The bored-looking man at the entrance of the taco joint in Guatemala City was holding a rosary while clutching the barrel of a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun. He was chatting with an equally bored mariachi trumpeter from the taco joint across the street. It’s Wednesday, a slow night in Zona 10, the neighbourhood for the city´s rich and for tourists who think the straw-roofed souvenir huts in all-inclusives are indigenous villages.

Why I picked this neighbourhood I don´t know. First-time backpacker jitters, I suppose. It reminds me of posh districts of São Paulo, like Vila Madalena and Jardins, where sleek restaurants with nice signs and expensive furniture line badly-paved streets with shitty street lamps. Neighbourhoods whose order of garish ostentation is precisely inverse to the proportion of the population that can afford it.

It’s where I paid a 300% markup for forgettable tacos and just as much for a hostel bed.

Social service: time of solidarity.

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There was little keeping me for more than one morning in Guatemala City, this smoke-choked, exploded burrito of a city. In fact, it’s a scale model of São Paulo dubbed into Spanish. You see the same cars, same vegetation, same blocky pastel condos, same scraggly peripheral neighbourhoods.

But you could do worse than get lost for a few hours in Zona 1, a rumbling, sputtering ant hill where street merchants jockey for space among crumbling vestiges of colonialism. For those hours, absorbing the city’s unsubtle energy and eyeing the pretty Mayan girls making tortillas is worth the occasional mouthful of exhaust.

Click here for more photos of Guatemala City.