Today started off bright and sunny in Flores, and we were well-rested and happy to be on the bikes. The plan was to ride down CA-13 until it intersected with CA-9, and then cut across on a little red road on the map from Gualan to where it intersected with CA-11 not terribly far from El Florido, the border crossing into Honduras. We figured we'd get halfway today, find a place to stay and then ride the rest of the way and cross into Honduras tomorrow.

The riding was easy but beautiful. The parts of Guatemala that we've seen are just beautiful landscape. Mexico was varied and lovely, presenting you with a wide range of landscapes… but the roads in Guatemala so far have been much less challenging, but the landscape lush, verdant and green. We saw more of the rolling hills that Kay mentioned riding in a couple of days ago, and we also saw a beautiful lowlands valley; watched rain falling on a mountain range off in a distance and just had an absolutely beautiful day of riding.


Guatemala

At one point, we ran across a man on a bicycle towing a small bicycle trailer. He was obviously traveling long-distance, and Kay waved and asked through the headsets "Do you want to stop and talk to him?" "Sure!" We pulled onto the shoulder (but still practically in the road) a few feet ahead of him and he rode up beside Kay and started chatting. It turns out, his name is Jeff and he's a bicyclist from Montreal. He's ridden over five thousand kilometers (miles?) in Europe, including the Alps, and is currently riding from Cancun to Costa Rica and then back to Cancun, or possibly elsewhere in Mexico. He was a really cool guy and we had a nice chat with him.


Jeff


While we were chatting with Jeff, a very nice, but compact, RV pulled up behind us. Out stepped a friendly Frenchman, and Jeff (who had pulled up and was chatting with me at this point) explained that he'd met this couple at a campground. Francoise introduced himself, and gave Kay a post-card for himself and his wife Dominique. They're on a two-year trip, but I think Jeff said they were revising it to a one-year trip. Francoise came up and started chatting with Jeff, and Jeff translated for us - telling Francoise that we were headed to Patagonia.

It was a lovely chance meeting, and Kay and I were very amused that while we were chatting with one traveller, another one came along. We've met some really great people on this trip so far, and these are the encounters I want to remember.

Lunch was great. We stopped at a random commodore in Chacalte, and generally had a good, easy day. The scale on the map we have is a bit misleading, and we made it much farther than we'd anticipated. By around 4:20PM, we'd made it to Gualan, and the road forward seemed just fine, so we thought we might actually make it to the border before it closed, find a hotel in Copan and be ready to see the ruins in the morning.

What we failed to consider was that there was a minor mountain range between here and there. Even then, we made good progress; in about 40 minutes, we had crossed 2/3 of the stretch between Gualan and where it crossed CA-11 toward El Florido. The sun was setting, but we thought another 20 minutes should see us to the major road, so we'd just head that way and try to grab a hotel.


Sunset in Guatemala

La Union thwarted us, though.

At first glance, this is a cute little mountain town. It was by far the biggest town on the route between here and there, and we were heartened to see it. The road through the town wasn't obvious, so we just started going where most of the traffic seemed to be going; typically a good strategy for getting through the town. We quickly discovered that this town was a bit more challenging than pretty much every road we've encountered in Guatemala; steep, paved grades covered in a layer of dirt that makes it impossible to stop our heavy bikes. I was quickly stressed out trying to maneuver the bike here.

We made it halfway through town and were apparently looking out of place, so another moto stopped to ask where we were going. Kay conveyed that we were looking for the frontier to Honduras, and one of the moto riders mimed going back the way we had come. Apparently he could tell that we weren't sure about the route, so he actually turned around and led us through town.

Back to the road we'd come in on.

He indicated that we needed to go down this road, and take a left at some point, and then go around. We started heading that way, and it was dusk… just minutes to full dark. The problem was, neither of us could remember a left turn for a long time. In fact, it seemed to us that the only route that was remotely close to what the kid was trying to indicate was to go all the way back to the major road we'd left (CA-9), take it over to CA-10 a bit further down, and connect with CA-11 that way.

Thus ensued some debate about what to do. The map showed a road going through, but the guy on the moto seemed to think we needed to go back the way we came. Neither of us was keen on backtracking through this road after dark, as it was full of potholes and slippery dirt sections. Kay posited that the map had a road going through the dot at La Union, and it seemed better to try that way again and make some forward progress for tomorrow.

I bailed completely on this decision as the town had stressed me out due to the challenging riding, and I wouldn't voluntarily say "let's go back there" unless Kay thought it was the right thing to do. Either road seemed equally perilous at this point and as we stopped to double check the map Kay's low beam died. The high beams work, but the regular setting is so dim as to be practically non-existent. So when Kay said that the lesser of two evils seemed to be trying the town again, I was ready to go along with that. So, now Kay has high beams, and the Denali lights, which are even brighter.

We made it through the town fairly quickly this time, and Kay stopped at a gas station on what we thought was the way out of town to ask if we were headed toward the next town on the map. The gent at the gas station didn't seem to understand, which we chalked up to our horrible accents. So Kay tried to point to the map, but it was a bit dark to read. The man went into the gas station and brought out a flashlight. A quick glance at the map and he realized he'd need someone who could read, so he called out his wife who started pondering the map and asking Kay about where we were going.

Unfortunately, the next town on the map (Lelá Obraje) simply doesn't exist. Or possibly doesn't exist anywhere on the road near here. That much she was certain of. The border town, El Floride, she was familiar with, but uncertain as to how to get to. She was confident in how to get us to the nearby town of Chagüitón though. Sadly, that appears to be along a dead-end road that wouldn't actually get us anywhere.

Routa 11 she didn't know how to get to. And Kay didn't realize that Copan was not just the name of the town, but the name of the Honduran state just over the border. So, us saying we were headed for Copan wasn't particularly useful. More debate ensued and with it now being full dark we all came to the agreement that it was Mucho Peligrosa and that we ought to get a hotel in town, and the lovely woman offered to drive over there and show us how to find it. So she got in her pick-up truck and started driving back through the town center toward the hotel.

As Murphy would have it, we got to a bit of road where a truck was trying to come down a steep hill and turn left, and she was trying to turn right up the hill - and there wasn't room for both of us. The truck clearly wasn't going to move for her, and the drivers started yelling to her to pull forward and let them by.

Eventually she pulled forward into another road, and I thought we were just trying an alternate route, and followed her. But she just pulled far enough forward to get herself out of the road and then stop. I tried to follow and got as close to her as I could so the truck could get by, and then there was a long line of traffic following. Eventually the traffic got through, and I started to back my bike up and around so she could back out into the intersection and go the way we were trying to go.

That's where things started to go south. The pavement was covered with a layer of dirt and the bike was just too heavy on the incline - I lost it. Me and the bike went down for the first time on this trip; the bike on the left pannier, and me flying off down the hill on my left shoulder and hip.

I popped up quickly and waited for Kay to come help me right the bike, which was in the middle of the road, but the incline was too steep for Kay to safely park his bike so I had to go help him lever his bike upright and pull it forward to a place where he could park, so he could get off his bike and come help me.

In the meantime, the nice little lady from the pick-up truck had hopped out, was asking if I was ok and was ready to try to help us lift the bike. I tried to convey that we didn't need help, but she was insistent about helping us get the bike up. We did right it, and I asked Kay to move it to a place that would be safer for me to mount it, so we held it steady while Kay got on and pulled it forward in front of his bike. It was one of those squirrely up-hill wiggles which went fine until he tried to park it at which point it went over on the left pannier *again*. We righted it again, and I mounted up and started following the woman - successfully.

We got to the hotel (on a relatively flat road, thank god) and Kay and the woman went in to book us a room. The woman helped to convey to the hotel proprietor that we needed a place to park our bikes - "No, no, big motos!" she had to convey, because I think they were just suggesting we stick them somewhere in a lobby or hallway thinking they were small bikes, so a guy came out and offered to lead us to a secure place where we could park the bikes. We turned around and followed him back up the relatively flat road… and onto another steep incline of doom.

This one had a mud wallow at the bottom that I got stuck in at first, but I was determined not to drop the bike again so I took it slow and easy and after a couple of tries, I got up the mud wallow and started up the street. Sometime during this point, Kay tried to stop his bike on the incline and the incline was so steep and the bikes so heavy that the brakes simply wouldn't hold - the bike started sliding down the hill in the dirt and went over on its side.

I managed to stop on a slightly less steep section of the incline and hold my bike in place using both brakes, but there was no way I could go help Kay get his bike up without laying mine down, because it was just too steep for me to get off the bike. Luckily, the guy who was leading us to the parking ran back to help Kay, and after some failure to communicate, they got the bike upright and the guy ran ahead to the parking.

He opened the gate, and I tried stopping so Kay could turn in and then I could go in, but I had the same problem - the bike was simply too heavy and started sliding backwards in the dirt, and went down on the right this time. Luckily it went down against a wall so it didn't go down all the way, and it was relatively easy to get it upright again and have Kay mount it and ride it into the parking area.

The problem, of course, was that we had been following a man walking up a hill. The bikes simply couldn't surmount the hill at that low of a speed. Given a little oomph towards the end when we knew where we were going and they roared up it happily.

With both bikes safely parked, only 4 drops later. I dropped my bike twice, Kay dropped my bike once and he dropped his bike once. All because the bikes are so heavy and simply don't have traction trying to stop on steep inclines in the dirt, or dirt covered concrete. Gravity and heavy bikes are not our friend.

I insisted on bringing both panniers all the way back to the hotel, even though it was down the steep hill and a bit of a ways down the relatively flat road, because I'd seen that my left pannier was borked. Kay had carried his heavy panniers a long way to parking once already and was smart enough to just grab a few essentials from his panniers and leave the rest on his bike in the parking lot.

Final tally of damage for today: my right wrist is sore for some reason, even though I fell on the left, in a similar place to where I broke something in my wrist on our excursion in August. Dunno if I aggravated the injury lifting the bikes or what.

My left pannier is partially destroyed; the plastic corner on the front left side of the pannier has bent forward and out, and the SW-Motech TraX cases don't have metal inside the plastic cover. So now there are things poking out the plastic from inside of my pannier. It didn't crumple like a piece of paper, and the stuff inside the pannier is fine, but the pannier itself is definitely no-longer watertight and is going to need a metal worker at some point to address the corner. For now, we're hoping duct tape is going to hold it.

Tomorrow's plan? Go back to the main road 32 KM away and take the long way around on "big" roads. We've had several independent sources confirm that "You can't get there from here" and I've had enough adventure in this town to admit defeat and try a bigger road.

__________________
-Dachary & Kay
http://www.CorporateRunaways.com

Or, why you should always bring a book.

*This post co-written by both Kay and Dachary - Kay writing some as Dachary worked for clients, and Dachary writing some as Kay effs with his ContourHD in an attempt to reclaim the USB port.*

We backtracked our way out of La Unión without fanfare. It was however our quickest morning ever. We had nothing to pack, really, and whilst we were very grateful for the bed, you could feel each spring pressing into you. It was as if there was nothing but the bed-sheet between you and them. I've slept on pieces of hard dirt and asphalt that were more comfortable.


She's smokin' baby


Dachary -
In the semi-rested light of morning, we examined the damage to my pannier. The plastic cap on the front left corner of the pannier was torn and pulled away from the pannier. Since there's no metal under the pannier, there's effectively a hole there - I could see some of the contents of my pannier through the opening. It didn't look like there was a lot we could do about it immediately, so Kay suggested that we clean it off a bit and duct-tape it until we could find an aluminum welder to fix it. But then he had the brilliant idea of using Corporate Runaways stickers to cover the hole, instead of duct tape, because we had a ton and it's just a fun idea.

So yeah. We totally bodged my pannier with Corporate Runaways stickers, and it's working for now!
- Dachary


Who said the stickers were a waste of time?

Repairs complete, we set off back to Gualan, where we got breakfast. Sadly, it was Carné Asada… again. We chose the wrong place: grissely, and without utensils to cut the meat, we were left to fend with Guatemalan tortillas (Mexican Tortillas are FAR tastier) and our fingers. Neither of us finished it despite our hunger.

So we rode on to the border, giving a huge wave to some anonymous couple riding the opposite direction two-up on an adventure bike.

Sadly, the baseplate on my Cardo Scala G4 packed it in this morning. Leaving me able to hear Dachary but unable to respond until magically, hours later, it started working without intervention. The prior four hundred restarts and swaps of units had had no effect. We have no idea whose unit is synced with the GPS at this point since we haven't had it talking to us for weeks.

Nearing the border, we passed a couple on touring bicycles going up the small mountains. We wanted to stop and chat with them, too, like we'd chatted with Jeff, but they looked like they were working hard to ride up the mountains and there wasn't a good place to stop. We decided that if we ran into them later, we'd chat, but otherwise wandered aloud about their gear, and whether the four soft panniers (two front, and two rear) that they had on each bike were better or worse than Jeff's trailer with his single dry-sack duffle.

Checking out of Guatemalan immigration was easy. So easy we accidentally checked into Honduras without realizing it. We even accidentally got a copy of the form Guatemalan customs needed a copy of to check the bikes out of Guatemala. For some reason everyone around there will answer yes when you ask them if they're customs. When we finally stumbled into the real customs building they were out to lunch. So, we went and got lunch ourselves, illegally loitering on Guatemalan soil. (At this point, we didn't realize we were checked into Honduras… we still thought we were just checked out of Guatemala.)

