Sophie tastes world travel as we walk down a Chichicastenango street

My ten year old daughter, Sophie, gets her first glimpse of the larger world though a backpack trip to Guatemala. I wondered how she'd do.

I found an entirely different layer of experience as I traveled largely through her eyes. We got off the plane in Guatemala City, and jumped right in a cab to Antigua. She was wide-eyed. And I suddenly I was back in 1987, when I got off the plane into my first developing country and had one of my life's greatest experiences.

Those first hours in Kathmandu were a state of absolute disbelief that there truly was a world that could look, sound, smell, and be like that. I kept thinking to myself, "I've seen the pictures, but I can't believe it really exists." I was overwhelmed. We overuse the word surreal, but such was my experience that first time. Real culture shock is most certainly an altered state of consciousness. But it only happens at the beginning of ones travel career. Repeated trips wears it off quickly.

Guatemala is a good introduction to the world. It's close. And its indigenous people give it a great ambiance. But Sophie was pretty casual. We ate a lot of hamburgers and ended up staying at hotels that were a little too nice considering the experience I wanted her to have.