Most vacation videos consist of the same basic inconsequential fluff, but this one captured a robbery at gunpoint.
While on a motorcycle trip in Guatemala earlier this month, Dan Landsborough and his girlfriend, Heidi Burton, passed through a remote stretch of road between San Pedro La Laguna and Santiago Atitlan. Shortly after encountering a dirt stretch that forced them to reduce their speed, two armed men, masked in balaclavas, emerged from the bushes.
"I was heading up the hill and I saw the first guy jump out with a gun pointed straight at my head," Landsborough recalled to the CBC. "So, I was pretty much forced to stop at that point and I looked out and the guy with the machete jumped out right next to us."
Landsborough's helmet camera kept rolling as the shadowy figures threatened the couple and then stole everything they could strip from the bike.
"They demanded [money] and proceeded to search us," Burton wrote on her travel blog, adding, "Being paranoid, I had hidden my valuables ... They didn’t get any of these as they seemed in a hurry, but cut Dan’s tank bag from his bike which contained some valuables worth about $300."
Fortunately, Landsborough had the foresight to put together a "fake wallet," using expired credit cards and a small amount of cash, which he handed off to the bandidos in place of the real thing.
A couple days after the encounter, Landsborough uploaded the video to YouTube in an effort to warn travelers planning to take that road in the future.
"We don't want to in any way put people off from visiting ... Guatemala ... as it's a beautiful place with generally warm and kind inhabitants," he wrote in the video description. "We have felt safe for the majority of our trip."
Watch the video above. Landsborough cut the audio 24 seconds in out of respect for his girlfriend, who he says "was understandably distressed."