The most conspicuous is DHL, located on 6a Avenida Sur 16 but there is another one before that on the same street called International Bounded Couriers (IBC) which is cheaper and allows you the option of not purchasing insurance (which costs about $USD 20) on your package. For a package of 5 kg to Malaysia, DHL charges $USD 280 but I asked for a discount and without much effort, got it down to $USD 210, insurance included (there is no option to exclude insurance). IBC charges $USD 170 for a package of the same weight without insurance.

I’m an enthusiastic amateur photographer and you would think that Guatemala offers a plethora of opportunities for documentary photography. But just yesterday I sent my gigantic Canon 10D SLR camera and similarly big lenses back home to Malaysia because it got too stressful worrying about being a potential target for armed robbers while I carried them conspicuously around town. I haven’t felt free to use them on the streets for the same reason so it’s actually been restricting me from taking as many photos as I would otherwise.

But the main reason isn’t my fear of being robbed. The other thing is that it affects my conscience when I take photos of the local people here. The children tend to ask you for a buck when you take a photo (anything for a buck here, seems to be the mentality) and I don’t like the idea of having to pay to take a photo, or the idea that I’m intruding. I don’t want to be taking pictures of people if people don’t welcome it. So I’ve bought myself a disposable camera instead to document my travels - it will do for now. I still have my writing.

So, unless you’re a very serious photographer, think long and hard about whether you want to bring all your photography equipment along. It’s a pain to carry and to worry about, and sure as hell it burns a hole in your pocket when you have to pay $200 to send it home!

© Emily Ding - Central Park, Antigua, where the volcanoes are omnipresent

The small colonial town of Antigua, Guatemala, is the mecca of the package Spanish school, combining both study and travel and so-called immersion social activities and accommodation with a Guatemalan host family. However, having studied at Ixchel School for a week I can tell you that you won’t get much of a genuine immersion experience in Antigua - at least, not for the short term.

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It’s more exciting not to have anything planned, to have only one ticket in and one ticket out and know that in between anything is possible. That way, things never quite turn out the way you expect them to.

I now find myself in Antigua (the quaint little town in Guatemala, not the Caribbean Island by the same name, mind you) despite the fact that I never intended to spend any time here, or Guatemala, at all. I’d thought that from San Francisco I’d work my way immediately to Nicaragua, but that just didn’t happen.

People who know me can testify that I can - frustratingly - be a very last-minute person. I prefer to be described as ’spontaneous’ and I like to think that that makes me better able to deal with challenging situations under pressure, but I know my parents prefer the use of the unflattering adjective ‘haphazard’. Admittedly my last-minuteness hasn’t always proved to be a good thing, but more often than not I’ve found it to be quite useful, and it’s landed me in plenty of interesting spots I’d never have found my way to otherwise.

Basically, what happened was this:

I had a flight booked to Guatemala from San Francisco on October 16 at 8:05 p.m. and by 5:30 p.m. I still wasn’t sure if I was going to take the flight. You see, I’d fallen a little bit in love with San Francisco and wanted to stay longer, thought that perhaps later I could make my way down to Nicaragua by land via Mexico and Guatemala. But in the end, for fear of invalidating my return ticket home if I missed this segment, I decided to board my plane.

However, I had no onward ticket to Nicaragua and no accommodation booked in Guatemala. I thought that upon my arrival in Guatemala I would buy the next ticket out to Nicaragua, if there was one, or take a bus. Or maybe I would stay a night and make a little tour of Guatemala before moving on to Nicaragua, since I was already in the area. But honestly I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. So I waited till I arrived to survey what my options were.

In the end, what happened came completely out of the blue: two elderly women from Hong Kong adopted me for a little while and gave me a place to stay.

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