We left the house at 5:45 with Shenny (our Guatemalan home stay mother) and Ina (another Spanish student staying with Shenny) to climb the Chicabal volcano. We met two of Ina's friends in Parque Central and caught two micro buses to the start of the walk. It was a steep track up a mud road to the visitor centre and an even steeper one after that to the crater's edge. Inside the crater is a lake which is considered to be spiritually important and it took us...

We have successfully completed five days in Spanish School- it´s been intense! Monday to Friday, we had one to one lessons from 8am-1pm (with a half hour break). We´re in Xela which took us four and a half hours to get to from Antigua last Sunday. We had our first Chicken bus experience and I´m pleased to report that there were chickens on the bus (in a box in the overhead rack). Who knows what the poor things thought of the many people, the loud noise of the...

After 5 (ish) years of saving and a year of planning we've finally landed in Guatemala for the start of our 9-10 month trip through Central and South America. We landed on Wednesday night (14th May) and there is not much to say about the 21 hour jorney via Miami - apart from a big thank you to Ben for dropping us off at Heathrow. We started exploring Antigua on the Thursday morning but both had colds brought over from England and Katy was struggling more than me...