Three days in Guatemala City: the best of Tikal never left the capital

The city has no single centre in the way Antigua does. Zona 1 is the historic one, a colonial grid on a plateau with the plaza at its heart, and it is grand, worn and full of people during the day. From there the city spreads south and east through the twentieth century: office towers in Zona 4, gated wealth in Zona 10 and 14, and a huge sprawl of neighbourhoods up the surrounding hillsides that no visitor has any reason to enter.

What is worth your time is concentrated. Two clusters, one in Zona 1 around the plaza and one split between Zona 13 and Zona 10, hold almost everything, and a taxi between them is fifteen or twenty minutes outside rush hour and forty inside it. Nothing here needs to be booked.

The thing that stays with people is the archaeology. Kaminaljuyú was a major Maya city on this site more than a thousand years before the Spanish arrived, trading obsidian across Mesoamerica, and most of it now lies under the suburbs with a fragment fenced off as a park. The finds from it, and from Tikal and Uaxactún in the north, are in the national museum five kilometres away.

La Aurora is the country's main airport and it sits inside the city in Zona 13, ten to twenty minutes from Zona 10 and about half an hour from Zona 1 in ordinary traffic. Long-haul arrivals come from the United States, Mexico, Madrid and the other Central American capitals, and the only domestic route worth knowing is the hop north to Flores for Tikal.

Take an authorised taxi from the arrivals rank or a car booked by your hotel, not a street cab. Carjackings on the airport road are the one crime that gets specifically warned about, and the mitigation is simply not standing outside the terminal negotiating with a stranger.

Shuttles to Antigua leave the airport all day for around Q150 and take 45 minutes to an hour. Long-distance buses to Flores, Cobán, the highlands and the neighbouring countries leave from company terminals scattered around Zona 1 and Zona 9, and the good operators run overnight services with reclining seats.

The city is divided into twenty-one numbered zonas laid out in a spiral, and knowing four of them covers a visit. Zona 1 is the colonial grid: the plaza, the palace, the cathedral, the central market. Zona 4 just south of it holds the national theatre and the government offices. Zona 10 is the money, with the hotels, the restaurants and the two private museums, and the nightlife corner of it is called the Zona Viva. Zona 13 has the airport, the archaeology museum, the modern art museum and the zoo, all within a few blocks of each other.

Sleep in Zona 10 if you want comfort and easy evenings, or in Zona 1 if you would rather be able to walk to the plaza in the morning. Zona 1 empties out and gets rougher after dark, so plan on eating near where you sleep.

Transmetro, the bus rapid transit, runs green articulated buses in dedicated lanes with police at the stops, which makes it the one form of public transport visitors are routinely told to use. Fares are loaded onto a Q20 card bought from a machine at the stop. Ordinary red city buses are not recommended and taxis or ride apps cover everything else cheaply.

This is a city where you take advice seriously rather than reading it as excessive caution. Street robbery and armed robbery are common, they are opportunistic, and the standard response if it happens is to hand over whatever is asked for without argument.

In practice: do not walk with a phone out, do not walk alone at night anywhere including Zona 1, use taxis or an app after dark, and keep to the zones above. Daytime in the plaza and the museum districts is busy and ordinary.

Nothing about this makes the city unvisitable, and Guatemalans go about their lives in it. It does mean the day should be planned as a series of destinations with a car between them, rather than as a walk across town.

The city sits at about 1,500 metres, which keeps it in the mid-twenties by day all year and cool at night. It is genuinely called the land of eternal spring and for once that is not a slogan.

The dry season runs November to April. From May to October it rains hard in the late afternoon, most days, which is worth building into a museum-heavy plan rather than fighting.

Quetzales. Cards work in hotels, malls and Zona 10 restaurants, and cash is needed for museum entry, markets, buses and taxis. ATMs inside malls and hotel lobbies are the sensible ones to use.