Baby in a hot thin waist

Becoming a parent is crazy. People do strange things, act out of character, and genuinely go a bit mad in the year after the birth of their first child. For my partner Dara and myself, this took the form of deciding that it was the ideal time for a three-month trip to the hot thin waist of the Americas.

The looks that we got when we told people ranged from surprise to shock to horror. Touring Central America with a six-month-old baby? What about disease, earthquakes, bandits?

"It'll be the same as looking after him here," we'd pompously assert, indignant that anyone should question the righteousness of our decision. "Apart from the blue skies and sunshine," and we'd laugh, smugly. We'd both travelled extensively before, knew all about roughing it in so-called Third World countries. What could possibly be different in bringing along our best mate, our smiling little man-child Fiach?

Fiach was the opposite of unwanted but definitely not planned – his dad and I were only together for nine months before he announced his presence. Like many other love-children, he forced his parents-to-be to confront their complacency. When we got pregnant there was a sense of urgency to do things we'd never done before. We were scared of the responsibility that loomed ahead, of losing our freedom to go adventuring.

Travelling with our baby became a powerful symbol for our commitment to the independent lifestyle. We also felt that it would be a positive influence on our son at this early stage of his development. People warned of the dangers, especially the health risks. But what could be healthier for a baby, we reasoned, than spending three months with both parents in the warm fresh air?

We conquered our fears and began preparations. You know how getting ready to go travelling – finding people to sub-let your home, etc. – can be stressful and intense? Increase that by about a thousandfold when a 6-month-old baby is your travelling companion.

Our luggage was a carefully thought out work of art. We had to bring everything from cooking facilities to toys. Dara carried two large rucksacks, one front, one back, like a packhorse; I carried another bag with Fiach in a baby carrier on my back.

That's what we left with in the middle of the night, Bridget's Day, 2001. We gathered our still sleeping baby in our arms, banged our front door, piled into the taxi and brushed the dust off our clothes. I mean that literally – just seven days before our departure the bedroom ceiling had caved in and we'd spent a week in total chaos getting it fixed, a thick layer of plaster dust sticking to every surface in our house, even the vertical ones.

Nervous breakdown material but in the past as we speed through dark empty streets on the way to Dublin Airport.

Onward, courageous souls!

I used to loathe people who had the cheek to bring their screaming brats onto aeroplanes. Now I have nothing but heartfelt compassion for them. We managed to avoid tantrums and crying fits on the eleven-hour flight to Mexico because Fiach basically spent the whole time on The Boob.

The Boob was our trusted fellow-traveller, someone we couldn't have done without. Apart from the baby comfort factor, breastmilk was the only feeding option, because most of the places we visited didn't have refrigeration, sterilising facilities or safe water for mixing up baby formula. Breastmilk is the best preventative medicine you can give a baby in a land full of unfamiliar germs and bacteria.

Our first stop was beautiful Tulum on the Mexican peninsula of Yucatan, an easy place to start, being a Caribbean beach resort for alternative heads. We planned to spend two weeks there chilling out and swimming in the celestial blue before leaving the tourists behind for more ethnic zones. Naively, we weren't yet taking the baby-friendly factor into account. This was something we could only learn along the way.

I unpacked all our stuff and created a little home in the bamboo hut we secured for ourselves right on the beach, hoping that the strong wind, blowing fine sand through the walls, would soon die down. By day three we realised that it was a permanent fixture, and our sense of humour began to fail.

The sand coated everything inside our cabin, including the bed, in a layer of yellowish dirt. In a ghastly replay of the plaster dust scenario we'd left behind at home, we inhaled sand, ate it, took it in through our very pores.

Not surprisingly, Fiach settled into a cranky, demanding mood that we couldn't shake, i.e., he was doing a lot of crying. A crying baby is enough to drive you to the brink, but when you're travelling – staying in low budget single rooms with no family or friends to pass the child to so you can have the occasional break – there is literally no escape.

Fiach was still waking three or four times a night to feed, and the veils of sand drifting over us in bed made sleep even harder to get. I reached new levels of sleep-deprived paranoia and anxiety and kept being reminded of the novel, The Beach. We decided it was time to get out of there.

After a couple of similar experiences – including sleeping in beds full of fleas – we copped on to the fact that if you want to stay sane when you're travelling with a baby, reasonably comfortable surroundings and beds are vital. Simple practicalities – a smooth insect-less floor for Fiach to crawl on, a sunny balcony to sit in while he had his naps – made all the difference to our moods.

We travelled to Palenque to visit the ancient Mayan ceremonial city there. After a fourteen-hour bus journey and a couple of blind taxi drives not knowing where the hell we were going, we ended up at a travellers' retreat in the dead of night. We lay back on our bags outside, Fiach mercifully asleep, and waited for dawn to break. It was one of those magical moments – blurred shapes separated themselves from the inky black, birds, insects and monkeys began to sing, and we realised that we were in the middle of a jungle. We found a cabin to rent. It became our home for the next ten days.

I walked round the massive stone temples at Palenque, watching monkeys, toucans and green parrots in the trees. It was the first non-urban walk that I'd had by myself since Fiach was born, and how I savoured it. Lizards rushed along hot paths; huge butterflies sailed the pure air; bats hung upsidedown in the temples' cool interiors; tropical blossoms intoxicated me; the sussuration of the jungly hills played across my senses. I thrilled with vertigo ascending the stone temples, recalling with macabre glee how the Maya reputedly killed their human sacrifices by chucking them down the steep steps.

I returned vitalised to my man and baby, having tapped the wellspring of my own solitude.