It was a surprisingly different, and tasty meal. A potato salad Dachary nommed with delight, some fried chicken, and tasty rice with bell peppers. Dachary ate almost every bit of hers, but I just couldn't bring myself to for some reason, even if it was tasty, and needed nutrition. The bathrooms however, were nasty.

The Guatemalan Customs folks got back from lunch a little earlier than expected, but when they went to check our bikes out of the country the computers were non-compliant. The girl apologized and explained that while she could use the system, it wasn't allowing her to check vehicles out of the country. Something about permissions. "Maybe in a couple hours?" she suggested.

So, we grabbed our books, and sat in the shade, until Dachary was unceremoniously savaged by a spider and then the verbal wranglings of a man with shoe-polish. Amusingly, while we were waiting for the customs system to come back up, the couple on touring bicycles made it to the border. We saw them resting in the shade and wandered over to chat. Apparently they're from Switzerland, and are touring from Mexico to Patagonia - almost the same trip we're taking. But they're taking a year to do it. They were nice and willing to chat, but we didn't have the same good time as we did chatting with Jeff… and we didn't even bother to get their names. We were still glad we'd gone to chat, though, as meeting other travelers on the road has been one of the highlights of the adventure so far.

After about an hour and a half, the computers started doing their thing and our bikes were free to leave Guatemala. While we were waiting, we encountered an American who said that while he normally made this crossing in 15 minutes, he'd spent the last two days trying to get into Guatemala, mostly because the "new guy in Honduras is slow, but don't tell him I said that."

So, we ventured forth into Honduras, tank bags in hand. "Ooh, a fancy new building!… No, wait. That's not finished. Maybe one of the other rooms… no.. hmm.."

"Go back over there" they said, and so we headed back to Guatemala, only to find they were telling us to go to a window we'd already been to. "Oh, it's the Honduras immigration. Does that mean?… Yup, we'd unknowingly immigrated into Honduras without our bikes checked out of Guatemala for hours now." In an odd moment of international co-operation Honduras and Guatemala share the same building for immigration.

Back to Honduras… "Where the hell is the Customs office…. Surely not… No… not that piece of shit thing with tin roofing on the side painted white…." Yes, that building. In the first door, "Is this customs?" "Yes." "We have two bikes…" "No not here! Next door…" So next door we went.

You know how people joke about getting forms in triplicate? Yeah, not in Honduras. Triplicate copies of your passport, the signed and stamped form checking you out of Guatemalan customs, your license, your registration, and after they're done with that they'll stamp your passport for the bike, and then require triplicate copies of the stamp next to your tax receipt, the import permit they just handed you, and the form the bank signs saying that you've paid to import it.

Oh, and the Bank. Yeah, it's across the street, down a path, and barely visible behind the trees. But if you're really nice, and possibly female, they may make the copies for you, because the copy machine in the custom office? Yeah, you can't use that.

Four hours after we started the process we were finally, legally, in Honduras.


Obligatory Devil Horns

Dachary -
From there, it was a quick ride to Copan Ruinas. We'd read about a hotel in the Central America on a Budget book called Via Via that we both agreed sounded like a good spot, and after a quick circuit of the town, we stopped to consult the book and a guy walked up to us and started chatting. Turns out he's a backpacker, and he was really nice. I totally forget where he and his girlfriend are from and where they're going. But after chatting for a few minutes, I asked him if he knew where Via Via was, and he directed us there.

We arrived at Via Via to find out that they were full up, but while Kay was consulting Via Via, the proprietor of another hotel across the street was chatting with me by the bikes. He was trying to convince us to stay with him, and it sounded like a good deal - Wi-Fi, hot water, a kitchen, a roof deck - everything we could want. And he'd give us a couple of options for parking the bikes. When Kay came back to tell me that Via Via was fully booked, I suggested we stay here, and booked the room for us. (Turns out that the Wi-Fi connection is painfully slow… but it's still net.)

When we were unloading our stuff into the hotel, we ran into the Swiss couple with the bicycles again! They'd made it through the border in about 20 minutes, and had beaten us the 10KM to Copan Ruinas while we were stuck in customs. And they're staying in the same hotel. In the room next to ours. We later ended up eating at the same restaurant at the table next to theirs. It was amusing… in an accidental stalker kind of way.


PimpTrix

We also met Stephen, aka PimpTrix, while we were standing with the bikes in front of the hotel. He walked up and started chatting with me while I was waiting for Kay to hit the ATM, and I quickly discovered that he's from Canada and has been riding around here on his KLR. We commiserated on the SPOT battery dilemma, and he gave us a tip that San Salvador might have lithium batteries, as it's like being back in America, with all the same stuff to buy and the shopping centers, commercialized stuff, etc. When he left to meet his friends at the Via Via restaurant, we gave him our card - and he came back a minute later saying "Hey! I didn't realize you guys are the Corporate Runaways! I've seen your thread on ADVRider!" Totally random, chance meeting with another ADV inmate. It was awesome.

Unloaded the bikes, showered and headed out for dinner and a photo with PimpTrix. We did a circuit of the town, poking our heads into random convenience stores in an attempt to find the red Chokies I'd developed a passion for in Mexico (turns out, you can't get them after you leave Mexico - Guatemala and now Honduras have only had the blue Chokies and the brown Chokies) and half-hazardly hunting for lithium batteries. No success on either front, and we decided to have dinner at a pizzeria again because Kay is getting tired of carne. We popped into the pizza restaurant that didn't look empty and sad, and amusingly ran into the Swiss bicycling couple AGAIN. They must think we're stalking them.

Hopefully they're not going to the Copan Ruins tomorrow or they really will think we're stalking them. I wonder what Honduras would do about a reported case of stalking? - Dachary

Lessons learned:
* Always bring a book.
* Never deal with the currency guys until AFTER you've checked out of a country. Leaving Mexico was free. Leaving Guatemala was not.
* Relax. You'll get there eventually - it's not like you've got some pressing errand you need to do in an hour anyway. I was scoping out possible places to set up the tent in no-mans land if the computers didn't get back online since we'd already emigrated out of Guatemala but the bikes were still stuck there.
* Bring plenty of photocopies of your license, passport, and registration. You'll need them. We've found it best to put the passport and license together on one photocopy. There's nothing you can do in advance about the photocopies of papers and stamps produced on the spot.

__________________
-Dachary & Kay
http://www.CorporateRunaways.com

Day 31 was not a happy day my friends. I can't even claim that it "started out well" because it didn't. A little before eight AM I heard someone futzing with the lock whilst I was sitting around getting ready.. I spoke up but suspected the worst. Someone trying to sneak into the room and get our stuff. The lock fidgeting stopped.

About half an hour later we attempted to head to the ruins. I say "attempted" because it turns out we were locked in our room. Dachary couldn't find the keys anywhere and it was a dual bolt deadbolt. The top one controlled by the key outside. The bottom one controlled from the inside or by closing the door.

We continued the search for the key, gave up, and eventually I looked up the Spanish word for help (ayudar) and pulled the bunk bed away from the wall so that we could open the window behind it into the common hall. I then began calmly, but repeatedly, calling for help in Spanish and English. In typical fashion one of the American backpackers down the hall told us to "Shut up". Fortunately there were two european backpackers whom we'd met yesterday who came out to investigate. "No No. Over here" I called. She turned and looked at me. "Is there a key in the door?" "Yes" "Can you unlock it please. Someone has locked us in." Fiddle Fiddle. "Welcome to your new freedom." she said with a smile and went back to her room.

We should have stayed in bed.

We stopped in the first place that advertised breakfast, where a grumpy waitress brought us both Tea even though we specifically asked for Coffee for Dachary. By the end of the meal we were convinced she'd done it on purpose. When we asked for the bill she charged us for two of Dachary's order (the most expensive of the two) instead of one of hers and one of mine. We politely suggested that no, that wasn't what we'd gotten. She didn't even apologize. So, if in Copan Ruinas don't eat at Restaurante Elisa's. The grumpy woman you have to deal with is a bitch, even if the woman in the kitchen has a kind face and a big smile.

The Tuk Tuk ride to the ruins... It was totally walkable but we weren't quite sure where, nor were we in the mood to begin a day at the ruins by hiking an extra mile. Sadly, it was 20 Limpera, or one US dollar per person.

The ruins themselves were great, once we escaped the tour guides. They really do stand apart from all the others with the incredible carvings that have long since worn away at the others. The museum is also very well done and totally worth the money. The tunnels we're not sure about. They're an additional $15 US, one is only like 30 feet long, but the other was more extensive. They were created by the archaeologists as they attempted to dig through the layers of building from successive rulers building over each others. It was good because there's no way to convey what building over other buildings is like via pictures or video, but on the other hand, it's a fair amount of money for not much. $37 US for everything, $15 for the site, $15 for the tunnels, and $7 for the museum.


Dachary and Kay at Copan


crocodile


the old man


When Kay had hair


Afterwards we went to the on-site restaurant figuring that the prices there wouldn't be any worse than in Copan Ruinas (total tourist trap) and they weren't. I decided that I would eschew being a complete Americana by ordering the chalupa instead of the hamburger. Alas, the chalupa was teeny and a hamburger had to be ordered for me anyway.

Another overpriced Tuk Tuk ride back to town and it was decided we should finally get me a haircut whilst we were in a town and had time. I swung by the bike on the way since I'd left one pannier on it and it was the one with the Berloitz Passport to Spanish book which I remembered having a section on getting haircuts. When we got there we discovered that someone had stolen the MSR bottle for our stove, and the fire extinguisher off of it.

Great.


Something's missing...

Nothing to do about it after the fact. I got my book, found the section on haircuts totally useless, and looked up how to say "everywhere" about 8 times because I was too frustrated to focus and went down the street to the barber. "5 centimeters everywhere" I said, and confirmed the price (40 L) and that yes, I wanted him to chop off about a foot off the back, and restating the 5 cm with fingers spread to the appropriate distance, and noting that in two days it'd be all curly. He then set to work, giving me sides and back about 5mm long, and a top about 3 cm, emphasizing the tall skinny nature of my skull and making me look like a total dork.


My instructions weren't that bad...

It would have been something to laugh about if i wasn't already pissed about the theft. Dachary decided that maybe Ice Cream would make things better, for her at least, and with nothing better to do, we set off.

The ice cream store was out of every flavor except vanilla, neopolitan, and cappuccino. Cappuccino it was. We sat in the shade of the central square while she ate it. We saw four people and a huge bag of something that was about the size of eighty pounds of dog food ( and appeared to weigh as much) climb into the back of a Tuk Tuk. We also saw an American hippy wearing MC Hammer pants made out of something cottony with hippy embroidery. I'd be willing to bet $5 that it was made of hemp.

We made our way back to the hotel, where we discovered that in the time we'd been gone someone had attempted to steal our tires. Fortunately they were locked to the bikes. We removed the remaining pannier, and the tires, and the gas cans (probably would have been stolen if not also locked to the bikes) and brought them up to the room.

When we got back to the room Dachary declared that I was stinky and needed a shower. I was in no position to argue so I disrobed, entered the shower, turned on the water, and began to wonder what I was doing wrong. There was only one knob. How hard could getting some slightly warm water be. We had it last night. Today though, we have scalding hot water. Scalding hot. Or cold. Eventually Dachary, who had decided to join me, and had prior experience with the device, climbed in and took over. Scalding hot, or cold.

We went with cold.

It's 3:40 PM. We're thoroughly annoyed by Copan Ruinas. I'm not sure if it's locals or tourists who stole my shit. I'm leaning towards touristas, because why would you steal an MSR bottle and a mini fire extinguisher if you didn't know what they were? MSR bottles don't have a lot of uses and who but campers needs a tiny bottle of gas?

This of course means that our stove and kitchen supplies are all just wasted space in Dachary's panniers at the moment. We're crossing our fingers that we'll find something in San Salvador, but even if a camping store exists, it's a big franking city and we'll be unlikely to find it. Oh, and for those who don't remember, the last time we used the stove it wasn't very cooperative and after cooking up some tasty meat, decided it didn't want to burn hot enough to boil water. So, even if we do find a bottle it may not be particularly useful.

Also, we can't find the Honduras map, and last night we attempted to dismantle my video camera to retrieve the USB socket that fell inwards, but didn't succeed in getting the metal tube off. So, that's in pieces, but as it wasn't useful before it's not really any worse off now.

Any inmates in San Salvador that can give us a hand looking for an MSR bottle and some Lithium batteries?

…

While, overall, today has a crappy feel, we must note that we really did love the ruins. They have a much more human feel to them than any of the others. They're approachable, and the artwork that remains really help to transform it from ancient architectural pieces to a place where people actually used to live.

Hours later…

Neither of us wants to be here. We just want to go. The theft has left us…. unhappy with this town. We're camping out in our hotel room watching Doctor Who hoping the hours will pass quickly. We're not afraid to go out, we just don't want to. We left to meander around and find food (once again I should have just gotten what Dachary did). But, we just don't want to be in a place where people seem to want to steal from us, and we keep expecting to walk out and find the bikes gone too.

