On the Road Again: Heading South

November week 1, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua (heading south)

Well hello again everyone. Starting up our portion of the trip in blogger style, we are on our way down to Panama from Xela. We hope to arrive in Panama in a week or so and hang for a while then head back to Guatemala. We figured it would be easier and safer to leave the camper in Xela and only bring the things we truly needed for the trip. We decided to do the trip tent and hostel/hotel style so no need for the bulky camper (better gas mileage too). Also our friend and roommate Josh and his dog “hippy” are traveling with us. It’s nice to have another person along for the trip and Josh speaks practically fluent Spanish so has been a great deal of help at the borders and in a few sticky situations. After packing all our things and making all the necessary arrangements for the trip, buying a few snacks and food for the road and Kindra almost getting her toe cut of by a careless machete carrying woman, we left Xela. Not to worry though… it was only a scratch.

On Sunday morning we headed to a small town a few hours away called Sumpango for the annual kite festival or “Day of the Dead celebration. People from this and other villages construct massive “kites” out of brightly colored tissue paper and bamboo that takes them months to complete. All the kites are truly works of art. Some are religious, some cultural, some environmental, but all beautiful and amazing. The larger 20 to 30 ft tall pieces are too big to actually fly, but there are some that are equally impressive in design (smaller of course) that with the assistance of 10 to 30 men actually get off the ground. The process is quite amazing, similar to a small kite, a long piece of rope is attached to the bottom of the kite and a long line of men (some women) run pulling the rope until it comes off the ground. Then depending on the skill of the “flyers”, weight and amount of wind that day the kite either remains in the air or crashes to the ground. We saw one of the larger pieces (about 10 to 15 ft tall) stay in the air for around 10 or 15 minutes!! After checking out all the kites and having lunch we headed out towards Guatemala City to stay the night at the parents of Josh’s friends place.

Josh’s good friend Byron’s parents were kind enough to let us stay on their beautiful property for the night and feed us two meals. It was a real treat to have such tranquil, clean….FREE place to stay, thanks so much for your hospitality Byron and Eva Marie!! In the morning we headed into Guatemala City to pick up the rest of our paper work for the truck, so as to be able to exit the country without issues. As with most things in Guatemala the process was slow and we had to wait a few hours before obtaining the paper work from the SAT office. After around 5pm we had everything, but it was dark and we decided to find a hostel in the city and leave early the next morning for the El Salvadorian border. The hostel we found was nice, cheap and allowed pets. The next morning we headed towards the border.

(Byron's parent's house) (byron and Eva


(Some cool graffiti in Guate City)

Now began the fun’nt (Leslie, Gaga, Tana, James and Jim will get this). Upon arriving at the border (and it’s the same at all of them) the truck is usually surrounded by a hoard of men with official looking badges that say you will need a guia, or guide, to successfully make it through the process because it’s sooooo confusing and difficult (for a small fee of course). Kindra and John learned early on this was not necessary and a scam for inexperienced travelers. Unless you speak absolutely no Spanish and don’t know how to make copies these guides are practically useless, aside from annoying the daylights out of you. Everything went well exiting Guatemala until the final step where they check our passports. Josh’s stamp and info were fine, but when the man went to input Kindra and John’s info into the computer something was not right. Apparently when we went to the city to have our visas renewed over a month before they gave us our stamps, but did not put the renewal info into the computer and it was showing we were almost 3 month late on our visas!! Not our fault at all, but a problem nonetheless and potentially a really big fine (which we could not afford) or going all the way back to the capital and having to spend a few days rectifying the problem or who knows what! Josh tried talking with the man to find out what our options were and he basically told Josh to see how much we would be willing to pay. We were livid! In no way was the mistake they made our fault. After talking more with him and explaining we couldn’t pay he eventually stamped our passports and let us move on.

So we’re out of Guatemala and on to the entry of El Salvador. Everything went smoothly here except for taking almost 4 hours to complete. Josh and Kindra had to wait for almost an hour for someone to get back from a dinner break before being able to pay a pet transport fee. This evening we drove another hour and a half toward the coast of El Salvador and found a place on the beach to stay. It was very nice, clean and beautiful with access to the beach. This part of the coast of El Salvador is beautiful with cliffs stretching along the coastline.

(1st day in El Salvador)

Wednesday, we headed out to our next destination, another spot on the coast, before leaving El Salvador and crossing into Honduras. The beach town we stayed in was called Cuco and the places we had to choose from were either really nice and really expensive or really crappy and not quite as expensive. So we chose the later. And let me tell ya, the only word to describe this place is GE-TOE. Bare bones, two “beds” if you could call them that, non flushing toilets, headless “shower” (pipe coming out of the wall with a spicket that barely let out a dribble of water)! Not complaining though it was a safe place to park the truck and they allowed dogs.

\(ghetto-fabulous-style)

Thursday, we drove towards the border of Honduras. We arrived in the mid afternoon and again spent the next four hours waiting patiently as we exited El Salvador and entered Honduras. After a long arduous process of making copies, getting passports stamped and having the dogs inspected we thought we were free. As we approached what seemed to be last check point of the border a uniformed dressed “official looking” man flagged us down and motioned us to pull over. After stopping the man asked for John’s driver’s license and pointed to his and Josh’s lack of seat belt use. He then proceeded to tell us we would have to pay a $50 US fine 33k away and then return with the receipt to get John’s drivers license back. We had been duped like this before and knew it was a scam. Luckily Josh was able to call “the crooked traffic official’s” bluff and expose him for what he was and was trying to do… extort tourist! The officer wanted to take the bribe on the sly because obviously he didn’t want to get caught extorting us, but instead Josh , along with a few other locals driving by, called him out. They were yelling out of their trucks “crooked cops” and “don’t let him bribe you!” He obviously felt he pressure the bunk official gave back the license and we didn’t have to pay a cent!!!! Hopefully this will be a lesson to some of the corrupt officials in Honduras, knowing they can’t get money from all the travelers passing through.

A bit about the landscape and what we have been seeing on the drive going south. El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua all have a very similar feel, beautiful jungle greenery, volcanoes rising up out of the earth 1,500 to 2,000ft, small villages, horse drawn carriages, fruit and vegetable stands on the sides of the road, fresh dairy farms that sell cheese and soft serve ice cream. Also since we left Xela everyday around 3pm or so there have been incredible tropical rains, harder than we have seen anywhere else, as of yet, on the trip. The people are very friendly if you are friendly to them and all the road side check points military and police are astonished when we present Wallace as a distraction. The little boy is a great conversation piece and immediately lightens the mood and break the ice of the stone face police and military officials.

We finished off Thursday afternoon by driving into a small town in Honduras, where we found again a nice, cheap, clean hotel room with a fan that allowed dogs and had a parqueo for the truck. We went out that evening… found a bit of street food then went back to the room and watched Year One on Johns laptop, funny movie by the way. We got up the next day and walked the dogs around the local market area, bought some fresh fruit and headed towards the boarder of Nicaragua. After making it through without much trouble and a lot of time, we made it to Leon, Nicaragua, a nice little town a lot like what Xela would be like with warm weather and nice paved streets. The Hostel we are now staying in is super chill and close to the market, we had a rainy day in today and just chilled out, walked around the market had lunch at a comedor, and wrote the blog, basically took it easy after the 3 days or so of border madness.