Helen did well at school, enjoying art and joining a drama group where she starred as Snow White in their pantomime one year. She read History of Art and Philosophy at Liverpool and has had several jobs in London in this field. In late 2006, with her partner Laurie Hunte, she has bought a house in Walthamstow and they are busy doing it up. They studied Spanish at evening classes for a couple of years before travelling through South America in 2005. Here is an email she sent from Guatemala.

Hola!

Laurie and I have been in Guatemala for almost a week now and I feel comfortable here already. We left Guatemala city as soon as possible after spending the first night in a hotel with high walls topped with barbed wire where we were told that it was unsafe to leave the confines of the hotel. So we came straight to Antigua de Guatemala, a pretty colonial town surrounded by volcanoes and full of tourists, but that´s a good thing to help us settle into the culture for the first week or 2. The town is very pleasant with a slow pace of life and pretty parks to sit in and churches to see. There are signs of typical Guatemalan life but it is not a typical town at all because of the amount of tourists. According to the newspapers the country is currently going through an unusual freeze, but it still reaches 25 degrees or so at midday, so I´m not complaining. We are staying with a Guatemalan family along with 2 other students from our Spanish school. For the first 10 days we are concentrating on learning Spanish with a 5 hour class in the morning and practice in cafes or in the garden of our casa in the afternoon.

But we had a day off yesterday so we climbed a nearby active volcanoe, Volcan Pacaya. It was a beautiful clear day so we could see for miles from the top but it was an incredibly difficult ascent because the top of the volcanoe was very steep and consisted only of black sand so for every step you took you slipped down almost as far and to add to that it was also very very very very very windy. I honestly thought I might be blown into the crater and never seen again. But it was a great experience because of the amazing black lunar style landscape and the smoke or sulphur fumes pouring out of the crater and various places on the side of the volcanoe. Running down was great fun too. Luckily it didn´t erupt while we were there but we could see Volcan Fuego belching out a great deal of smoke in the distance. Maybe we´ll climb that one next!

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