Folks in tourism never know what to make of us. People normally ask, “Where should we go? What’s worth checking out?”…inevitably they suggest a beach or some other tourist trap. You probably know by now, I’m not the ‘swim up bar’ type. To avoid this, I like to ask…”Where do YOU go, where do YOU like to hang out?”. If you want to learn about the world, you don’t learn about it through landscapes (well, if you’re a geologist you might) you learn about it through people. Those are the places you want to go. On this day, we politely asked the woman below for directions. An hour later we had walked with her to the local market, shopped for produce with her, had lunch together and exchanged contact information. I shot the above photo in the local market she took us to. During our visit we learned she was a retired school teacher in the town of San Ignacio. This information would serve us later when we were stopped and questioned by the police….no kidding, we told the officer we had lunch with what turned out to be his school teacher. At that point we were friends and the city was ours to explore (complete with a police escort if we so desired..we didn’t, the town of San Ignacio is a comfortable place to walk around).

As I always say, the world is far too small to be a jerk (normally, I use another word) and this just goes to prove it!

Meet our tour guide and savior…Amina Estrada!

Photographer’s Note – As you know, the Nikon 24mm 1.4g has become my storytelling lens of choice over the last year. This is just another reason why I love it so much. The image was converted to B&W via Nik SEP 2.