I've been grumpy ever since the theft and it's annoying both of us. The hippies (yes, literal hippies) who've been banging their drums outside our hotel aren't helping. And, before anyone says it, yes, we know. It's our own damn fault the things got stolen. We could have prevented it, but our own innocence, and inexperience, led us to thinking they'd be left alone. Now we know better. I'm just grateful it wasn't something more important or valuable.

P.S. A colony of very tiny ants seems to have set up residence in my laptop and they scurry out for squishing every time I open it.

P.P.S. As usual, a few more photos on our Flickr Stream.

__________________
-Dachary & Kay
http://www.CorporateRunaways.com

ooo..too bad about the theft guys, ahh well. You are having a once in a life time experience! It might not seem like it now, but all the crap that goes worng is the stuff you laugh and tell stories about down the road
safe travels and keep up the great updates!
Noah M

Today started out with the both of us still in a bad mood from yesterday's theft. Neither of us slept very well - hippie drummers in front of the hotel kept us up half the night, and the AC did a decent job of drowning them out… until someone came by and turned off the circuit that the AC and everything else in our room was running on during the night. So no more AC. Roosters started crowing effing early (well before a hint of sun on the horizon - like around 3:30AM, I think, and sunrise was after 6AM) and it just wasn't very restful.

Combine that with both of us having tummy problems when we woke up this morning, and just wanting to get out of this town, and we were both not feeling well and simultaneously eager to hit the road. (We forgot to take the anti-malaria pills last night before bed, and I woke up around 5-something AM and remembered we needed to take them, so we did… but Kay woke up feeling nauseous after 7AM, and was very sick for a while… and we were both having tummy problems, possibly from dinner last night. No bueno. But we have figured out that if we remember to take the anti-malaria pills before bed, we're fine in the morning.)

We got everything packed up in the panniers and the tummies had calmed enough to seek breakfast shortly after 8AM. We were walking out through the hotel lobby when Kay happened to look to the right and noticed the missing MSR bottle and fire extinguisher bottle sitting on top of the cabinet that held the room keys! For some reason, they'd been removed from Kay's pannier and taken to the hotel lobby, and apparently no-one thought to tell us.

So we were simultaneously relieved that they hadn't been stolen after all, and annoyed that we spent yesterday evening all upset about the theft when there was no theft at all. We have no idea who thought it would be a good idea to bring the bottles in or why they were taken off the bike at all. It remains a mystery, but at least we have our stuff back. One less thing to try hunting in San Salvador.

We decided to see if Via Via across the street served breakfast, and were happy to find that they did. The Central America book that we have recommends Via Via highly, and I think it says that the owner is Belgium and speaks excellent English. Either way, we were thrilled to see a menu with familiar foodstuffs, including fresh bread! Baked on the premises! We haven't seen a whole lot of bread since leaving the US; there's the occasional store with a bread section, or pastry/bread store, but mostly everything has been tortilla-based. And we're definitely missing the Mexican tortillas - the tortillas we've encountered in Central America have been thicker and kinda lame, even if they are individually made by hand. So when we saw actual bread in a place owned by a Belgium man who probably does bread in a way we'd like it, we were happy.

Alas, Kay has been violating the rule of "order whatever Dachary orders" and got french toast for breakfast, and was disappointed. I, on the other hand, had a spectacular meal (bacon, eggs, toast, fresh fruit and DELICIOUS coffee) and was thoroughly pleased. So my day was getting off to a really good start, and Kay was at least favorably disposed toward Via Via on my behalf.

Went back to the bikes to pack up and I noticed a note on my bike saying that there might be a place for us to park the bikes and set up shop if/when we got to Panama. I stuck the note in my tank bag and we started loading the bikes… and as we were loading up, a guy walked up and introduced himself - he was Shaun, who'd left us the note. It turns out that he and his business partner are on the way to Panama to set up a guest house and eventually a resource center for ADV tourers.

We had a nice chat about ADV riding, trip-planning, etc. and I'm curious to see his eventual setup. At one point, he says "Oh, you guys are Corporate Runaways? We're Expedition Portal" and hands us a sticker. What they're doing sounds neat, and I'm sure a good spot and resource center for ADV travelers who are doing the Americas will be a welcome resource for travelers.

While we're chatting, another gent came up and asked to get a picture, as he has a friend who is a biker (and if you happen to see this, I'm sorry we didn't get your name!) and joined the chat. While we were with the bikes in Copan Ruinas, we had a ton of people stop by to chat - more than we've encountered anywhere else. So while it was a totally touristy town, a lot of travelers do come through there and many of them seemed interested in us and the bikes. It's always nice to meet other travelers, so we enjoyed chatting.

After all the chatting and adventures in international calling from my cell phone to wish a Happy Birthday to a good friend, it was after 10:15AM when we finally hit the road. Traveling from Copan Ruinas to La Entratada, we discovered the shit roads that seem to be the norm in Honduras. You can be riding along on perfectly good pavement when suddenly the road is just gone, and it's rocky dirt for like 10 or 20 feet. And then it's paved again. There are also ginormous potholes (and by ginormous, I mean in terms of stretching across the road - the deepest one we saw was probably 6" to 10" - we mostly tried to avoid them). So sometimes you're slaloming around potholes, and sometimes you're transitioning from pavement to rocky dirt to pavement repeatedly.

And sometimes the road has just dropped away entirely on the side, and you have to swerve into the other lane to keep from falling down a hill or off the side of a mountain.

Also? As in the other countries south of the US, Honduran drivers are deathly afraid of potholes and irregular road surfaces. They'll slow WAY down for dirt stretches - even when it's perfectly good dirt and there's no reason to slow at all. They'll also swerve WAY wide (like into the other lane, wide) - even when there are people coming - to avoid the potholes. It's really crazy. You have to be alert driving in Honduras. The roads weren't actually that bad aside from the potholes and occasional dirt stretches - as long as you pay attention you can cruise along at 60-80 KPH.

Between Copan Ruinas and La Entrada, we were going up a hill when we encountered a couple of touring bicycles. Kay suggested that we pull over and chat, and it turns out that they're in the middle of a huge bicycle tour. (Again, stupidly, we did not get their names - if you guys happen to read this, sorry! And drop us a note with your names!) The gent was touring from Ireland, and had ridden his bicycle down through Africa, over to Buenos Aires, took a bus to Tierra Del Fuego, and now is in the midst of riding his bicycle from Buenos Aires up.


A real adventure rider

In Bolivia, he met the girl who's traveling with him now, and she's along for the rest of the ride. They now plan to head up through Canada, through Vancouver, and then through Asia - probably starting in China. It sounds like an epic trip - and on bicycles! We're really impressed with long-distance bicycle tourers, as it's way more work than riding a motorcycle, and these two are on a truly epic journey. Our figurative hats off to you!


It must be love...

That's been one of the greatest things about Mexico/Central America, so far - meeting other travelers. Everyone we've met has been great, and it's amazing and wonderful and awesome to know there's this global community of people who don't just stay where they're put, but instead want to get out and see the world.

Stopped for lunch at La Entrada, and looked for a nice-ish looking restaurant as I was still having tummy troubles and wanted a decent bano. The restaurant we spotted was a bit pricey, but we had surprise shrimp (I thought I was ordering something else, and Kay has finally decided to stick with his rule of "get whatever Dachary gets") and while neither of us would normally order shrimp, it was quite tasty. I think we were both a bit depleted of salt, as we've been drinking a lot of fluid lately and I'm not sure our bodies were retaining enough, so the salty shrimp breading and french fries we got were spectacularly tasty.

At around 1PM, we headed south from La Entrada toward Santa Rosa de Copan, which was our route to the El Salvador border. We made surprisingly good progress, and didn't get off the bikes again until 4PM - when we hit the border with El Salvador. We weren't sure how far we'd get today or how far it actually was to El Salvador, and while we hadn't planned to cross the border today, we thought we might actually have enough time. We might have been even quicker had we noticed a tiny red squiggle on the map that, if it exists, would have saved many miles.

Checking out of Honduras, we had to deal with aduana for the bikes first. Because we're planning to re-enter Honduras (you have to go through Honduras to get further south) we didn't have them check us out entirely, but they could only give the bikes 3 days in El Salvador. Otherwise we would have had to check out entirely and do a new vehicle import permit when we cross through the little bit of Honduras between El Salvador and Nicaragua. We're not opposed to that, but it takes more time to check out and we feared El Salvador's side might close soon and we'd be stuck in no-man's land for the night.

Next we headed down the street to immigration, which it turns out is surprisingly far down and right in front of the gate to the El Salvador border. Immigration is in a non-obvious building on the right. I think we got a little over two weeks for us to leave Honduras and return, but the bikes only have 3 days… damn. Took slightly less than 30 minutes to check out of Honduras on a return ticket, some of which was spent trying to figure out where to go.


Migracion de Honduras

Crossing through the gate to El Salvador, a man hands Kay forms we'll need to fill out for the bikes and take to aduana (customs) for the vehicle import. But 50 meters down the road, there's an immigration control booth, and the woman took our passports and started asking a bunch of questions about our trip to El Salvador. Eventually she sent us to the immigration office, which took all of 5 minutes to get our stamps, and then we went back to the bikes to try to fill out the form that the guy gave us to give to customs re: the bike import. But as we were standing next to our bikes, a security guard comes up and tells us "No, no, you must go to customs." When a man with a big gun tells you to go to customs, you go to customs.

When we get there, he opens the door and a customs guy comes out and takes our forms for us. But then he sees that they're not filled out, and orders us to stand at a counter nearby to fill them out. Which we would have done before going over there if the guard hadn't told us to go to customs immediately. Luckily, the customs guy stood there and helped us figure out how to fill out the form, as a lot of the words were non-obvious to us - he didn't speak English but he was able to get his meaning across. So he helped us fill out our forms, and then asked for copies of some of our paperwork (registration and passport) and seemed surprised when we said "Yes, we have copies. Here you go!" and pulled them out. Back to the office to process the paperwork.

After a few minutes of reviewing things, he tells us to go around outside of the customs building and to one of the windows there. A woman there is going to process the bike importation permits. But it turns out she was only processing one of them - Kay's. She tries to convey something to us and seems frustrated by our lack of understanding, but eventually we realize she's telling me to go to a window further down. Apparently someone else is processing my import permit.

Alas, the someone else must have been new. It took the woman less than 10 minutes, I'd say, to process Kay's permit. The guy who was doing mine took over an hour, and at one point he had three other people helping him input it into the system. So Kay was done with the border crossing around 5-5:15PM, but I wasn't done until after 6PM.

At this point the sun had set, it was getting dark, and we'd just crossed into a country we didn't know. Kay still has no headlights (although his high-beams work and he has the Denali driving lights) and there are mountains between the border and San Salvador - our next destination. At first, we think we'll just ride for a few minutes and then try to find a hotel. Then we think we don't want to stay so close to the border, so maybe we'll try riding all the way to San Salvador in the dark - around 40 miles.

The road seemed ok, but riding over the mountains is time-consuming in the best of times, and after all of the roads in Honduras where the roadway just falls away and a lane is missing entirely, neither of us was too keen to carry on after dark. So when we hit a little town that has a few hotels, one of which seemed to have secure parking, we decide to turn around and check out the hotel. And the spot where Kay stops to turn around has a hotel right there. Instead of riding back to the hotel we've passed, Kay suggests checking this hotel. Which has parking well out of sight of the road, and a restaurant in the hotel complex. "It was a sign" he said.

So here we are, at Hotel La Palma in La Palma, El Salvador. The wifi is WAY faster than the last place, and our dinner was really tasty. Unexpected border crossing, which took us into the night - but we've found a place to sleep and we can head off to San Salvador bright and early in the morning. On the to-do list for tomorrow: try to find some lithium batteries for the friggin Spot.

__________________
-Dachary & Kay
http://www.CorporateRunaways.com

Or, the day the Rough Guide led us horribly astray.

It all started well. A good breakfast at La Palmas, and a leisurely packing up since we had such a short ride to San Salvador after repacking. The land, we were told, where you could "buy anything". We were going there for the mythical Latin American stash of Lithium AAA batteries. There was a little time spent grabbing the Cycle Pump and putting some air back in my rear tire, but it went quickly and our mood was good.

I didn't know where exactly we were going in San Salvador, but the prior night we'd looked up the address of a couple of hotels that sounded decent in what sounded like the historical district.

Dear gods was it wrong. As is our modus operandi, we circled our way to the coordinates, checking the map until we finally found it. We were overheated, drenched in sweat, and hungry when we arrived. Dachary had been out of water for about half an hour at that point too.

Unfortunately, the promised hotel, was not there. There was, however, *a* hotel. A tiny tiled driveway between two buildings led to a locked gate. I made an executive decision to give it a try despite the fact that neither of us actually wanted to stay anywhere near this place. We pulled in. The bedrooms looked cheap… very cheap. The bathrooms were all varying degrees of nasty. Neither of us wanted it, and while we both had some vague notion that things got better somewhere west of here, all we knew for sure was that San Salvador was large and that we didn't actually know where, west of here, any hotels were. And the prospect of spending the next hour, or two, trying to find something in this heat… we decided, unhappily, with much grumbling, to take it.

