Belize
More than half the country is forest, the ruins still wear their canopy, and the treehouses sit on real rivers.
Belize gets filed under reef and beach, which undersells it badly. Behind the cayes sits a country that is more than half forested, cut through by the Maya Mountains, with one of the densest jaguar populations on the planet and Maya cities that still rise out of unbroken canopy. English is the official language, the US dollar is accepted at a fixed two-to-one rate, and the whole country is smaller than New Hampshire, so a jungle week here is easy to run.
The stays cluster in Cayo, the western district along the Guatemalan border. San Ignacio is the working hub: a real market town, not a resort strip, two hours by road from the international airport. The Mopan and Macal rivers meet there, and the treehouses in this directory sit on their banks, in Guanacaste trees, above landscaped gardens, or up in the hills at Santa Cruz. From Cayo you day-trip to Xunantunich, Caracol, the ATM cave and Mountain Pine Ridge. Toledo, in the deep south around Punta Gorda, is quieter, wetter and wilder, and it is where the country's most serious jungle lodge sits on 16,000 acres.
Dry season runs roughly late November through May and lines up with the busy holiday stretch, so book Cayo lodges well ahead for Christmas and New Year. June through November is wet, green and cheaper, with rain that mostly arrives in the afternoon. Howler monkeys are the alarm clock in Cayo; nobody warns you how loud they are.
Maya forest, jaguar country