The Day from Hell

The Day from Hell

Before I start with today, I have to make some other mentions of wonderful things in El Salvador. (You don’t want to hear about our day from hell, right now anyway – do you?). 

As I sat at the border and Bob was taking care of paperwork, I saw a large number of women – young and old, had on these beautiful, colorful, lacey, ruffle-y aprons.  All different colors – usually a bit shorter in the back than in the front.  Normally, they were half aprons, worn with skirts, leggings, pants, you name it.  Dressy, not dressy – not sure if they were a fashion statement or just part of their everyday wear.

Currency was USD – sure made things easier.

Lots of tin roofs

Many people walking back and forth across this border like it was nothing – the crossing was very primitive – looked like something from an old movie. 

More ladies carrying baskets on their heads – but these were hand woven and HUGE.

OK – Finally - Day 11,  Sunday, August 4^th

Can’t EVEN begin to tell you what our hotel was like last night….I just really don’t want to do that again!  It’s an adventure – my mantra.  After such a pleasant day traveling through El Salvador, it was just, well, anti-climatic – to say the least.  However, new morning, new day – let’s go!

We figured we should be able to make 2 borders today – Honduras just has a small tail that connects El Salvador and Nicaragua – only about 70 miles wide – on the western coast of Central America. We had read that we might want to go a different route and skip El Salvador (such a tiny country) because they were hard to deal with – well, our experience was so pleasant, we thought Honduras would be a breeze.  At the same time, though, we read that it would probably cost us the most of any crossing.  Yep.

We arrived early – got accosted by several “runners” who wanted to help us.  We didn’t want to do it, but then realized we really needed to at this crossing.  It would have ben much cheaper I we hadn’t, but not sure we could have handled it.  The different offices were so spread apart – on different roads that we likely would never have figured it out.  The guy told us he would charge $10.00.  OK  First charge was $6.00 – 3 each for the 2 of us.  Then $15 each for our pets, then $40 for customs – and that would be ‘todo’.  Until he wanted another 80 for our car and 30 for something else. And that was ‘todo’.  $206.00!!  THEN another $105 for who knows what.  $311 dollars and several hours later, we were on our way.

I fully understand that our perception of each country I am writing about is only based on our few hours to a couple of days spent in that particular country, so I know I’m not the full authority on any of them.  I just tell you what I see.  The country of Honduras – what we saw was drier, dirtier (extremely), lots of potholes (the width of your car and a foot deep – no kidding!) There was no produce being sold on the road – only sticks.  Not nearly as many big trees, not a green.  It was only 2 hours to the Nicaragua border, but it didn’t leave us wanting to come back.

When we got to the border, we thought we were doing paperwork to get into Nicaragua, but instead found that Honduras wanted more money. Again, we used a runner, again, we felt we needed it, but they really jack up the prices.  Another $203 later (so now we’re at $514. total – yes, USD) and we were in to Nicaragua – wanted to kiss them! 

Notice to Travelers:  We were told that they are extremely strict about seat belts.  So we were diligent about keeping our seatbelts fastened at all times.  As we pulled up to the border – after all our paperwork was finished – to leave Honduras, my husband pulled of his seatbelt to get his wallet out for identification.  The officer walked up to the car – which was stopped – saw the seatbelt was off and said he was going to give my husband a ticket for which he would have to return to the last town to pay – and it would be $125.00.  But we could pay him $80.00.  My husband refused – he’d had about enough of their hospitality!  He did end up paying $50.00 to get out of there – but I have the guys name (Zepeda) and Honduras is going to hear about it all. We pretty much felt like we’d ben raped.  I can only hope that other parts of Honduras are not like this.

As soon as we got into Nicaragua, we noticed immediately the friendliness of the people there.  Bob was able to take care of everything himself, it cost $50.00 total and we were out of there in a short amount of time. We drove all the way to Managua – and even though we don’t approve of this, we did drive until about 7:30 to get there.  We wanted to be close enough to the border to cross into Costa Rica the next day.