We then proceeded to spend as much time as possible as far away from the hotel as possible. And, following LoLita's instructions we began our journey with a stop at a place that served Papusas, which happened to be on the corner. We're still undecided about them. We like the idea, and the fillings were good, but the surrounding bread was very doughy. We're not sure if that's the norm or just how this place does it, but we think we'd like them a bit more thoroughly cooked.

The hotel bordered the market area, which was good as it was where we thought we'd have luck looking for batteries. We were wrong. But, if you need any clothes we know just where to look. DVDs too. I even saw Tron Legacy even though it isn't even in the theaters in El Salvador yet.

While there we learned an important fact. Denizens of San Salvador are all mostly deaf. There's no other way they could survive the sheer volume of the place day in, and day out.

Whilst walking through the market Dachary remembered that we had two tasks here. One was to find the mythical batteries. The other was to get me a new headlight for the bike since my low beam only technically emits light. If you look at it, you see light, but if you try and use it, you see none. It's all Schrodingery like that. We'd set out from the hotel with such haste that I'd neglected to bring my Moleskine with the address of the BMW Dealership, and we needed to get there before they closed. So, back we went, grabbed it, and promptly hailed a cab from next to the Papusa place.

Seven dollars later (they use US currency here. So freaking weird) we were standing in the BMW Dealership being told by the security guard at the desk that no, there wasn't actually ANYONE at work there and that no, there wouldn't be tomorrow either. But if we were to come back on Monday we might have better luck.

It seems that Excel Automotriz isn't particularly interested in selling any of the luxury vehicles and motorcycles it has on the floor. I'm not convinced they actually have a service area either. But, the security guard was happy to point us to the nearby ATM, which happened to be in the mallish thing that abutted the shiny glass BMW dealership. The ATM was next to a supermarket in which we discovered AA Lithium batteries! They had no AAA, but it at least made us believe that our quest was not entirely in vain. (And btw, if you have a first generation SPOT tracker and need just AA lithium batteries, you can get them at the Super-something grocery store in the mall-ish area next to Excel Automotriz BMW dealer here in San Salvador, El Salvador. And buy those motha-effers out because we haven't seen them ANYWHERE else.)

We backtracked down the street to the nearby actual mall, and discovered that it contained a Radio Shack! I was positively vibrating with hope. But no, dear friends, it was not to be. Radio Shack in San Salvador sells only their own brand of batteries, which are all alkaline. ****ers. They did, however have grounded three prong to ungrounded two prong adapters that we could use for our power strip, and a Y adapter for headphones, so that we can both watch Dr Who even with an air conditioner on, or hippie drummers outside the window. That at least made us a bit happier.

We stopped by the Apple store, just because we could (teeny), and wandered the mall looking for other places that might have batteries. This mall happened to have a theater, and I was convinced that seeing a movie was our best option for avoiding the hotel. Dachary agreed, but wasn't willing to give up the quest. She pulled out the Rough Guide, and tracked down the names of the other malls in the area that she remembered seeing there. One of them was apparently the largest in Central America it claimed. So, we grabbed a cab, and five dollars US we were there.

It was big, sprawly, easy to get lost in, and possessed two food courts, two Wendy's, a Sherwin Williams, a Payless Shoe Source, Two mister Donuts (they sell actual meals here and appear to be quite popular), and lots and lots of other stores.

We meandered, and meandered, and meandered, and then found a camera store, which we wandered into fully bereft of hope. But just when things seem their darkest… AAA Lithium batteries!!!! We squealed. We high-fived each other. We waited for the girl who worked there.

"tres A lithium batteries!" we said and pointed. "Qanto?" "DIez." This confused her, but she pulled one off the rack. "Mas! Mas!" she pulled. "Mas! en todo!" I'm not sure if that means, all, or everything, or anything even close to ether but our frantic waving conveyed the desire. "Mas mas!" she pulled them all. We bounced. We laughed. She counted. "nueve?" "Si!" We'd miscounted. We didn't care. We laughed more.

Five dollars, twenty cents for two batteries my friend, and we bought every single one they had. It should *just* be enough to keep the Spot running for the rest of the trip.


Lithium Baby... All Lithium

Food next. We went to Wendy's. I forget why exactly, but I have to say that I was disgusted with the Anglo centric Bullshit from Wendy's HQ that we found within. There were exactly two sentences in Spanish in the entire establishment, and one was in the bathroom telling employees to wash their hands. The entire menu was in English. Even the "choose a side". It's as if they didn't give even the slightest thought to the people who work there or the people who eat there.

Afterwards we made our way to the Cinema in this mall and found that everything had just started, but the new animated Repunzel flick had started not too long ago and was probably only barely past the trailers. Fine, we'll go for it. Go in and find out it's been dubbed. Damn. **** that. I'm not going to go see a movie that I've probably missed the start of and definitely won't catch most of. The The Tourist (El Tourista) was subtitled though….

Debate ensued. Kill almost two hours meandering around the mall in order to watch a film for the sole purpose of avoiding the hotel room, or go back to the hotel room. Ultimately, we decided that while the prospect of spending more time meandering anywhere wasn't particularly what we wanted to do, it would probably be better to the hotel. So we meandered, and gradually got more worn out.

But finally it was time, and into the ticket line we got. "This ticket ordering process seems to take a very long time." I mused, and then realized something… they were looking at the screens. They were… they were choosing seats! When it was out turn, we did too, right in the middle of the theatre. Row J, seats 5 and 6. It cost us $3.90 US dollars each. I shit you not. We started laughing in line when we saw the price. Last time we went to a movie it was probably $14 each.

We got a soda, a bottle of water, and a large popcorn (not the ****ing Gigantor one thank you) for about $6 and spent a very enjoyable hour and a half, or more, watching The Tourist. Neither of us had seen the original, but I was aware of its pedigree, so I had high hopes. I am happy to say, it met them. We both left with spirits lifted.

Until, that is, the taxi ($5) dropped us off at the hotel. Food needed to be acquired, and the area was even more nasty looking than in the daylight. This is definitely not a part of town that tourists should be meandering around at night. This way? no closed. That way? no, that's not food. That way? No those stands all sell alcohol. ****… Back to the one place on the corner (across from the Papusa place) that had a bunch of people and meat on a grill. It was more Carne Asada, but there was ground churiso, some tasty salsa(ish) and some very tasty tortillas.

While we waited in the smoke filled tent (from the grill) we were assaulted by the "music" from the Las Vegas strip club around the corner from the Papusa place. We wondered if deaf patrons tipped strippers better, but declined to investigate. The food was tasty, but half way through it I suddenly felt like I'd come over with a fever. Dachary finished off hers and we headed back to the hotel… quickly, with a stop in the Papusa place (it's the center of our world) for a couple sodas before they finished closing up shop.

"For here?" "No, to go" She smiles happliy and goes to get some bags. "Oh how nice, she's getting us bags for our soda." Not worth trying to explain that we don't need bags, we let her continue. "Ah, yes, thank you for the straws. Oh, she's… she's opened one… both of them for us. Maybe she thinks we might not have bottle openers. Oh, now she's… what's she doing with the… Oh no…" She then proceeds to tip each bottle into a bag and hand us the bag. She wanted to keep the bottles for the return. This explains the people walking around with drinks in plastic baggies with straws we'd seen. It is also, we believe, the origin of the phrase "left holding the bag" because you can't actually do anything until you've finished your drink.

I'm not sure how Dachary managed to pay her but… We walked past four homeless people bedded down for the night and into the hotel's driveway thing. And, as we did, oh happy day, the assault from the strip club started to lessen. Yes! Around the corner into our hall. Even quieter. Yes! There's some other music we can hear but it's not bad…. Unlock the padlock. ( Some of the rooms have no locks. Some have locks that don't work. This one had a lock that didn't work but they gave us a padlock to put through the two eye-bolts they'd conveniently installed…) Open the door. Flick the switch. Wait. Flickr. Wait. Flickr. Wait….. The fluorescent blinks into life.

I think that light is making my headache worse… Dachary thinks that it'll probably give her one. So, we get out our laptops and power cords, plug the headsets in to recharge, and are using our headlamps (on our heads) instead of the overhead whilst I type this to you, and she does some work for a client.

We suspect the worst from these beds, and will be very pleasantly surprised if we survive without bedbug bites, and actually obtaining sleep.

Also, while we can't hear the strip club, there's obviously some other club nearby because we can hear the bass from it's music vibrating the walls.

We are not at all happy with San Salvador. And, with that, I'm going to hand the laptop to Dachary for review whilst I give myself a Baby-wipe bath, because I'm not going to touch the shower.

Remember, lithium batteries means SPOT tracking is back on tomorrow!

__________________
-Dachary & Kay
http://www.CorporateRunaways.com

Neither of us was particularly eager to stay in the shitty San Salvador hotel longer than we needed to, so we were on the road pretty quick after we woke up - by 7:45AM (possibly our earliest start of the trip?)

How shitty was the hotel?

This was the shower…


How bad was the room in San Salvador?

And our door lock? A padlock... from a different room.

So yeah. We wanted to leave the hotel and the city quickly, so we didn't even bother trying to find breakfast. First order of business was getting away. Sadly, leaving the city involved getting on the Pan American Highway (for the first time on our trip!) and we didn't realize how difficult it would be to find breakfast after we left. We passed very few commodores or restaurants, and the ones we did pass seemed to be all closed. We attributed this partially to being a Sunday, and partially to being early. While the people in the hotels where we stay all seem to rise early, Latin America, in general, doesn't seem to get a particularly early start on the work day.

Eventually we spotted a big enclosed area with several rows of tables, lots of semi trucks stopped, and even a military truck full of armed men stopped. It was a row of commodores. A quick (legal!) U-turn later and we were pulling up in front of a couple of women with a grill who immediately started brandishing meat on a stick at Kay. This was a good start, we felt.

We had a bit of trouble ordering, as our Spanish is still quite bad (non-existent, save for a few important phrases we use often). The woman kept trying to ask us to make decisions - i.e. do we want meat done this way, or that way? Or this type of meat, or that type of meat? Or these sides? Neither of us could really pick up on what she was saying - I think she got a little frustrated but she was good natured about it and eventually put down in front of us some stick-meat, some tortillas, and something else that neither of us can remember.


She gave us delicious stick meat.

The stick meat, as it turns out, was surprisingly delicious. And I mean delicious. Really effing tasty. We only got two pieces of stick meat each and I think we were both wishing we'd gotten a third piece. While we were nomming our meat (sans forks - food stands in El Salvador don't seem to believe in forks), Kay noticed that the large woman was making something that looked like pupusas.

We were still interested in trying another one, after the recommendation that lilolita made, so Kay went and asked for two pupusas. They didn't ask us what we wanted in them - I assume because we had such a hard time ordering before that they assumed our Spanish wasn't up to the task - so when she brought the pupusas to the table, we discovered we'd gotten bean-filled pupusas.

I was mightily amused by this as Kay is getting tired of beans with every meal - particularly breakfast - and while we'd escaped the main part of breakfast without beans, here they were, haunting him. The pupusas were tastier than the ones we had in San Salvador, except for the bean filling. I think if we'd had the filling from San Salvador in the pupusas from this street-side stand, it would have been a home run.

A short, easy ride later, we arrived in San Miguel. The plan was to ride a short day and chill in the hotel in San Miguel. We weren't sure if the border crossing offices would be open on a Sunday, so we didn't want to chance it, and neither of us was feeling particularly well-rested after our night in the crap hotel in San Salvador. Also, we didn't really feel we'd really experienced whatever it was people kept telling us was so awesome about El Salvador.

We gave the Rough Guide another chance and let it guide us to Posada Real, which turned out to be pretty nice. We had air conditioning, a clean bathroom, and only a handful of ants to plague us throughout the night. (The air conditioning was awesome - after only about an hour and a half of riding, we were both DRENCHED in sweat. It was around 95 degrees, or a bit more, in San Miguel. In the shade.)

After a quick shower to rinse off the sweat, we headed out into the city. We were only a couple of blocks from the giant street market, and we wanted to check it out. We happily started wandering, idly looking for more lithium batteries but not on a real mission, and spent probably a half hour poking around the street fair. Then we popped into a super mercado (supermarket) for some supplies, and when we came back out, we started looking for lunch.


San Miguel, El Salvador


Dried fishy things in San Miguel

We quickly discovered that the street market was shutting down… we thought maybe they were closing early because it was Sunday, and looked at the clock, only to realize that it wasn't even 1PM yet and the thing was rapidly becoming deserted even as we wandered through it. Kay found a man who had hot dogs, and we wandered a bit longer looking for something for me, but even the commodores that we'd seen earlier had shut down since we'd been poking around. We tried going back to the hot dog man for me, but by the time we arrived, he was gone, too.

No problem, we thought - just try for a regular restaurant or commodore. We walked out of the big street market and realized that EVERYTHING was deserted. The entire town was shuttered. We consulted the Rough Guide again, hoping for guidance, and followed its directions to a street where everything was shuttered and the restaurant that was supposed to be there didn't exist. Luckily, the search took us around the corner to a Pizza Hut.

