A Mayan sauna, known as a temescal, was not tall enough to stand in, but wooden benches provided seating. Rinsing off with bowls of steaming water is a refreshing way to end a day spent hauling a pack 13 miles through cornfields and cloud forests.

We walked into the village around dusk, but with the fog pouring down the dirt streets, it could have been anytime. It was cold, and I could hardly see across the concrete plaza. The Catholic church had been cleaved by an earthquake, the gap between its two halves now spanned with sheets of plywood, but that didn’t stop people from praying in the dank cavern on a floor littered with boughs of long green pine needles.

Our accommodations were a municipal building, a cinder block structure around a courtyard with a fountain that didn’t work and an ash heap where skinny mutts gnawed leftovers. We were to sleep on the tile floor of a room with no furniture and a nonfunctioning light bulb hanging from a wire. I recognized the place from Hollywood thrillers: This was where the narco-cartel tortured its enemies.

It was the first day of our three-day walk across the highlands from Quetzaltenango to Lake Atitlan. I was back in Guatemala, and pretty pleased about it.

Later that night, in the yard of someone’s house, we crawled on our knees to enter a smoky sauna. Inside, a fire had been burning for an hour, and the temperature was well over 100.

It was like a large doghouse, a concrete box with a pitched roof, not tall enough to stand in, but we could sit upright on a wooden bench. From a steel drum we scooped bowls of steaming water and rinsed ourselves. It felt good after hauling a pack 13 miles through sun-beaten cornfields, dropping into cloud forests where bamboo and orchids grew and where weathered woodcutters with machetes heaved beneath 100-pound loads of firewood.

We sweated in this Mayan sauna, a temescal, for half an hour, before crawling outside to discover that the fog had dispersed and the sky was exploding with stars. Back at the plaza a town meeting was under way, and the villagers were debating something in their glottal, popping language called Tz’utujil.

The taming of the land

Remember when Guatemala was the world’s coolest destination, when your dormmates returned from winter break bedecked in purple ponchos for which they’d bargained — in Spanish! — from some actual Maya on market day in Chichicastenango? As decades of civil war calmed enough to allow tourism, your friends reported hair-raising rides aboard rickety chicken buses, those Blue Birds pimped like low-riders with flashing lights, naked-lady mud flaps, and Jesus and the Virgin Mary airbrushed on the hood.

But that was so 1990. When the next generation lugged its backpacks to more exotic places like Uzbekistan and Laos, Guatemala became a done-that, losing its cachet among the Lonely Planet vanguard and opening itself up to the Frommer’s masses. Tourism is now the country’s top industry, a fact made evident by the tour buses spilling North Americans, Europeans and South Americans into destinations like Antigua, Tikal and Lake Atitlan. Just how tame has Guatemala become? Well, in the past two decades my 72-year-old mother had gone there 15 times.

But when my parents invited my girlfriend and me to join them on Trip No. 16, I was struck with nostalgic yearning. It had been 17 years since my only visit to Guatemala, and in the intervening years as a writer searching for new places, I had ended up in a few locations that were just as well left unvisited. Maybe the reason so many people still flock to Guatemala is that it is fun to be there. It is, after all, a country where a man in a cowboy hat will board the public bus and sell you a pink ice cream cone for 25 cents.

Our plan was to travel the new gringo trail with my parents and then peel off into parts unknown. First we took a week of Spanish classes in Antigua, its cobblestone streets so heavily trod by foreign sandals that it ceases to feel Guatemalan and takes on an international character all its own. The narrow sidewalks teem with mimes and Michigan State students among the Mayas and marimbas, and you can choose Thai, Italian or sushi each night. The one-on-one Spanish lessons cost just $120 a week, and even if you don’t want to learn the language, paying someone $7 an hour to listen to you is a pretty good deal. We spent afternoons climbing volcanoes and riding bikes through hillside villages, the pat-pat-pat of hands slapping dough audible through the open doors of the tortillerias.

Then we spent a week on Lake Atitlan, which has perhaps borne the hardest brunt of backpackers. While the indigenous villagers, since the landing of Pedro de Alvarado 500 years ago, have resisted outside conquest well enough to maintain their native language, they appear to have capitulated almost entirely in the four decades since the arrival of the hippie. You can get by easily here with no language but English and no currency but dollars, and fantasies of Mayan immersion are disrupted by barefoot white people hawking trinkets and busking Bob Marley on the guitar.

