route to Belize City and the Cayes if you’re going that way, or even if you’re heading south to the coastal towns.  We had a car between us, so we drove straight to the caves near to Belmopan, where most of the cave-tubing tours go from.  And the reason I’d recommend doing it this way is because at the entrance to the caves from the road you will find several freelance cave-tubing guides, most of which will have worked for the big companies before and know their way around just as well, and you can get much, much cheaper rates.  Even without a car, you could probably get a bus to Belmopan and then a taxi from there.

Cave-tubing is incredible, and it’s just what it sounds like: you float on big rubber rings down the rivers that run through the caves.  You have headlamps for the dark bits; although, if you had a guide like ours, you might find yourselves turning them off and floating along in pitch blackness.  I can tell you, there are few things more disorienting than drifting in the dark.  At one point I was convinced that we had hit a current, I had turned round and was zipping along backwards.  I turned on my light to find that I had come to a standstill and was still facing the right way.  Very embarrassing.

You get a good hour or so on the water, during which time you might find that your bum gets a bit bruised over the shallow, rocky bits, where the current runs faster.  There really is only so high that you can lift your backside on those things.

But it’s a great combination of exciting and chilled, and a lot of fun.  My bruises are now, I am happy to say, fading!