Don't get me wrong - neither of us particularly wants to eat like gringos. We really enjoy the local fare when we get the chance - street food, in particular. But Pizza Hut was literally the ONLY thing open at this point - around 1:30 on a Sunday afternoon other than the Pollo Campanero. We opted for Pizza Hut, and had a somewhat lame, but actually quite satisfying, meal. (Pizza Hut in San Miguel, by the way, must employ at least a third of the population. At one point, Kay counted something like a dozen people just standing around while another eight were on break. It was crazy.)

Went back to the hotel at around 2:30 and Kay decided to nap for a bit while I read my book. It was total luxury. Kay hasn't gotten a nap since we hit the road, and he enjoys naps. I read for about 40 minutes before I had to give in and sleep, too. We ended up napping for a couple of hours, and it was total luxury. We loved it. I could have kept right on napping, but Kay pointed out that we should try to find dinner - particularly as things had seemed all closed earlier and dinner might be a more difficult prospect.

So we headed out again, following the Rough Guide's directions to yet another restaurant. Which also either didn't exist, or was hidden behind a closed shutter. We covered probably 10 blocks and only found three things open - a restaurant/bar, the Pollo Campanero, and Pizza Hut. Neither of us was in the mood for the ambience of a restaurant/bar (that looked more bar from the windows) so we opted for the Pollo Campanero. Which turned out to be surprisingly tasty. Seriously. We both nommed our food with gusto and wanted more. And felt lame about enjoying chain fast food… but enjoyed it anyway.

I was craving Coke (most of Mexico was Coca Cola country, but it turns out that El Salvador is Pepsi dominated. You have to look to find Coke.) and the temperature had dropped a bit with the arrival of dark so we decided to wander around for a bit and try to find an open tienda where I could grab a soda.

When we left the hotel, we both commented that we felt surprisingly safe. Trying to find the major road where we might find a tienda, though - that feeling of safety quickly dissipated as we walked down dark, deserted streets - two gringo touristas who were clearly out of place. We both agreed that we didn't feel safe anymore, and hoofed it to the major street only to find that we couldn't see a tienda anywhere. We did, however, see a Burger King, another Pizza Hut, another Pollo Campanero, and a bunch of other chain-type restaurants that were open - so apparently the whole town didn't shut down. Just the town center.

Whilst walking back up the main drag to head back to our hotel, we ran into a street food festival. It was a bunch of tents with banners that looked like they represented several of the restaurants in the area. The food smelled tasty and everyone looked like they were really enjoying it, and we wished we'd ran into this unexpected gem before we'd had dinner at the Pollo place. Alas.

Headed quickly back to the hotel room, walking faster now that we'd realized we didn't feel so safe wandering around after dark, and closeted ourselves with the A/C and a two-part season finale for Dr. Who. All in all, not a bad way to spend an afternoon/evening, although we probably would have enjoyed San Miguel a lot more if everything hadn't closed down before 1PM.

__________________
-Dachary & Kay
http://www.CorporateRunaways.com

Ahh Honduras, you bureaucratic ass wipe…

A little before 5 AM Dachary wakes up and realizes we haven't taken the Malaria pills. ****. We do. I then stress over the effects of taking the pill near the morning. Which gets me all stomach acidy, which gets me stressed, which makes my stomach tense and acidy, which makes me stress… I don't really sleep much between then and 7 when the alarm goes off. The air conditioning (luxury I know) which was controllable by degree, was such that at the 25 deg c setting we froze, and at 26 deg c we were covered with a sticky patina of quasi-sweat. This didn't help.

When 7 o'clock comes I'm somewhat nauseous, as I start getting ready I'm even more so. Eventually, I slowly, get up, get dressed, get packed and we start to deal with loading the bikes.

We were drenched in sweat before we're half-way done. Breakfast was acquired at a Burger King we'd noticed the night before, based on the assumption that since they had breakfast in the US they were likely to here. This assumption proved correct. The large room with the kiddy play area was filled with people studying to be good Burger King employees, with test papers and slides being projected.

The ride to the border was only notable in that in our attempt to find the shorter route we drove ten miles further trying to find the turn-off.

The border at El Amatillo, El Salvador though…

El Salvador customs was as trivial going out as in, except that the customs office is 4 kilometers from the immigration and if it weren't for the somewhat aggressive helper we'd have gone the wrong way to the thing that looked like a border but apparently wasn't (ignore it, go left).

El Salvador customs requires 2 copies of the form they gave you with a sticker when you entered. So make copies before you get to the border if you can. They'll stamp the copies and sign them. You only need one of them as far as I can tell, but hey, I'll take a spare…

When we made it to the El Salvador customs all the helper had done was show me where to make copies (at the tiny building that says copies about 100 meters before the customs gate). Dachary wasn't in favor of accepting any more help and then providing the obligatory tip, but I went with it, and ultimately, am quite thankful I did.

He pointed us to the El Salvador immigration window (trivially easy). And then led us to the bridge (show them the papers the guy at customs signed I think) and then to the other side of the bridge where another customs guy takes your passport, your license, and your registration and meanders off to the totally unmarked customs office while you find somewhere to park. You could just follow slowly behind him, but the helper and his new friend who spoke English (you'll find plenty of them at the El Salvador Immigration building) showed us somewhere to park a little farther down the road as there are only four spaces in front of the customs building.

Now, there IS a large blue building that says Aduana on it, but that's not the building you want. You go in there for your immigration stamp which takes about one minute and costs $3. But, if you're facing the blue Aduana look to your right for the dirty brown building with three square columns and zero signage. That's the customs building. The official you gave your passport to has disappeared in there. You, however, can not. You must wait outside until someone emerges and calls your name. It's air conditioned, but it's unlikely you'll see the inside for more than a few seconds.

Dachary waited with the bikes. I waited with the helper. I was called, but we'd gone to immigration. Fortunately a Canadian we'd chatted with told them to wait a moment and ran and grabbed us. We ran back, words were exchanged, more waiting commenced. The man emerged, words were exchanged. More waiting commenced. Repeat. Oh wait. Now it's time for lunch. More waiting. Lunch passes. man emerges, words are exchanged.

Title is requested. **** that. Registration. Grumbles. Discussion over transit vs tourist visa because no title. We didn't need a title to get in before, and theoretically we're not fully out since when we left Honduras we told them we wanted to come back and they said fine, but we had to bring the bikes back in three days. Today was the third day. More discussion. Man disappears, reemerges, discusses, repeats. Eventually… helper says they say I have to go back to Guatemala to get a new exit stamp from there before I can get into Honduras. What?! WTF does Guatemala have to do with it? I'm leaving El Salvador. I left Guatemala before I came to Honduras the first time.

More discussion. Eventually I make it into the secret room. The woman in yellow is unmoved. "No. You must go back to Guatemala." More discussion. I explain that we are returning from El Salvador. "Why did you go to El Salvador?" "We wanted to visit San Salvador." This doesn't seem to have any effect. "No. You have to go to Guatemala and get an exit stamp."

This made zero sense to me at the time, but pissing off a customs agent is never a good plan, so we made our way out. Long story short. El Salvador is trivial to get in and out of, but part of the reason for that is that they put zero stamps in your passport. So, as far as anyone can tell from our passport, we never went there. (Except that we have copies of our bike's import permits that have been canceled with an official stamp from El Salvador, but nothing in our passport for us.)

Now, obviously the Honduras customs woman knows this (it is the El Salvador border she works at), and I have the exit stamp on the paperwork from El Salvador but if you look at the passport it says that we entered and then left Guatemala, entered Honduras, left honduras, and now, without having gone anywhere, are asking to come back to Honduras. That simply won't do my friends. You can't re-enter without having gone somewhere in your passport, and we did not. The english speaking helper (Jordan) asked if it would work if we could get El Salvador to stamp something in the passport. She shrugged. It was worth a try.

So, we trotted back to El Salvador. A guard at the bridge checked my passport, and seemed perfectly happy to let me into El Salvador even though I was checked into Honduras. Back at the El Salvador immigration he looked at the passport and, because they don't stamp passports, was unable to help at all.

Back to Honduras, back to the lady…. brick wall. Come, lets go wait. We go back to the bikes. "She isn't going to give it to you." says Jordan, "but she will go home tonight and the border is open 24 hours. Maybe we can get the next guy to do it."

Along the way there have been various suggestions that money would make this all go away. I was not prepared, at this point, to start handing out $150 per bike to get the stamp. So, we waited. Jordan disappeared, then came back suggesting that for only $20 I could get one of the officials to stamp us out to go back to El Salvador. I told him I wasn't about to bribe anyone to go in the wrong direction, and that while I didn't intend to bribe anyone, if i WAS going to bribe someone it would be to go towards Nicaragua not back into El Salvador and Guatemala. Alas, more waiting. Eventually there was more discussion about the shift change. Dachary missed the part where it was stated that 10pm would be the appropriate time to retry and Jordan said he'd return in 2hrs.

I made a total newb move and let him walk off with the papers. They were all copies, but one of each set had the official stamp from the guy at El Salvador customs. I had a spare, so i could go it alone without him, but it still irked me that I let him. Of course, two hours came and went. Around three hours later I saw the original helper ( I never got his name ) down the road and tracked him down.

It was now about four PM and we'd arrived around eleven AM. Yes, he said Jordan was around, somewhere (El Salvador I think) and yes, he had the paperwork, and yes he would be back. "When?" …."neuve" (9 PM). Great….

Dachary was stressed before this, and upon hearing the news was… very stressed. She'd been sitting by the bikes being hit upon by various men (often drunk) who failed to grasp the concept of someone who doesn't speak their language not being able to carry on a conversation with them.


Waiting at El Amatillo

Not long after sunset the original helper reappeared. Come… we make this happen. Jordan had been replaced with a plump interpreter with a desire for dollars. Basically, for something like $75 a bike we could get it all taken care of. Coming in legally it had been like $36, but we didn't have an exit stamp from Guatemala, and getting a stamp into Honduras without having gone anywhere required a little… grease.

Now, I'm generally opposed to bribes, and am stubborn enough to say **** that and drive back to Guatemala, as I was fairly confident that I could get back over the border in that direction without bribing anyone, but by this point, Dachary was near tears. Stressed from a generally unpleasant experience since leaving Copan (and that one tainted by the perceived theft) and really really not happy about the prospect of spending another night in another shitty hotel like the one beside us at the border, and not having anywhere to set up a tent in this no-mans land (total shit hole of a border crossing), and not wanting to ride at night, especially with me having no real low beam and the officials on the impending stretch of road being well known for wanting to pull you over to get bribes…. she was left without any options that didn't add more stress.

So, I made an executive decision. It was time to bribe. Now, we had about $30 in US currency left (not expecting to need it) and more than enough Limperas to pay the official fees to get back in, even though we were expecting them to be less since, in theory, the bikes were only kind-of checked out, but as the US dollars weren't enough to cover the fees and the bribe I needed to pay in Limperas and they wanted 3,000. I told them no. I only had 2000. Much discussion and verbal discussion of numbers ensued. They were trying to figure out how much that left them after the bribe and fees. Not enough apparently. I held fast but it was not to be.

I've got maybe $20 US I tell them. Discussion, discussion. No. 2,000 L and $30 US was what it was going to take. Oh wait… I really don't have 3,000 L. Shit, I don't even have 2,000 L. I've got just over 1,700…. "Can you go to the ATM? There's one about 5K back?" No way. No how. I am not giving you guys a blank ****ing checque.

Back to Dachary to have her extract some more US from the pannier. Not something we wanted to do with a helper looking over our shoulder but… She extracted $60. I managed to hide $20 of it. Ok …So, 1,700L + $60 US. Yes, that was probably more than the 3000L but at this point I honestly didn't give a shit. I wanted this done.

Yes, that was enough. Hand over the passports because, of course, there's no way the official will do it in front of me. **** it. I hand them over. They disappear into the customs building. At this point there a three helpers and a guy who seems to be just hanging around for the hell of it, it's pitch black out. Dachary is back at the bikes being proposition by multiple men in various states of inebriation… Helpers emerge. Helpers enter. Helpers emerge. One likes to bitch about something annoying about the customs official. At this point I'm wondering if they're just totally scamming me and it was something that I could have actually done myself with the new person...

Enter, emerge, bitch, repeat. Eventually they emerge with passports… but no, we're not done yet. Honduras needs three copies of everything, even their illegal passport stamps. They run the passports across the road. I could follow, but I can see the shack he's running to, and honestly I don't give a ****. I'm not worried that he's going to run off with them. Copies are made. Copies are delivered. Passports emerge. Oops. One of them has us needing to leave on the 11th of January (tomorrow) and one of them has us needing to leave on the 11th of October. The October one goes back for a doctoring. No new photocopies are required. Time passes. Official papers emerge. Copies are made. This time the copies are for us. We need them to give to the guy at the gate a little ways down the road.

At no point did any official check our bikes, which confirms what I had suspected. That we really were bribing an official and not just lining the pockets of helpers.

The topic of fumigation had come up earlier in the day, even though the border by Copan had none, and we'd seen no-one fumigating anything here. I was dubious. I suspect Jordan was trying to get more money in an earlier attempt at getting me to bribe someone. Fumigation was not mentioned during the actual bribery, and as far as I can tell, there is none. I believe that two or three taxes were actually paid as part of the bribe.

