From the Mind of Trevor Stone

• January started with a snowshoe trek and had a few more good shots, both frozen and thawed.
• February had a few good pictures from city park walks, plus a bunch of pictures from the U.S. olympic curling trials.
• March was mostly about finishing up at work, but I took a few nice fire spinning pictures and some shots around Confluence park before the show began.
• April through June were dominated by a trip to Guanduras with mollybzz. I returned with nearly 3000 pictures, but pared it down to 475 I wanted to share with the world. Molly's selections (pre-camera death at Travesía) are on her Guanduras page.
• I did take a few good pictures in April and June that I was in Colorado.
• July featured trips to Dreamtime, Yellowstone and Glacier.
• August has a few nice pictures of fire spinning and jumping before my tripod got knocked over, cracking the filter on my lens (fortunately it's a pretty cheap part with cheap repairs). I also took some nice pictures at the last Dragonfest held at Wellington Lake.
• Burning Man wasn't a big picture-taking experience for me. I spent a lot of time at the temple and took a few nice pictures of art. I was pleased to see someone did a Playa-worthy to-scale solar system, though the un-Playa-worthy version Michelle, Zane, and I did was more educational.
• In September I learned an important protip: If your camera's been sitting in the cold desert night air, don't dance right next to the giant hot fire: you might get condensation in your lens and be unable to take a crisp photo. I played around with the new involuntary soft focus effect and got some nice pictures of people and things.
• October is a perfect time to have a soft focus lens, lots of light, and colorful trees, bushes, flowers, and street signs.
• I spent much of November inside, but I took the occasional interesting picture on a few walks.
• I started December at the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA. I visited mollybzz in Mendocino County and we wandered around her ancestral woodlands, chatting about life, gathering mushrooms, admiring trees, exploring a sinkhole, standing on the seashore, and dealing with unexpected interpersonal drama.

• My brand new Mayan weave billfold with Q250 (approx US$30), stolen by a middle-aged woman on a bus in Chimaltenango. With the money in the wallet, she can pay for 25 more round trips to Antigua.
• My five-year-old 3.1 MP Pentax Optio 33L with three weeks of Molly's carefully framed photos and visual memoranda, stolen by a middle-aged man on a bus in Chimaltenango.
• A $20 bill and two $10 bills, missing from Molly's small blue bag, departure date and location unknown. Oddly, several other bills remain in the same place.

Clearly, Chimaltenango is a wretched hive of scum and villainy.
Lonely Planet advised us not to leave our things unattended there on account of bag-slashing, but I didn't think through the scenario of theives robbing me before I got off the bus. We discovered the theft a few minutes into our ride to Lake Atitlan; too far to turn back and wrestle the theives to the ground.

We spent most of the ride making light of the situation:

• Now Molly won't get frustrated that my old camera doesn't do a good job taking the photos she likes to frame
• Now I have an excuse to get a better pocket-sized camera in the next year, saving shoulder stress from carrying an SLR hiking
• Maybe we should buy several decoy wallets, place them in easily-accessible pockets, and fill them with notes like "Aquí está su boleto al infierno. Es de ida, no más. ¡Disfruta el viaje!" (Here is your ticket to hell. It's one way only. Enjoy the trip!)
• The average time I've owned a wallet in my life is about 8.5 years. 17 years on the first one, two days on the second
• With the money from my wallet, the woman can fund 25 more round trips on that route
• Nathan's advice: "Frustration is a magician's misdirection, leading the audience's eyes toward a distraction while in otherwise plain sight the fraid is perpetrated"
• (In a discussion about the black plumes out the back of the '80s-vintage school bus) "It's a problem with the catalytic converter." "The Catholic converter is dirty, so it can't put the holy air into the high confession chamber, thus leading to sinful smoke."
• Things that wouldn't happen in the U.S. #2365: A guy opening the bus's emergency exit to climb on the roof to untie a box while the bus is doing 45 uphill on a curve. #2366: Passengers boarding and departing the bus through the emergency exit while the bus is not at a full stop.

Inventory of valuables still in possession:

• Two sane minds with senses of humor and knowledge of several languages
• Two relatively healthy and intact human bodies
• Two United States passports (with expired visas for China)
• Two Visa bank cards
• Two full camera memory cards
• A camera bag containing a Canon Rebel XT, a 4GB Compact Flash card (over half full and containing fantastic pictures of Molly kissing a horse), and a Garmin hand-held GPS device with the locations of all my photographs
• Two journals containing daily descriptions and observations
• One MP3 player/recorder with a few dozen sound clips to share what cannot be photographed

Everything else could be replaced or let go with a minimum of greiving and frustration.

While it's clearly to the immediate personal benefit of the thieves to steal petty cash and old camera equipment, in the long run it hurts their community, and in turn their chance at true prosperity. While I know that not every Guatemalan is a theif, others who hear stories of theft on busses may conclude that Latinos are untrustworthy. They then don't treat them with respect and pay them a poor wage when they work in the north, lowering the flow of remissions to the south. They may also think twice about traveling in "the third world;" if they do, they may choose to stay in expensive foreign-owned hotels and take direct shuttles run by companies that don't keep their money locally. I certainly wouldn't recommend anyone stay in a hotel or eat at a restaurant in Chimaltenango, a place tarnished by the actions of a few who deny respect to people because of the color of their face and the style of their luggage.