I arrived in Guatemala City late on a Sunday night. The streets were deserted apart from the occasional gunman outside of buildings. Immediately I began to think back over all the cautionary anecdotes I had heard over the last few months and clutched my rucksack closer.

We stayed in a lovely hostel quezxalroo with a very cheery hostel owner who made our short stay in Guatemala City fun and informative.

On our first day we took a bicycle tour around the city, I was a bit nervous crossing roads for the first few blocks but soon we arrived in a beautiful tree lined street with excellent cycle lanes which I was really grateful of.

We stopped at many interesting points: an artist's area soon followed by a history museum outlining the brief history of Guatemala and the coins used throughout the ages. We tasted some of "the best rum in the world", went to a bar Che Guevara used to drink at, saw the palace and main cathedral.

Our most memorable stop was a somewhat secret stop- it was a secret centre set up 2 years ago displaying documents of captured and executed citizens held by the army. A man with 2 missing brothers on the list told us about the 45,000 missing. Those taken were students and any type of political activist. The remains of the missing were discovered in mass graves. A harrowing insight into the atrocities of the genocide still not acknowledged by the government.