Total cost approximately $171 US to get into Honduras a second time, for one day.

Now, many of you are stubborn, like me, and would have said **** it and gone back to Guatemala for an exit stamp. But you have to consider that it'll take you a day to cross El Salvador, you'll have to pay to enter Guatemala, you'll have to pay to exit Guatemala, and you'll have to pay to enter Honduras again. Plus, you'll need to sleep a few times dung all of this so add in few nights in hotels and food, and gas…. $171 US is starting to sound like a good deal financially, plus a ****load less annoyance. Add on top of that the sanity of the woman you love and it's a ****ing bargain.

Helper #1 came back to the bikes, made sure each of us had the fancy paper and the photocopy for the gate man, and then, even though it was specifically stated that he was getting paid from the bribery and didn't need a tip, asked for a tip. This was not at all unexpected. He was rather insistent. I was rather broke, and also rather motivated to get the **** out of there. I started pulling out 20 Limpera notes (I had 2) and wasn't going to give him my ones, five, and a ten, but he managed to convey that that was a shit tip (it was) and he deserved more (probably not). **** it. I said again. There's no point in arguing over what is essentially $2 US worth of notes that can't buy me anything. I handed them over.

Oh wait… Dachary needed to go to the bathroom. I didn't know, and the bathroom costs 5L…

We drive. The plan is to stop at the first ATM or gas station as we have no money, and the gas stations in Honduras have, to date, not charged anything for the bathroom. No bank.

Whilst waiting in the dark for corrupt dealings to conclude I had a rather good idea. There's not any significant difference between a low beam and a high beam other than the direction they're pointed in. Why then, do my Denali LED lights have to be high beams. As we suited up to leave I turned them on, and repointed them to have a minimal spread and point not far beyond the bike… voilla! Instant low beam. Turning off my high beam and leaving just the Denalis seemed to please the truckers who would flash you if you didn't turn down your highs…

We continued driving, past two police checkpoints. Getting stopped at one. Eventually street lights appeared (gasp) and a town full of lights…. and then "Hey, there's a hotel." says Dachary. "Where?" "We just passed it." We turn around, pull in, and it's swank. It's expensive too, but it's nice, and Dachary has had a particularly stressful day and zero desire to deal with another shit place.

**** it. Lets go for it. It's nice, it requires zero more driving in the dark and the odds of finding another non-shit hotel along the way, in the dark, are pretty slim. Also they have internet and, it turns out, secure parking. Best yet, they take visa. No ATM required for Limpera, no digging hidden dollars off of the bike, but I asked, and yes they take them too.

We go in. Oh, the restaurant? Yeah, that's open for another hour and a half. Holy shit! We eat. It's not bad. We can't find internet. Oh, it's only in the lobby… We get our laptops and go to the lobby as Dachary suspects she has work materials from a client. Oh… the password doesn't work. "Did I get this right?" "Yup, that's it." says the receptionist. "Are you sure, because it's not working?" she reads what I've typed carefully "Yup, that's it."

****…. back to the room.

Oh the hot water on the spigot sticker? Yeah, it's just on the sticker….

****…

Well, at least the bed is nice, and the room is nice, and the air conditioning isn't evil.

[Dachary's Note]
I've never felt being a woman at a border crossing so acutely as I did today. When the helpers extracted Kay around 11:30AM to do the paperwork for us, I didn't think too much of it. One of us should clearly stay with the bikes as this was a very busy border crossing - much bigger than the ones we've used before and the bikes weren't really close to where we'd be doing the paperwork. It wasn't until they'd been gone for almost two hours that I started to think that if someone tried to actually do something to the bikes (or take something) there's not much I could do about it. I think my presence was merely a deterrent.

During the first part of the day, only one guy really bothered me. He'd been hit in the face pretty bad as the area around his right side was swollen, and his lip was split and swollen, too. He started chatting with me, pointing to his wounds and then off toward the Aduana building. I didn't know what he wanted from me but I tried the "No habla Espanol" trick, which didn't really seem to do anything. He kept trying to talk to me. A lot of "no entiendo"s later, I got up to get the book from my tank bag and as long as I had my nose in the book, he didn't bother me. But he hung around the entire time Kay was off dealing with paperwork.

Eventually I really had to pee and I was also getting quite hungry, so I locked as much as I could down to the bike and went looking for Kay to get an update. I stayed where I could see the bikes, for the most part, but I saw no sign of Kay or the helper people so I eventually had to wander out of sight of the bikes and through the blue Aduana building. No Kay, and no helpers. I turned around to come back, and saw Kay sitting at the bikes with the helper. Apparently I'd just missed them.

We sat around together until around 6PM, and no-one really bothered me with Kay there. We had a couple of people try to chat with us - one guy spoke a little bit of English and between his English and our little bit of Spanish we had a nice little chat with him and his Spanish-speaking friend. But for the most part, people just left us alone, with the occasional smile or nod.

But around 6PM, one of the helpers came to fetch Kay, and then came back a minute later with a guy who said it would be $35 US each to take the bikes. Yay! That's exactly what we wanted. That was the official fee. I was thrilled, and began to be optimistic about getting out of here. And they went away again. And it got dark.

During this point, a drunk (or maybe just slightly crazy) guy came over and started playing with the dog that had been hanging around the tienda where we were sitting. The dog reminded me a bit of my dog from home, and I was missing him, so I watched the guy playing with the dog and smiled. Alas, this was apparently the wrong thing to do. The guy saw me paying attention and started really hamming it up, indicating "See! Just a minute, look what I do with this dog!" The dog started going crazy and the guy just kept saying "my friend. He's my friend" and doing more silly things, apparently for my benefit, because he kept looking to see that I was watching and gesturing for me while playing with the dog.

At some point during this, Kay comes back for something else (Lempiras, I think.) I get up to get stuff for Kay, and when I sit back down, the crazy/drunk guy was gone. Kay walks off with the helper again, and a few minutes later, the drunk guy is back with a can of . He opens it and takes a big swig, makes a happy sound, and then offers me a drink. "No, gracias," I tell him. He tries offering me a drink a few more times and I decline, and then he pulls out his wallet and starts taking Lempiras out of it, and indicates that if I want a they sell them over there and here's some money. "No, gracias."

Then he starts trying to talk to me in far more than my meager Spanish can comprehend. I tell him I don't understand, and that I only speak very little Spanish, and he switches over to a combination of mime and intermittent Spanish and starts telling me his life story. From the mime and Spanish, I get that he went to California, became a lumberjack, and his true love left him, and he cried for two years… at some point he may have worked as a truck driver or may have driven a very odd moto… I really had no friggin clue what he was saying but it was very dark by now so there was no chance of pulling my book out and trying to ignore him again. I just kept praying for Kay to come back, but the paperwork was taking forever.

At one point, a cab driver in a Tuk-Tuk walks up to the tienda and starts trying to chat with me about the bikes. I give him my "no entiendo" routine and he sort of smiles and nods and goes into the store. The drunk guy continues to pester me, and when the cabbie comes back out, he sees my predicament and before he gets within site of the drunk guy, he makes the "he's crazy" hand gesture. I nod and smile a bit, agreeing with the cabbie.

The cabbie comes out and right in front of the drunk guy waves his hand in front of his nose like the guy stinks. (He does stink, in fact.) The drunk guy gets offended by this. At this point I've gotten up and am standing next to Kay's bike because I'm sick of sitting and I want to put a little distance between me and the drunk guy. The drunk guy and the cabbie start having a verbal exchange, which I gather was essentially "Come back here and say that to my face!" or some other equally stupid, macho thing, and the cabbie just waves it off and walks away.

The drunk guy then starts trying to get me to sit down next to him again, but I try conveying that I'm tired of sitting and that standing is bueno. Then he waves off toward the direction the cabbie went, and makes a dismissive gesture, and I just shrug. He starts miming that he's sad I won't sit down next to him again, and I continue the "no entiendo" and that I don't want to sit down again. Apparently he thinks that the cabbie has turned me against him, and he sadly gets up and starts to walk away, continuing to gesture to me from time to time. Eventually he waves and wanders off, and I see him a few minutes later standing about 100 feet away watching me to see if I notice he's gone.

Dear God. This was painful.

So ladies - it may or may not be ok to sit around with bikes during the day. But after dark - beware of the men who will try to proposition you/buy you s/grab or kiss you as you walk away.

Kay asks me to point out that had I been the one with the helper guys in the beginning, the woman at the window may have taken pity on me and not tried to send me all the way back to Guatemala. Personally, I think if I'd been there I would have gotten annoyed and done something that would have pissed her off and we'd still be sitting at the border.

---
Afterthoughts:
Would I recommend using a helper at this border crossing? Absolutely. Had we not made the mistake of going into El Salvador after Honduras they would have seriously expedited the process and only cost a tip of $5-10 US. But, hold out on getting one until you reach the El Salvador immigration. Then you can choose from a number of them who speak good English. Even if you spanish is good I'd still lean towards getting one because $5 isn't a bad price for being led directly to all the windows, told which papers to hand to what people, and when to make how many copies of what. Because there's no getting into Honduras without a plethora of copies. Not counting the copies made during the bribery we needed the three copies of the license, registration, passport, and i think two copies of the copies stamped by the El Salvador customs man.

Would I recommend using this crossing? Absolutely not. Use it if you must, but considering the number of bribery options I was presented during the day there are obviously a lot of corrupt people working on the Honduras side of it. I believe there are some border crossings along El Salvador's northern border near the eastern end. Try those instead.

The biggest piece of advice I can give future travelers though is to simply not go from Honduras to El Salvador to Honduras. If you want to visit El Salvador you should enter it from Guatemala. That way your passport has a Guatemala exit stamp that Honduras can counter with their entry stamp.

Also, before you leave El Salvador make two copies of the paper they gave you with the stamp.

__________________
-Dachary & Kay
http://www.CorporateRunaways.com

After yesterday's trouble at the El Salvador/Honduras border, neither of us was looking forward to dealing with the Honduras/Nicaragua border. I think we were both kind of dreading it, but we faced the day with as much optimism as we could muster, and grabbed breakfast at the hotel restaurant because we still didn't have any lempiras and they would take our dollars. Luckily, they gave us change for our dollars in lempiras so we had enough to buy some bottled water at a gas station along the way (we'd left the stuff on the bikes last night which meant we didn't have the stuff to pump water).

Riding across Honduras took us nearly three hours. We ran into two police checkpoints last night (both of which wanted to look at our paperwork) and 5 or 6 checkpoints in total today. A few waved us through, a few wanted to stop and look at our paperwork… and one, near a cute little town in the mountains, tried extracting a bribe from us.

Yep. Not only did we get taken for far too much money in bribes at the Honduran border last night - one of the checkpoint cops tried to get a bribe from us. He took our paperwork (the guy who took my license asked me if it was a copy, which it was, but I played dumb) and the main cop who was questioning Kay started poking at his panniers.

He started running his hands along the retro-reflective tape on the side of the panniers and was trying to indicate that it was a problem. Kay said he'd take it off if it was a problem (in English) and the guy didn't seem to get it or care. "No. Sixty dollars." and eventually "Fourty dollars" Then he came to my panniers, which also had retro-reflective (but in black, to match my panniers) and started pointing to it like it was a problem. We've read about the attempt to extract bribes, and did our best "dumb gringo" routine. "No entiendo. No entiendo."

The big cop apparently decided I was the weaker target and stood next to my bike with his hand on my handlebars jabbering away in Spanish, to which I kept replying "no entiendo" - and then he started spouting numbers in English. "16 dollars. 15 dollars. 20 dollars. 20 dollars. Dollars, dollars, dollars." To emphasize his point, he made the international symbol for cash practically in my face.

"No entiendo."

Then he went back to Kay's bike and started naming numbers at Kay. At one point Kay just started saying "Why?" (in English) every time the cop named a number (and always different numbers) - either the cop didn't understand the word "why" or had no reason, because he made no attempt to explain, just named numbers. The other guy pulled out a little book of traffic offenses and showed a section of it to Kay, but Kay replied with "No entiendo" and we both stood there staring at each other across the bikes.

We did our best dumb gringo and surprisingly it worked, after only about 10 minutes. The second police guy who'd originally taken my paperwork gave it back to Kay, and gave my license back to me, and they waved us on. We were both upset that he'd tried so blatantly to get a bribe from us, and surprised that they'd let us go so easily. It left a very sour taste in our mouths, after the corruption at the Honduras border. We pulled over a few minutes down the road so Kay could give my paperwork back to me, in case we got stopped again and the corrupt cops tried to find some other reason to complain at us.

The worst thing about this was that for the first time since Copan I'd been enjoying the riding and for the rest of the day whenever either of us remembered the riding earlier, it was followed with the sour taint of attempted bribery. Rendered it somewhat less enjoyable.


pan_american_view

Luckily, not long after this, we arrived at the border. Neither of us realized quite how close we were and it sorta snuck up on us. The Honduras border exit place was literally a little shack on the side of the road. Kay went into it, and came back a few minutes later saying that the border official was complaining that his registration wasn't the original. (Annoyingly, Massachusetts gives you these plain 8.5x11 piece of paper registrations that LOOKS like a copy to begin with, and we made a bunch of copies for borders, so I'm really not sure anymore which one is the original - but border officials don't seem to like that even the original looks like a copy.)

