[Raion]

I've never really talked much about the countries I've gone to but rather than just toot my own horn by myself I'm going to want to know about other people's travels as well.

Everyone who knows me for a while hat probably known I've been to China, so I won't bore you with those details off the start. 

I'll talk about my time in Latin America first. I've been three times, twice to Mexico, and once to Guatemala. 

In 2010 I visited Guatemala as part of a group that was performing community service for rural people in Cobán and Antigua, the city, not the island. I was basically 16 years old at the time and I'd only been out of the country once before to China so I had no idea what to expect. 

I flew into Guatemala City and I stepped out into one of the most tropical areas of the world I've ever been to. But it also made me acutely aware of just how much I stuck out. You can't go more than two city blocks without "Gringo!" being a chant from people driving by and such. Vuvuzelas are also everywhere. 

It was a five and a half hour drive without much water or food to Cobán over treacherous mountain roads and past mountains that were either completely jungle or turned into cornfields that grew up to 12 ft tall. 

First meal that I had ironically was Domino's as we met up with a local guide named Julio. Older guy in his 60s and a former monastic of the Catholic Church. Guatemalan Domino's tasted virtually the same as it does in the United States but you could get pizzas with things like mango or puerco pibil. 

Eventually late at night we got to a local compound for volunteers and it was topped with 15 ft concrete walls with barbed wire and had guard dogs everywhere. We stayed in a cold concrete building with no doors and a constant supply of mosquitoes. We had to sleep in mosquito nets and deal with other crazy things while we were there. 

Everyday for 2 weeks we rode in the back of a pickup truck bed clinging to a steel frame and going across mountain roads to local Mayan villages. Yes you heard me right the majority of people in this village don't speak Spanish as a first language much less English or anything else. You'll smell the village before you reach it. Open sewers in the gutters and you constantly are seeing stray dogs scavenge whatever they can. 

Roads are often overgrown or eroded, we had to stop everyday and manually turn the 4WD hubs on the truck. At certain points, you're surrounded by nothing but jungle and you can sometimes hear gunfire in the distance. 

One day to and from the various villages where we were repairing houses our truck had a flat. Some of the locals we had become friends with helped us, and Julio took me and a couple of others through the jungle and you could actually find old Mayan shrines and statues in places. I asked them if archaeologists knew about it and they basically told me that they had no intention of showing these to them because this was part of their history and it wasn't for white people to take. Keeping in mind that this was translated from a local Mayan language (Kakchi) to Spanish to English, that's the gist I got. 

Mayan is hard to speak. Very difficult language with a lot of weird cases and such so after the first couple days of people from the villages trying to eagerly teach those of us who knew sufficient Spanish most of us gave up. 

After, we got a break from the jungle and eventually went to the city of Antigua which is much more Hispanic in style. Much cleaner but it's ironically the only place that I got dysentery. From a McDonald's no less. I would argue that this leg of the trip was harder. We had to carry all the supplies up the mountains into slums. And trust me considering several of us were sick this was not a fun time. 

Anyway, the food was good. Good black beans and platanos. Lots of pork and chicken, very little cheese, lots of tamales and tortillas. My favorite tamales that I had were poblano. 

Meanwhile I travel to Northern Mexico as an adult, both Sonora and Baja California. Baja California is much more familiar feeling but Sonora definitely had the better food. Northern Mexican food does make use of a lot of flour tortillas and things that most people in the US assume aren't authentic so it's not exactly as if it's very different from what you might have in many restaurants across the US. On both trips I had somebody with me who was fluent in Spanish. I gained a huge amount of respect for Tequila, as I had begun to be a drinker several years ago. That stuff is wicked. 

Maybe I'll tell some about my China trips another time if people are interested.

Tell us about the countries you've been to and what you liked and disliked about them.