Belize

Belize is Central America's best-kept secret, though the secret is getting out fast. It is the only English-speaking country in Central America, a former British colony squeezed between Mexico and Guatemala that feels like the Caribbean and Central America had a baby and raised it in the jungle. The country is tiny - about the size of New Jersey - with fewer than 430,000 people, but it packs in more biodiversity per square kilometer than almost anywhere in the region.

The Belize Barrier Reef, the second-largest in the world after Australia's, runs the entire length of the coast and contains the Great Blue Hole, a massive underwater sinkhole that Jacques Cousteau called one of the top dive sites on the planet. Inland, the jungle hides hundreds of Mayan ruins, jaguars, howler monkeys, and cave systems that the ancient Maya used as entrances to the underworld. Belize is the kind of place where you can explore a thousand-year-old temple in the morning, snorkel a coral reef in the afternoon, and eat rice and beans with stew chicken while listening to reggae at a beachside shack by evening.