A good alternative is to fly to Cancun on Mexico’s Caribbean coast and travel overland to Belize

A good alternative is to fly to Cancun, on Mexico’s Caribbean coast, and travel overland to Belize.Belize’s land area is about the same size as Wales, but there’s an equal area of sea and islands. It also boasts three of the only four coral atolls in the Caribbean, protected in national parks and marine reserves. Return fares vary from pounds 470-pounds 650 – low season is in the British summer. For Belize you almost always need an overnight stay in the USA. Keep up withdevelopments in travel by subscribing to the free newsletter `Rough News’, published three times yearly. Write to Rough Guides, IoS offer, 1 Mercer Street, London WC2H 9QJ.

A free Rough Guide to the first three subscribers each week.FACT FILEGetting There: There are no direct flights to either Belize or Guatemala, but you can get to Guatemala in one day using American or Continental. I was flown to Belize City the next day, but rejected advice to fly out to a modern hospital in Florida. I stayed in Belize, recovering over Christmas as a guest of the British High Commission, and the Foreign Office gained a new fan.Peter Eltringham did research for `The Rough Guide to Guatemala and Belize’. Each wave hitting the boat knocked the breath out of me and at the hospital the X-ray machine blew a fuse every time the technician turned it on.

I was in a serious state; six broken ribs, a punctured lung and the possibility of a ruptured spleen. The only way out was by boat, nine miles over choppy sea in the dark to the hospital in the District capital of Dangriga It was excruciating. As I fell I realised that the verandah deck was one of the unfinished parts. I hit a horizontal hardwood beam a foot square then slid off, gasping, into the sand.The entire village was alarmed, convinced I was going to die. Robert called to me from outside and I stepped through the door to the balcony to see what he wanted.