The ancient Mayan city where you can still get gloriously lost

You know you're going somewhere away from the crowds when your accommodation for the night sends you directions that say "go to the traffic light, and we're in front of the tabasquena store". It doesn't register with me until I get there. Go to THE traffic light. This is the kind of town where that won't cause any confusion. There's only one.

I've ended up in the small town of Xpujil in the east of Mexico as part of a journey to find the ancient Mayan city of Calakmul, supposedly hidden in the jungle about 100 kilometres from here. I know someone in Xpujil will be able to tell me how to find it. Where do I start asking?

As it turns out, finding someone who knows about Calakmul is as easy as it was to find the single traffic light. For me, the legend of these jungle ruins seems like an exotic mystery. But for the owner of the guesthouse where I'm staying, they're the main reason most people stop here.

"I have a driver, he's taking other tourists, you can go with them," he offers. The price seems pretty reasonable too, considering I am still assuming this to be an Indiana Jones-style adventure.

In some ways, my journey to Calakmul started the previous day in the city of Campeche, at the small archaeological museum there. An old colonial fortification, it's not somewhere you'd associate with the Mayan Empire, but in the final room of the city's museum, I found a treasure trove - literally. Amongst the jewellery and stone statues is the incredible funerary mask of a Mayan ruler, intricately and ornately designed, it's made entirely of jade. The green face seemed to look at me, staring from its life-like eyes, and say, "come to my city, come to Calakmul".

And so here I am, squeezed into a beaten-up old van with six other tourists for the two-hour drive from Xpujil into the thick jungle to see where this beautiful jade mask was found. As it turns out, Calakmul may be remote, but there's still a good road right to the ticket booth at the entrance. Perhaps I should stop calling it "hidden".

Hidden from tourists, it might be fair to say. I think our vanload are the only visitors here this morning. So, as we gradually start to split up to explore and I find myself alone, the Calakmul ruins feel just like the lost city I had imagined. There are enormous stone monuments here but I won't find them at first. Tall trees with thick canopies stand in between, vines and roots protruding from the ancient walls I can see.

"Rooooaaaarrrr!" I jump. It sounds like a jaguar and I quickly look around to see if I'm about to be eaten. Then I remember - that's what a howler monkey sounds like! Up in the branches, there it is, perhaps howling with laughter at my shocked reaction. It wouldn't think it was so funny if his home was filled with hordes of visitors.

I keep walking, I keep exploring. There's so much to see here. It's amazing to think that about 1500 years ago, Calakmul was one of the greatest Mayan cities to ever exist, probably with about 50,000 residents. From about 600 BC up to its apogee more than a millennium later, it was the capital of the region, a huge political force, a cultural hub... and with all the monuments you would expect.

One of the most impressive temples here has the rather dull name of 'Structure 2' but about 50 metres high, 120 metres wide, it's designed with an enormous hulking staircase up to the terrace at the top. Nearby, the equally banally-named 'Structure 1' is slightly shorter but feels taller because it sits atop an elevated platform. I start climbing it, a stair at a time, about 140 of them. From the top, a green carpet of canopy stretches out beneath in every direction. I feel like I'm at the top of the world. Did the Maya feel the same? This is as high as they would ever get.

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The driver had given us a three-hour deadline to meet back at the van and I find myself rushing around to see everything in that time, as howler monkeys occasionally roar again. This was a whole city, remember, and as well as the temples and pyramids, there are plazas, a ball court for sports, and whole suburbs of houses where people lived all those centuries ago.

In a few of these old houses, the walls have been restored by archaeologists, but they have left the trees growing from the middle of a room, or in the spaces between walls that might once have been storage. It's fitting because from about 900 AD or so, the trees became the main residents here at Calakmul when the city-state collapsed like so many others in the region, probably because deforestation had changed the climate.

There are many other Mayan sites that people visit here on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, such as the iconic Chichen Itza ruins near Cancun or the impressive Palenque further west. Getting to Calakmul does take time and, I confess, the architecture is quite similar to what you'll find at the other locations.

But what you get here is the sense of adventure and the feeling of discovering something for the first time. You can climb to the top of the temples, which you can't do at the other sites because of the crowds. You can get lost in the jungle, you can be alone in ancient homes, and you can be scared by the howler monkeys. I don't know why that jade mask spoke to me, but I'm glad I listened to its call.

You can see more about visiting Calakmul on Michael's Time Travel Turtle website.