Ambient audio: Antigua, Guatemala, at night.

(Images: Ivan Castro)

Click on the embedded audio below, and you'll hear a 10-minute chunk of ambient sound I taped one night in the old colonial city of La Antigua (literally, "The Old"), Guatemala: centuries-old church bells, popping firecrackers, rumbling mopeds, and a Kakchikel Maya family walking home on ancient cobblestone streets.

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I taped this outside my bedroom window there in November, 2006, while in the country working on a series of reports for NPR News. I'd been out in the field all day taping interviews. I was sun-fried, road-weary, hunched over a Marantz digital audio recorder and backing up what I'd taped that day to portable hard drives, ipods, and CDs for redundant safekeeping.

I heard a bunch of loud explosions -- pulled off my headphones for a sec -- an escalating cluster of pop pop pop, again and again, and the churchbells ringing nonstop. WTF? Firecrackers are familiar sounds there, lit for any and every birthday or saint's day, any excuse it seems. But the bells were just going and going and going this time. Some big Catholic holiday? An emergency? Are those guns mixed in with the firecracker sounds? Couldn't figure it out, and neither could the family in whose home I was staying.

Anyway, the editors and producers I learn from at NPR always tell me, tape first, ask questions later. So I stuck my mic out the window and hit "record."

Never did figure out exactly what was going on.

But when I listen to this recording now, it transports me back. I keep this file in my iTunes playlist and fall asleep to it sometimes. I remember the things that filled my senses, while falling asleep there: warm tortillas cooking over wood fires; copal resin burning in the church next door; cool breezes from nearby pine forests; diesel fumes from overburdened trucks; and the volcan de fuego puffing ash and intermittent red sparks off in the distance.

I hope you enjoy it. I love this old place like you might love a person. This sound reminds me of that.

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PHOTOGRAPHS of nighttime Antigua, Guatemala in this post ganked from the flickr stream of Ivan Castro, a prolific and (obviously) very talented photographer based in Guatemala.

Related: Link to an archive of my posts from the road in Guatemala.