You know each other's habits, stories, and favourite arguments. A mother-daughter adventure in Guatemala gives you something less familiar to work out together.

Getting to know a country has less to do with how many places you visit and more to do with how much visiting you do! I often help families plan their travels through Guatemala. Many tell me they want to travel slowly with their kids, and then send over an itinerary with five or six destinations squeezed into two or three weeks. I understand the temptation. Guatemala is an extraordinary country, and there are so many places worth visiting. You could spend weeks exploring its

Search Guatemala online, and you will find plenty of stories about crime, travel warnings, dangerous neighborhoods, armed robbery, gangs and all the other things that make a parent wonder whether they have completely lost their mind for considering bringing their children here.

We were up at five this morning and drove to the capital with Jaime, to pick up a group of 25 people. By the time we headed back toward Lake Atitlán, everyone was excited, joking around, getting to know each other, and talking about how amazing the month ahead would be. It was the start of a big adventure, and about twenty minutes from San Juan, as we descended the switchbacks of the mountains into the Lake Atitlán basin, my phone rang. It was Ceci. She was crying and apologi

Concrete is gray. That is one of the first things you notice when you arrive in Guatemala. Cinderblock is everywhere. Houses go up in concrete blocks, walls are built in concrete blocks, retaining walls are concrete blocks, and plenty of buildings seem to spend years in the strange unfinished state where you can still see exactly what they are made of. If you arrived by plane, drove out of Guatemala City and headed toward the rural communities around Lake Atitlán, you could b

(...But humour me by consuming THIS content) I have been thinking a lot about social media lately. Not in the usual “how do we grow our account?” kind of way. Quite the opposite. I have been wondering whether I still want to grow our account. The world doesn’t need more content. There is already an unbelievable amount of it. More videos, more opinions, more inspiration, more people telling us how to live, where to travel, what to buy, how to parent and how to become the best

There’s no doubt about it: the most paralyzing thing keeping families from traveling is fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of things not going to plan, fear of losing an income, and the flat-out fear of failing in the eyes of peers and family. We are culturechalk.org. Our job isn’t just to host families at hubs; we’ve lived this reality. Over five years ago, we sold everything, left Canada, and set off for Guatemala—a country we had never been to and knew relatively little about

I am often asked, “How have your kids adjusted?” Let's start with me Around 1994, my dad took a government job managing an arts facility in Qamani’tuaq (Baker Lake), a remote Inuit community of roughly 2,000 people in the Canadian Arctic. The nearest neighbouring community was Rankin Inlet, an hour flight south along Hudson Bay. Inuktitut was spoken more often than English, and life was deeply rooted in culture and tradition. It was an incredible place to spend time while gro

We walked the city with our host family, played futból with their kids, and shared a pot of afternoon coffee while sharing stories, asking questions about each other’s lives and fumbling through broken second (or sometimes third) language barriers.

It wasn't long at all. Out of the blue, the owner of the Tavern building approached us. She saw us sweeping the road in front of the structure one morning and mentioned, "The lease with the man that runs this bar is almost up, would you like to rent it? I'd rather not renew the lease."

There’s a cliché that’s been floating around forever about “finding yourself” when travelling. People travel for different reasons. Overworked parents with stressful jobs look for an all-inclusive holiday to relax by the pool. Youngsters hit the backpacking routes to see the world. Instagrammers search for more exotic content to stay relevant and exciting to their followers, scrolling and hungrily consuming it from the comfort of their beds. At their core, travellers all do w

“Time’s fun when you’re having flies,” said the Frog. In an unbelievable, mind-bending twist of events, our family just four years ago shifted direction and relocated to Guatemala. We needed it. Something big, over the top, had to occur to give ourselves the jolt we needed to shake off the ruts, bad habits and general discontent we felt in life. We needed extreme circumstances to shock us from the numbness we had become accustomed to. When we look back at pictures, we looked

What was so normal just 17 years ago, (original iPhone release) has now become the ultimate gesture of selflessness. Sharing time and space with one another has never been such a significant act of rebellion against apathy and indifference. Material clutter and buzzing tech have, quite literally, been increasingly stealing invaluable moments from families across the globe. The best way to fight back, and rediscover our humanity is to simply SHARE!

We have been spreading our roots here. Seeds of friendship have fallen on fertile Guatemalan ground! The last few years have been a grand experiment of self-examination and questioning lifestyles in general, and we have much food for thought. Let me set the stage: A standard home in rural Guatemala consists of tin or stone walls, a wood-burning stove of some sort, a foam mattress or two on the ground, and a table, some pots. The floor is either bare concrete or plain dirt, an

It’s a topic we’ve seen come up regularly on family travel groups, Worldschooling forums, etc. Facebook Mamas pleading for words of support after buying one-way tickets with their families away from home after selling everything with no easy way back! Here are some helpful tips we’ve put together to ensure travel is rewarding for every member of the family and that you don’t end up crawling back home, hating travel for the rest of your existence. Define your WHY. Every family