Kay went off to the shack again, and came back 20-30 minutes later saying that the border official had complained that we didn't have the correct receipts or something from the paperwork at the other Honduran border, so Kay had to bribe this one, too. He demanded a $40 to cross the border, but Kay managed to convince him he could only afford $20. (At this point we still had virtually no lempiras, but he wanted US dollars, anyway.) Unfortunately, because the other Honduran border was so effed up, and we had to bribe that one to let us across - we weren't actually confident that we did have all the paperwork that the guy wanted, so Kay gave in and bribed him.


Bribing our way out of Honduras

- Kay
I could have totally stood there longer and possibly waited them out like I did the cops wanting the bribe, but the problem was I didn't know if we were really missing receipts or not because we'd bribed our way back into Honduras because the last border was also ****ing corrupt. Upon reflection I have realized that I could have just pointed out that he only really had two options. Stamp me out, or stamp me back in, because we had no more days left on the passport. If i had of had any confidence in the official documents we were carrying I would have, but I didn't, so a caved kind of quickly. Afterwards the guy who did the running around getting the passports stamped brought them back, showed me the stamps, and returned them to me on the way to the bikes. Then, of course, he requested a tip. I told him "No. You got part of the $20." "Yeah but… tip." he says. "No. You got part of the $20" and I proceed to suit up and climb on the bike while Dachary does the same.

- Kay

Down the road just a bit and we arrive at the Nicaraguan border offices, and are swarmed by 5 or 6 "helpers." They all start talking at once, some of them have official-looking badges, and they all want our money. Kay and I decide that I should try this border and see if they give a woman trouble, etc. and I decided that my first order of business was to get rid of the helpers. I was sick of people who wanted our money and wanted them all to just eff off. One of them took some extra initiative and brought us a couple of "forms" we had to fill out (which looked exactly like the forms we had to fill out at the Guatemalan border so it seemed plausible) but one of the other guys said we didn't need to fill them out and that the guy who gave them to us was "false."

At this point I'd had enough. I said quite forcefully "No, we don't want your help, go away!" and waved them away. They didn't seem to believe me, so I got even more annoyed - I channeled a little of the inner bitch that has been simmering away since the Honduran border crossing fiasco - and told them all to get away and leave us alone. I might have yelled a bit. This time they listened.

I walked over and got in the line that said "Nicaragua Entrada" (although one of the guys tried to wave me over to the "Salida" window, again to which I shook my head and stayed in line). There was a couple in front of me with big backpacks, watching this in quasi-amusement/horror. The woman spoke to me - they were French and backpacking around Central America and South America. And she said they never got swarmed by helpers like that.

I had to conclude it was the motos that draw all this attention, and I'm starting to think that BMWs, while great bikes, aren't the right bikes for a trip through the Americas. The 650s, while wonderful, are big, heavy, unwieldy and clunky when fully loaded. And their power has been mostly wasted since we left the US. Most places we're going between 30-55MPH and we don't really get to use the power of these bikes. And they say to everybody who sees us: "Look! Expensive BMW motorcycles! Rich tourists! Scam them for some cash!" So I'm really starting to second-guess bringing these bikes, although I do love my bike and it's wicked comfortable to ride all day, even after more than a month on the road.

So while I'm waiting in the "entrada" line, the official guy waves me over to the other window - there were fewer people in the "salida" line and I guess they can both serve both functions. I asked Kay to come over and stand with me at this point, as the bikes were in plain view and he's better with understanding the numbers than I am. So Kay stands with me and we hand the guy our passports and wait for him to process us in. He doesn't ask for the little paper that one of the helper guys tried to have us fill out - just our passports.

We ask how much, and he tells us $24 per person (in dollars). Luckily we'd taken more money out of our emergency stash, so we had $60, and Kay handed the $60 to the guy for both of us. Paperwork, paperwork - processing, etc. He makes out two individual receipts and one combined receipt for us, and hands us back $6. We can't figure out any way that makes the math work for $6, so we stand around looking at each other, wondering how to ask for more change back. Apparently the official guy gets the gist and hands us one of our twenties back. Now we're even more confused because he told us $24 each, which should have been $48, and we got $26 back in change?

(I've just now looked at the receipts as I've been typing this up because it occurs to me the cost might be on the receipt… and it was supposed to be $24 TOTAL - $10 per person and $4 for the other receipt thing we got. So the bastard scammed us out of an extra $10, and would have kept the other twenty we'd erroneously given him if we hadn't kept standing around waiting for more change.

Next was the bikes. I asked the official where aduana was for the motos, and he motioned around the building. One of the guys I'd shooed off at the beginning was selling insurance, which he said was obligatory, and Kay and I couldn't remember if it actually was, so I tried asking the official guy if he knew if insurance was obligatory. He said "yes, yes" and motioned me again to the aduana building. So that didn't really answer my question - I'm not sure if he actually got what I was trying to ask.

We go back to the motos and the helper guys try to swarm us again, and again I wave them off. I forget what I said, but apparently my look this time was enough to keep them at a distance. Kay and I debated about whether to leave the bikes where they were or move them around the building nearer to the aduana office, and while we were discussing it, the helper guys got one of the security guards involved to tell us that now we needed to take the bikes to aduana on the other side of the building (the building is round) and that one of the helper guys could help us. We thanked the security guy and said help wasn't necessary, and wheeled the bikes around to the other side of the building - half to just get away from the stupid helpers who were still loitering around.

I went in the other side of the building armed with our originals and copies and my very poor Spanish, and left Kay watching over the bikes. Helper guys tried one more time and again I waved them off, and found the correct line to stand in for vehicle importation. One of the helper guys stood nearby, and another insurance guy approached me (and I told him, no, it wasn't necessary, I'll do what the official tells me) and the first insurance guy who had approached us came in and told the guy that he'd already talked to me - I gather they were fighting over the commission.

I waited while the customs guy dealt with the guy in front of me, and then I knelt down at his window because it was glass from about waist high to the ceiling, with only a few inches to slide things through and no talking-hole-thing. So I had a hard time hearing anything he said, and my Spanish is bad to begin with, so I was kneeling in front of the window with my head at roughly desk level just so I could hear the guy.

I'm answering his questions fairly well, I think, when the insurance-salesman guy pipes in on one side, and the other helper guy who is hanging around on my right pipes in on the other, and I stand up and start to tell off the insurance guy and realize he's selling insurance - he isn't even a helper. But the look on my face backed him off, and other helper got a sort of smile on his face and said "Ahh, no molesto." And started spouting some stuff in Spanish. I spoke with him a little, but couldn't understand a lot of what he was saying, but it was clear that he understood that I wasn't going to accept a helper and he was somewhat amused/respectful of my fierceness. So I had no more trouble with him, although he stood nearby a bit longer and did offer me some helpful info later.

So I go back to waiting for the customs guy, who eventually hands me some paperwork and manages to convey that he needs a copy of the permit he's handing me, a copy of the registration and a copy of the passport/license. That's pretty standard and normally we've been carrying extra copies of the registration and the passport and license, but we used ALL of those copies crossing into Honduras twice so I had to go pay the lady nearby to make copies.

While I'm standing in line for copies, the helper guy is in front of me and he indicates that I need to sign the permit I'm about to copy before I copy it. I thank him, and when I hand the copy to the lady, I tell her I need one copy and the helper guy interrupts and says "no, you need two copies". I ignore him and repeat one copy, because the official guy told me one copy, and I figure I can always come back and make more. (It's just a few feet away from the customs window.)

Copy, copy. Back to the customs guy. "No, you need an inspection." At this point, the first insurance guy is standing nearby again, and he manages to convey to me that the bikes need an inspection. So he leads me off (and says he's not going to charge me anything to help me find an inspector) and we go looking for an inspector. The two guys we find say that the inspector guy is back at the customs building, so the insurance guy leads me back across to the customs building and we find the inspector.

He comes to look at the bikes and checks the license plate but not the VIN number, and then indicates to me that he needs a second copy of the other vehicle import permit (which the aduana guy hadn't stamped, so I hadn't made a copy of it.) So the insurance guy hands it back to the customs guy to sign and stamp, and I go make a second copy of that permit (which turns out to be Kay's permit) and bring it back to the inspector guy, and he signs off on both inspections. Which I then take back to the aduana guy, who tells me he needs another copy of the paperwork I've just copied. So I go make more copies, and make a few extra copies of our passport and license just because I'm there (the girl at the copy place must have been getting sick of me by then) and take all of the copies back to the inspector. And apparently that's it - I'm all done.

What did it cost for the bikes to get into Nicaragua? Nothing. And what did the people on the Honduras side of the border tell us it would cost to get the bikes into Nicaragua? $60 per moto, at least. And some of the helpy guys said similarly. I'm now convinced that everybody at a border is a liar, except the officials - and they lie sometimes, too.

So we buy insurance from the insurance guy who helped me with the inspection bit, since he wasn't as pushy and was actually helpful, and we've confirmed with a couple of other people at the border that you do, indeed, need the insurance. So he takes our permits and makes us out some nice insurance papers, and staples them to the permits, and hands them to us - just another $24 ($12 per moto). But I didn't feel as bad about that money, as he seemed pretty above-board and didn't ask for money for helping me with the inspection, etc.

Yay! At this point it's 3:30 and we're officially signed into Nicaragua. We have no Nicaraguan money (the money-changers at the border weren't giving me what I felt was a good enough rate, based on the "official" current exchange rate) and we haven't had lunch. We've pulled out the Nicaragua map but we haven't really driven on it yet so we don't know the scale (but I've become the official map-carrier, because apparently I'm better at reading them while riding and retaining the information) and we decide to ride to the first town, which is 20km from the border, and look for an ATM.

The ATM turns out to be surprisingly difficult to find. We stop and ask for directions 4 times but it's a maze of one-way streets. Eventually we find it, though, and Kay gets out some cash. I look at the map in the meantime, and decide we can probably get to Esteli if we skip lunch altogether (at this point it's around 4:15) so we decide to go for it.

I have to pee soon thereafter as I haven't had a bathroom since we stopped to buy water at around 11:00AM, and have to do the side of a road drop-trow - and alas, a pick-up truck full of guys (like probably 10-15 guys, because a bunch of them were standing in the bed) drove by just as I was pulling up my underwear. They all turned their heads to stare because it was obvious what I was doing. It's so awesome sometimes to be a woman on a road trip like this.

We get into Esteli just as the sun is setting, and we stop at another gas station so I can use a real bathroom this time while Kay consults the Rough Guide to try to find us a hotel in Esteli. We find a place that sounds like it might have net (which I still need, since last night's swanky hotel didn't have a functional net connection and I have work to do for a client) and look at the Rough Guide map to get into town.

And start driving… only to discover that the roads coming off the Pan Americana aren't labeled at all. Eventually we pass one with a number, but we don't know if it's north or south of the hotel, so we have to stop to pull over again to consult the Rough Guide in the rapidly growing dusk. It's too far south, so we turn around and start heading north, and eventually thread our way into the city. Only about 1 in 3 or 4 roads is visibly labeled, but I manage to catch enough cross-street signs to figure out where we are in relation to the hotel, and we get there fairly easily once we get into town.

Kay runs in to ask about the cost, the 'net and where we can park our bikes. He comes back with favorable answers, and goes back to look at the room. Room looks nice enough so we decide to take it. There's a catch - we need to unload our stuff and then drive our bikes to the parking lot that is four blocks away. At least this time we have warning, so we haul our stuff into the room and drive the bikes to the parking lot.

Return to Casa Hotel Nicarao, drop off our helmets, and immediately go looking for food, as stuff is starting to shut down as usual. Kay suggests changing into street clothes, but I stink too much to want to put on clean street clothes, so we head out in our motorcycle pants and boots. We find a Hamburguesa place that also has pollo hamburgers, and looks kind interesting, but turns out to be rather crap pre-frozen patties. Lame. But it was food - and as the first food since breakfast (it's now 7PM) we clean our plates.

Back the hotel where we try to get the password for the internet and hot water for the shower. I work on the shower while Kay tracks down the password. Neither of us is successful. The shower has a hot water heater attachment thing on the end, which we've found to be fairly common south of Mexico, but it doesn't seem to actually produce hot water. Cold showers for us. (Quite cold, in fact… now that we're up around 900 meters above sea level the temperatures aren't quite as hot, and cold water is COLD.)

Kay gets the internet password, but discovers that there's no actual network. Apparently someone down the street did something to a cable or something, and the net is down. It should be up again tomorrow. Which is, of course, too late for me, with work that is now two days overdue for a client.

On the bright side, the hotel sold us a bottle of Coca Cola (I was dying for some Coke, as Pepsi seems to be the bigger drink down here) and there's a nice little courtyard where you can sit and chill, and hang out with a duck that squeaks cute little birdie squeaks from time to time. No 'net, which I needed, and no hot water, which we both wanted… but otherwise this place seems to be a step up from where we've been staying, and it's a decent stopover on our run to Grenada, where we intend to spend a few days and unwind a bit.