Moments like these, as well as the simple pleasure of sharing beautiful places with Dara and Fiach, were what I lived for when we were travelling. We met loads of other travellers, nearly all of them baby-less, but we couldn't join in on their exciting plans to hike up volcanoes, or go white-water rafting, or scuba-dive in the coral reef, or take shamanic mushrooms at a Mayan sacred site, or even go out on the piss. This could be lonely, isolating and frustrating.

After about a month, after a lot of denial, we had to accept that travelling with a baby is a lot different to travelling on your own. To avoid disappointment we changed our expectations. Instead of wild adventures we had the joy of watching our baby develop – learning to sit up, crawl, wave at people, splash in the water – in true wilderness, in the mountains, beside rivers and lakes, on remote tropical beaches.

Most of the places we visited were so warm that Fiach wore nothing but the balmy air (and shitloads of herbal insect repellent and Factor 50 sunscreen). We carried him everywhere, and he laughed with joy at the sheer variety of it all.

I like to think that the amazing sights and sounds – the temple-laden jungle landscapes of the ancient Maya; the still pagan religious ceremonies of the modern-day Indians; the pelicans and magnificent frigate birds that filled the Caribbean sky; the canyons, mountains, lakes and forests that we travelled through – will stay with him forever, to re-surface as beautiful imagery in his dreams.

What made our trip really special was the welcome heaped upon us by the Mayan Indians in whose lands we travelled. Often we had more in common with the locals than we had with the gringos.

Like other indigenous cultures around the world, the Maya people revere their babies, who are never pushed in buggies but carried close until they can walk by themselves. We'd be at military checkpoints in Mexico and the hardest-looking soldiers would lower their guns and coo when they saw our child. It wasn't unusual for us to be accompanied by a large crowd of men, women and children, all wanting to talk to Fiach, as we walked through Indian villages.

Not that I'd romanticise the position of women and children in this culture. Twelve, fourteen, even sixteen-member families are common, because male machismo (babies being a sign of virility) and lack of access to birth control keep the women breeding year after year.

The men love babies, but you don't often see them directly caring for them. When men saw Dara by himself with Fiach, walking around or changing his nappy and feeding him, they'd come up and ask in amazement where the mother was.

And when I visited a struggling orphanage in Guatemala I saw how difficult it is for this sad country's unwanted children to survive. Sometimes parents try to take their children back out of the orphanage when they reach working age – just three or four years old.

We crossed from Mexico to Guatemala via a treacherous, swollen river full of whirlpools, in a dug-out boat driven by a young teenager. This was the first of many dangerous boat rides with no life-jackets: fine by yourself but very frightening when you're with your baby.

Another 10-hour bus journey – passed with Fiach either asleep, on The Boob, playing with a snorkel or being entertained by the locals – brought us to the small village of El Romate near the stunning Mayan site of Tikkal. Here we stayed in a limestone cave overlooking a mirror-like lake which we swam in every sunset. We'd intended to go trekking in the rainforests nearby, but were warned not to by the locals because of a series of violent robberies and rapes in the area. It's true that you have to watch your ass in Guatemala, where violence is endemic and life is cheap.

Next stop was Caye Caulker, a sundrenched Caribbean island off the coast of neighbouring country Belize, a former British colony, and so English-speaking. Here we spent two blissful weeks in our own fisherman's hut which fronted right onto the sea, chilling in hammocks watching our boy learning to turn onto his tummy and begin to scramble, throwing bits of bread to the two-foot long iguanas that lived in a pile of broken lobster pots beside our porch. A highpoint here was snorkelling in a coral reef with nursing sharks and manta rays.

We travelled south through Belize, visiting a jaguar sanctuary and staying in a Garifuna village. The Garifuna are a proud black Caribbean culture descended from Africans who escaped slavery when the boat transporting them was shipwrecked. Today their language is an amazing mix of African and Mayan Indian. We met this cool Garifuna shaman through Fiach (our son had a knack of finding interesting locals) who described how he 'christened' his own son by simply walking out with him into the sea and announcing to god and the village members that there was now someone in the world more important himself.

After Belize we travelled back into Guatemala to stay for a couple of weeks in San Marcos, a very special little village steeped in mysticism on the shores Lago Atitlan, a massive lake surrounded by volcanoes.

A particularly horrifying journey on the way put us off travelling on the local 'chicken' buses for good. Many of the drivers took a sadistic pleasure in scaring their passengers by overtaking whilst driving up hills on bends at the sides of cliffs. It wasn't just our imagination – we heard of several travellers being badly hurt in the frequent accidents on Guatemala's roads.

Finally, a weeklong stay in the beautiful town of San Cristobal in the Chiapas highlands of Mexico, followed by a mega 24-hour bus and boat journey to another Caribbean island – where we could relax and Fiach could safely experiment with the new world of crawling and standing up against things – brought our three-month trip to a wonderful close.

Travelling with a baby was a lot harder than we'd anticipated. At times it was exhausting and emotionally draining. My advice, to anyone thinking about it, is do a lot of research beforehand. It's better to stay somewhere really good for a month than put yourself through the stress of travelling fast and far with poor accommodation.

Isolation is the other problem. There are no babysitters, and looking after babies is time-consuming work, especially when you don't have access to buggies, bouncers and other modern equipment. Opportunities to meet people can be slim. Next time we go travelling with our child, it'll be to one spot, where maybe we'll have arranged to do some voluntary work, to give us the chance to get to know people properly.

Our trip to Central America brought hardships and joys. But it was something we just had to do. I think both Dara and myself would have become dissatisfied with our new lives as parents unless we'd made the journey. We just didn't want to fall into a rut of mind baby, work for the mortgage, occasionally go out.

Most important of all, the three months together created a bond that will stand to us – mother, father and child – for the rest of our lives.