Central America overland routes & highlights

The advantage of taking three weeks to travel just two small countries is that you don’t just tick off the famous locations like the Panama Canal and Arenal Volcano. Instead, you can take your time, getting thoroughly off the beaten track for a more relaxed and immersive experience. That also ensures our vacations benefit communities that are well beyond the regular tourism route.

Panama in the far south of Central America is often something of an afterthought, somewhere to add on at the end of Costa Rica. This route does it justice, spending at least 10 days in a country that’s much more than a body of water and a hat. Our Costa Rica and Panama overland tour is tailor made, too, so you can extend it beyond three weeks if you prefer, add on other countries, or tweak the itinerary to suit your particular interests.

Begin in Panama City, where skyscrapers pile up into the sky above the Baroque and Spanish colonial houses of the UNESCO-listed Casco Viejo. The Panama Canal is one of the great engineering marvels of the modern age. Looking out across it from a viewpoint above gives you an idea of its immense scale. But kayaking through the watershed at sunset shows you its beauty, with professional guides keeping you paddling in the right direction while also filling you in on the canal’s astonishing history.

The only internal flight of the trip takes you to the mountain town of Boquete, where the highlands carry the promise of fragrant coffee fincas, zipline thrills, and hikes through wildlife-rich cloud forest. You’ll then enjoy an island interlude in Panama’s Bocas del Toro archipelago where you can slow things down, or throw in some more activities, before you cross the border into Costa Rica.

Costa Rica has long been a staple for those seeking adventure travel combined with natural beauty, but its Caribbean coast is less visited. Via Limon you can spend a few days volunteering in a private rainforest reserve – maintaining trails, planting trees, or monitoring wildlife camera traps. You can visit a Cabecar community and learn how to survive in the forest with traditional bow hunting and medicinal plants. Continuing on to Nosara, on the Nicoya Peninsula, you can whip up some corn tortillas stuffed with meat and vegetables in the private kitchen of a local chef, or whip out the board for a day of surfing. 


Panama and Costa Rica overland tour 23 days Good for: those wanting a relaxed pace and to get even further off the beaten track.

This route focuses on the center of Central America, winding its way through tiny and under-visited El Salvador, the natural wonders of Nicaragua from coast to volcano to rainforest, and guapa Guatemala, rich in traditional Maya culture, fervently beautiful in its landscapes. You pass through Honduras only briefly but still taking in key sites Copan and Suchitoto; not enough time to know the country, more than enough time to whet your appetite for a return visit. Costa Rica’s cloud forests, volcanos and adventure activities promise a thrilling grand finale.

Central America in general is quite an inexpensive region to travel – Costa Rica excepted – but this route is ideal for those on a budget as almost everything can be stripped out of our small group tours beyond a few meals and activities. So, when you reach Granada in Nicaragua, for instance, you can hire a kayak or a bike to explore, book a day trip to Masaya Volcano National Park – or content yourself with wandering the markets and cobbled streets, and getting a feel for the city on foot. In El Salvador, the dark sands of El Cuco are steepled with the boards of surfers who consider this one of the finest surf spots in the region. You can hire a board yourself, stretch out with a yoga class, or just chill in a hammock.

Our trips are accompanied throughout by professional tour leaders who know the route well, so you are never short of solid recommendations on local restaurants or food stands to visit – and neither are you short of dining companions. Routes like this are well suited to confident, independent travelers happy to do their own thing much of the time, but groups will often share meals together or split into smaller groups. You have the freedom to go your own way much of the time, but the structure of a pre-planned route ensures that all of the thorny logistics like transfers are cleared ahead of you.


Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras and Costa Rica 17 days Good for: travelers on a budget and looking for ad hoc adventures.

When you break this route down, it’s only 33 days. A little over four weeks. One solitary month (and a bit). But when you look at where you’ll go, and what you’ll do, over the course of that month – wow. You’ll travel almost the full length of Central America, from Playa del Carmen at the tip of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula south as far as the volcanic Lake Atitlan in Guatemala’s highlands, then drop down further south to reach San Jose in Costa Rica, via short but memorable hops through Belize, El Salvador and Honduras.

Maya culture, ancient and modern, runs through this itinerary like a seam. The clifftop ruins of Tulum are two hours by public bus from Cancun. Actun Tunichil Muknal (ATM) is a fascinating ceremonial site, a vast cave filled with skeletons, ceramics… and bats, set into Belize’s Tapir Mountains. Shrouded in jungle, Guatemala’s Tikal National Park is one of the finest Maya cities yet discovered, while the ruins of Copan in Honduras are far less visited but no less significant. You’ll also experience living Maya culture on this route. Visit Guatemalan villages to learn about traditional textile dying, or centuries-old pottery techniques. Wander highland markets where you can purchase a handful of roasted coffee beans, or a handmade hammock. Or visit a chocolate museum to learn why the Maya people considered cacao a gift from the gods, and try a hot chocolate infused with chilli.

Nature is also a constant as you leave the white sand beaches of the Yucatan for the coral reefs and manatees of Caye Caulker in Belize, Guatemala’s Lake Atitlan fringed with distant volcanoes, and the rolling breakers along El Salvador’s Pacific Coast. You can hear the toucans and macaws in the trees as you wander around Tikal, and watch hawks and falcons divebomb in Lake Atitlan. But it’s Costa Rica that thoroughly immerses you in natural wonder – zipline through the Monteverde Cloud Forest, traipse canopy walkways around Arenal Volcano, and spot caimans, capuchin monkeys and tapirs on boat safaris in Cano Negro Wildlife Refuge.

You finish in San Jose, but while that’s where your tour ends and your group goes its separate ways, it’s only a 90-minute flight to Panama City, and the chance to complete the set. Go on, what’s a few more days?


Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica overland tour 33 days Good for: those with more time and wanting to see more with it.