We avoided these Haight Street dregs — not to mention all glimmers of native culture — when my parents checked us into the exquisite Hotel Atitlan. Here amid captive blossoms and parrots in cages, the waters of the infinity pool seemed to merge with the lake, and as mist hovered on the volcano tops, cocktails were delivered caldron-side by Mayas dressed in the warrior costumes of their ancestors.

Ready for adventure

Once my parents left, my girlfriend, Cedar, and I wanted to get off the pavement. In the 15 years since the civil war, the dangers of wandering Guatemala’s wilderness have greatly decreased, and these days, outdoor adventure is booming: mountain biking tours, sea kayaking and treks across the highlands, like the one that landed us in the tiny fog-laden village of Santa Catarina.

After packing up in the ramshackle municipal building that had proved a perfectly acceptable campsite, we crossed the plaza for breakfast in a one-table diner where an elderly woman named Maria was pressing tortillas over a fire. After our breakfast of eggs and rice and beans, we started the day’s hike, which would take us across plots of corn and green peas that clung to the steep hills like patchwork, and then down a ravine to cross a rickety wooden footbridge and hoist ourselves up the mountain on the other side. Our guides were young volunteers from Britain and Ireland. The company was called Quetzaltrekkers, a nonprofit that operates a school and a youth home with the funds it raises through these trips.

Late in the afternoon, after criss-crossing a creek shaded with alder groves and banana trees and orange lilies, we climbed out of yet another canyon. The lead guide, Anne McGarr, 25, a Dublin speech therapist on indefinite leave from her job, whipped out a phone and asked, “Who wants strawberry, and who wants pineapple?” Fifteen minutes later when we arrived at the house on whose floor we’d be sleeping — an upgrade from the previous night’s interrogation chamber — Don Pedro, the house’s owner, was ready with two blenders of cold fruit licuados.

He and his wife served us chicken, rice and beans, and afterward we sat around a fire passing a guitar back and forth. Don Pedro sang us songs in both Spanish and Quiche, and paused to tell us of the dire poverty he’d grown up in, just a thatched roof shack for all 14 siblings, 10 of whom died young. I didn’t want to interrupt his story, so I never asked if they died from poverty, or the war, or something else. He said that the hardship had ended, thanks to God, only with the arrival of missionaries from Spokane, Wash., and Helena, Mont., who brought with them radios, medicine and irrigation. They even taught Don Pedro to read. He thanked us for passing through his village, for supporting the school and the youth home with the money we spent for the hike.

“Somos todos los hijos de Dios,” he concluded. We are all God’s children.

I guess I expected resentment toward the unending stream of foreign do-gooders — from missionaries to the Peace Corps to Quetzaltrekkers — who can create one set of problems as they address another. I was surprised by Don Pedro’s earnest appreciation: The closest translation of his words was, “We love tourists here.” And I suppose that’s what I’m looking for when I ramble across other countries — not obliterating my own identity or merging with the locals, but just that thrill of not knowing what will happen next.

Before bed Anne informed us that our wake-up call was 4 in the morning. She told us to trust her, it would be worth it. So when the alarm chirped we packed in chilly darkness, hauled ourselves past the lone bulb of a church, dodged buses as we climbed a paved road and emerged at a rim overlooking Lake Atitlan, the lights of the villages twinkling below. There on a rugged patch of earth we rolled out of our sleeping bags and boiled water for powdered coffee and chocolate, watched the sky go gray and the lake go blue. Only a few hours had passed since Don Pedro’s lullabies. Now with the sun in the sky, we descended the rest of the way to the waters.

If you go

The three-day trek from Quetzaltenango to Lake Atitlan with Quetzaltrekkers (minimum donation 600 quetzales, about $81 at 7.4 quetzales to the dollar; quetzaltrekkers.com) includes all meals, but not tips for the volunteer guides. For an additional 90 quetzales, your luggage will be delivered to the trip’s end.

Some trekkers spend the night before departure at Casa Argentina (casaargentina.xela@gmail.com), the dilapidated hostel that is home to Quetzaltrekkers’ office (60 quetzales for a double), but a better night’s rest will be found at Hotel Casa Manen (385 to 500 quetzales for a double; comeseeit.com).

Adrenalina Tours offers minibus shuttle service from Guatemala City to Quetzaltenango (230 quetzales; adrenalinatours.com).

A similar trek to Quetzaltrekkers’, but in the reverse direction, is offered by Old Town Outfitters (from $265 a person; adventureguatemala.com), which includes round-trip shuttle from Antigua.

At trek’s end, a short ferry ride across the lake takes you to San Marcos, where lakefront rooms are sculpted into a cliff at Hotel Aaculaax ($65 for a double; aaculaax.com).