If Jamaica's football team is to make it all the way to next year's Olympic Games, one of the roads travelled would take them through Guatemala. The next step is today at the National Stadium and then midweek in Guatemala's western highlands.

When CONCACAF announced the current round of Olympic qualifying a month ago, Quetzaltenango was deemed the Guatemalan venue. The Guatemalans have been known to change their international football venues at the last minute depending on the visitors' condition. They are likely to remain steadfast to this schedule as they'd figure the cool temperatures would be in their favour.

The town of Xela (Quetzaltenango) with the 12,300 foot high Santa Maria volcanic mountain in the background.

This time of the year, Quetzaltenango, a city of just over 130,000, routinely experiences nighttime temperatures below 50 degrees Farenheit (10 degrees celssius) with daytime temperatures struggling to get into the 70s.

Quetzaltenango is Guatemala's second largest city and the main hub of the southwestern highlands. Of course, most travellers to Guatemala will inevitably pass through the capital, Guatemala City, a wonderful city that American travel guide-books have inexplicably been notoriously unkind to. It's a three-hour bus ride between both cities but you could spend the whole day at the bus station and not see any bus with destination sign Quetzaltenango, which is not to be confused with Chichicastenango. That's because locals resist capitulating to the Government's official name, in favour of the indigenous Quiche Indian's Xela (pronounced shayla).

You'll no doubt want camera shots of the effulgently colourful Mayan clothing called huipile.

Xela's main hub of activity is centred around the Parque Centroamerica. Aged, stately looking trees flanking equally stately buildings around the park makes this arguably one of Central America's most picturesque parks. Leave this immediate area and Xela possesses little more to detain the visitor. Well, there is the municipal stadium that's slated to play host to the Jamaican team. Not much to the stadium, which can fit 18,000 spectators, but if the atmosphere is anything to go by when their beloved 75 year-old Xelaju football club plays there, visitors are in for a treat.

The busy market at Quetzaltenango

To truly appreciate Xela and its surroundings, it would be prudent to rent a car, which won't necessarily mean you'll miss the Mayan pulse. This will facilitate beholding the surrounding volcanic mountains, including the 12,300 foot high Santa Maria. Several colourful towns are nearby, including the delightful Zunil, some six miles away at the base of an extinct volcano. You'll no doubt want camera shots of the effulgently colourful Mayan clothing called huipile, but it's politically incorrect to do so with reckless abandon without getting permission from the subject. Not that your life will be threatened, but you might just be viewed with some degree of suspicion.

Mayans are quintessential xenophobes and with good reason. Ever since the arrival of the Spanish, by way of Mexico in the 1520s, the Mayans have been subjected to abject treatment. They were exploited, enslaved, and had their lands stolen from them. Even in the civil war years of the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s, the Mayans of the southwestern highlands suffered the most at the hands of the Government forces. They exacted torture on them as a reminder not to support the guerrillas with as much as a morsel of food.

But Mayan culture thrives today and even plays a big part in adorning government and financial buildings in the exuberantly modern capital today. Xela's cobblestoned streets of yesteryear more accurately reflect the Mayan culture, which radiates abundantly more than any other that the Europeans came upon 500 years ago.

The busy market at Quetzaltenango

It's a three-hour bus ride between Guatemala City and Quetzaltenango but you could spend the whole day at the bus station and not see any bus with the destination sign.

One of Quetzaltenango's picturesque parks.

Mayan huipile

Trousers in Denim

Cream of the 'Crop'

Cheeky's World