-Kay
I'm going to have to agree with Dachary about helpers at the Nicaraguan border crossing. This particular one was really easy, just watch the numbers on the receipts so that they don't take more money than they need. Also, **** honduras's corrupt officials. The real people of the country have been quite nice, but the people at two out of three border crossings have screwed us in one way or another. The first time we exited we were told we'd have no problem coming back as long as it was in three days…. liars. Then again, maybe it should have been fine, and everyone afterwards was just corrupt and looking for a bribe.

__________________
-Dachary & Kay
http://www.CorporateRunaways.com

Dachary and Kay

When I left Honduras to Nic. at Los Manos they asked if I would be returning to Honduras and I said yes in 2 or 3 weeks. so what they do is hold your bike permit for you in the office and when you enter back in they give it back to you and there is no cost to re enter Honduras! and best of all it then only takes 15 minutes to re enter!

When they said there would be no problem coming back into Honduras maybe they thought you would come back in at the same border crossing and were saving your permits on file at that crossing?

That information is easy to miss if your spanish is not up to par, but they do stamp your passport saying that the permits are being held.

Great report!!!!
Saludos Cal

I am laughing up here as I read the Honduras crossing. I got stung for $ 270. at the Elsalvador Honduras crossing on the pan am. The cargo building is where it cost big for me. You are not alone in your misery.
Bill

Nicaragua, I'm kinda digging you… except for your corrupt border officials and police.

We woke up in Esteli Nicaragua and promptly hit snooze. Neither of us were doing well. We haven't really mentioned it, but in addition to my being queazy in the mornings both of us have had diarrhea since Copan Ruinas. Not "OMG MUST GO NOW" bad, but when we sit, it ain't coming out like it's supposed to. Dachary's had started to clear up, but we suspect that the shit meal we had at Hamburlooca last night did us in.

Neither of us slept well last night even though there was nothing wrong with the hotel room (besides the hot water thing on the spigot not working), and it was relatively quiet, but before the alarm had even gone off both of us had made unhappy trips to the bathroom. The queazy stayed away for most of the morning for me, but there were a few minutes of required inactivity on the bed before proceeding with packing up our stuff.

Not feeling well the five block walk to the bikes seemed much longer than it had returning from them the night before. We brought them back, loaded them up, and set off but for the first time, probably in my life, setting out on the bike didn't make everything feel better.

Normally it doesn't matter how stressed I am, how badly I've slept, or what the previous day was like; setting out for a ride makes things better. But today, we rode down the Panamerican through beautiful Nicaraguan countryside and I just couldn't get excited about it. It wasn't Nicaragua's fault though. My intestines just weren't particularly happy, and I was just feeling exhausted. It was worse for Dachary though. As we rode she started getting queazy. The water in her Camelbak started disagreeing with her. It was water we'd filtered, so it was clean, but going through two Dromedaries* and into a Camelbak does tend to leave a somewhat plasticy taste.

(Dachary's note - something tasted "off" about the water. And it was the same taste I had in the coffee I ordered at breakfast, that turned out to contain something disgusting. So not only was the flavor off, but it put me in mind of the queasy-making coffee and it wasn't pleasant.)

She requested we pull over at the first gas station we saw with a mini-mart. I thought she needed to pee, but no, she really needed some water that wouldn't disagree with her. While there she grabbed some PowerAid (since we're both dehydrated from the diarrhea) but wasn't able to stomach that either. And then, it was an emergency trip to the bathroom for her.

Honestly I didn't want to move. The mini-mart had tables and air conditioning, outside it was probably over a hundred degrees, and I was just tired. But, the sooner we made it to Granada the sooner we could flop in a hotel room with easy access to a bathroom, and a nap sounded so good…. So we threw on our coats and headed out…. then turned around when Dachary deduced that the unmarked road the gas station was on was also the road to Granada.

Along the way there was a typically slow chicken bus pulling away from one of its myriad stops which we passed, like everyone else, even though it was a solid yellow. Unfortunately, Dachary was behind me and by the time she made it around we were in sight of some cops, who pulled us over. He explained to me that my woman had crossed the line illegally. "Ahh" I said, and he asked to see her license. To which I attempted to convey that she had it. This did not work. Eventually, I had to get off the bike and go over to Dachary myself to get her license, because the cop just couldn't grasp that the woman would be carrying her own license. No, I must have it.

He explained that there was a fine of 400 Cordobas and that I'd need to go pay it at the bank. He even started writing out an honest to goodness ticket, double checked the price with his cohort and changed it to 300, still not asking for anything here. We'd have to pay it at the bank, and her license would stay here until we came back.

He asked where we were going "Costa Rica" we said, since we've found that it's much easier to say somewhere a country or two on than to say Argentina. Argentina is simply too far away for people to get their head around. But one or two countries down the road… That's an easily graspable distance.

Anyway, he pondered for a minute, and then stopped writing and handed me her license. Conveyed that he wasn't going to bother then went back to Dachary, asked me how much spanish she spoke, and then proceeded to explain to her what she'd done wrong, and how she should only pass on the white lines.

Personally, I don't think he was trying for a bribe. He was too quick to say pay at the bank, explain where the bank was, and he was filling out what appeared to be a real ticket.

We set off, and not five minutes later had a biker tailing us with actual gear on… well, except for the flip-flops. We pulled over to see what was up, and it turned out to be an adventure rider who'd left Alaska in September and was staying in Granada. He confirmed that it was a nice town to spend some days in, we gave him a card, took a picture, and parted ways. if he drops us an email we may get together for a . Assuming we can get free of the bathroom. (Hi, Mike, and safe travels, if we didn't get to meet up with you!)


Mike

So, on we rode, until the road T'd. We pulled up to the T, stopped completely, and waited until there was a nice large break, because on the far side were police. Alas, we weren't good enough. They pulled us over and asked for my license. I showed him the one in my wallet. No no, he wanted it out. They seem reticent to touch a wallet, which I like, and is one of the reasons I leave it in the clear pocket in the wallet. There's never much money in the wallet anyway…

I pull it out and he's all "original?" I'm all "yes". Of course, it isn't. It's a nice color photocopy that I've laminated. We both have one, and we make sure than we never hand over the originals except at border crossings when we're also handing over the much more important passport. Anyway, he hands it off to another guy and asks him if it's a copy. The other guy confirms it's a copy and asks me if it's the original. I stick to my story. "Yes." he asks again. I confirm again. We repeat this. I look confused. "Is copy?" "no." "This is copy. It's a problem." Not sure if I should pull out the original or not at this point Dachary, whom they're ignoring, pipes in over the headset "Hand him the international driver's license." I know good advice when I hear it. So I do.

This seems to placate him. Why, I can't say. But, now he starts to explain in somewhat passable English that I have stopped passed the white stop line. I act confused. He draws a map. I say I stopped before it, then had to pull forwards. He says there's a fine of 800 Cordoba. I say "Ok. I pay at bank." He says no. I pay here, or my license (which he's holding) will go to Managua, and I can pick it up in 20 days. "I can't do that. I don't have 20 days on my visa." I claim. I'm pretty sure I do, but that's not the point. "I pay at bank. I bring you receipt." "No. You pay here. If you pay at the bank license goes to Managua." "I don't have that much." I'm going to Granada to meet a friend, Nathan Postman. I get money from him. I go Granada. Get money. Pay at bank." At some point he suggests that we'd have to go to Costa Rica (he'd asked where we were headed) in one day. His English is poor and I intentionally misunderstand him. "No. Four or five days I think. We go Granada next."

The whole series repeats for a bit (managua, bank, costa rica) until he walks off, hands the fake and international license to another guy, who hands them back, at which point we start our engines and prepare to take off. I figure we're probably ok to go, but if not, they'll probably trundle back over when we turn on the engines. They don't. We go.

Advice to future Runaways. 1) fake licenses are your friend. 2) get multiple copies of your international drivers license. They only cost us like $7 US. The reason, of course, is that no matter what bullshit they pull you can always ride off and not give a shit about the documents you've left behind. We only have one International Drivers License each, but in the Americas you really don't need one and I wouldn't care if I had to abandon it.

We proceed carefully to Granada, trying to not break any more laws, and find the place recommended by the book. Nope they're full, so I ask who they recommend that would have space for the bikes. We follow the directions and find that with tax, it's over $80 US per night. A bit too much, especially since we want to stay in town for three nights because we need a break. While I'm checking on the price Dachary has taken off her coat and is sitting on the curb. She's really not feeling hot…. well she is feeling hot, but she's not feeling well. I'm about to take off hunting down one of the places in the book while Dachary waits there, when the receptionist comes out to us and mentions that they have a cheaper room in an annex, but the bathroom is just outside of the room. At $60 a night it's still more than we want to pay, but I ask her if she can recommend a cheaper place with parking for the bikes. She ponders, runs in and grabs a tourist map, comes back and tells me how to get to Hotel del Sol. Yay.

She goes back in, and a bee decides to land on Dachary's leg and investigate it. She calls me over to remove it, which I do, and claims that she's not staying with the bee. She'll come find the place with me. So we head out, find the place, and the lady from the previous hotel has called ahead, and, I suspect, told them we're looking for something cheaper, and are concerned about parking the bikes. So the girl at Hotel del Sol offers me $40 per night ($13 less than normal) and lets me park the bikes in the foyer.

The room is sweet. It's really well done, has huge windows that open up and let in a breeze, AC, decent internet speed, and has an honest to goodness table we can use our laptops on. We didn't realize what a luxury that was. (Also, a kitchen with a gas stove, a refrigerator, a sink and dishes… we could even cook if we felt like it. Unfortunately, we have to change rooms tomorrow because they didn't have 3 nights together in the same room… but we've been told that the other room is only "slightly smaller.")

We started photos uploading, posted past posts, started things downloading, then took glorious showers. The water, of course, was not hot. It wasn't cold, and Dachary manage to get something resembling luke warm, which we've decided is exceptional for Central America. We think the last time we had a hot shower was in Mexico.


He has his own ideas...


A pedestrian only street in Granada


Pondering Granada


Tired but happy

Showered and starving, we set out for dinner, find something that didn't work for Dachary but did for me, then head to a book store we saw that had an English sign, and may actually have English books as I've finished mine, and Dachary is almost done with her three (she reads about as fast as she types it seems…). The book store shuttered up for the night, we decide to walk to the lake that's about a kilometer to the east, at which point i suddenly feel feverish and we decide to head to the hotel. On the way back over those four or five blocks I start feeling queazy and needing to explode in the bathroom again.


Coupula in Granada


Street Art

We make it back, I collapse on the bed, and wait for my intestines to give me the signal to go make an offering to the Porcelan God. It doesn't take too long. Dachary reads on the bed, and I let things settle then the lights go out. The whole city's lights go out! We venture outside to confirm this and notice how beautiful the moon and stars are. We venture out onto the streets. The cathedral has lights in its steeple. It's only about five blocks away so we figure we'll investigate. Three quarters of the way there I stop to give my tummy a rest from the exercise and the lights come back on. "aww…" We turn around to head back and my intestines inform me that they need to make another offering

We come back. I make the offering, and then start writing this. I've made a couple more offerings during the course of writing this. Yes, I'm sure you wanted to know.

Dachary's intestines felt left out so she's made a couple too. I've decided that this has gone too far and have just started a course of antibiotics. Technically it says to take when there's blood in the stool or fever, and while the fever isn't constant, it's definitely making an appearance.

So yeah. Granada. It's not bad. It's no San Cristobal de la Casa, but it'll do for relaxing for a few days.

---

Side note: all the Hotels in Nicaragua want US dollars. They'll take Cordobas, but their go-to currency is Dollars. Also, all the ATMs dispense Dollars and Cordobas. It's very strange.

"Nathan Postman" may ring a bell for some of you. You see, Nathan the Postman is a bit of a hero to us and we decided after the bribe attempt from the Honduran cops that we should claim that the reason we can't afford the bribe but were still able to ride was that we we going to meet a friend in the next major city. "What friend?" we said… "hmm… Nathan! What's his last name." "Hmmm… I dunno." "Nathan Postman!" So yes, wherever we are now, we're broke, but on our way to meet Nathan Postman in the next major city. We'll be getting money from him. We think he'll get a kick out of the idea.

* Regarding the two MSR Dromedaries and a Camelbak: First we fill the 5L Dromedary from a tap. This is the "dirty" bag. We then pump from it into the 10L "clean" dromedary because the pump has a nalgene bottle size end and so does the Dromedary. Then we pour from one of the smaller openings on the Dromedary lid into each of the Camelbaks. It's easy, but it's an annoying routine to have to go through every day. Some days we just say "**** it" and buy bottled water, which hasn't been particularly expensive most of the time. It also has the benefit of being refrigerated. Because while there seems to be almost no hot water in Central America there's also no water that's particularly cold.


Remember the guy we met bicycling from Ireland? Well, his name is Julian, and her name is Ellie. He's raising money for young homeless people in Dublin and you can check out their adventures at The Slow Way Home

__________________
-Dachary & Kay
http://www.CorporateRunaways.com

(Kay) I'm not seeing anything in the passport that looks like it might indicate the bikes permits were being held. Also, the customs lady said that if we wanted to return she could only give us 72 hours. Immigration gave us 19 I think. So, I dunno. I just wish El Salvador would put something in the damn passports. Now Nicaragua hasn't put anything in the passport and I fear for the Costa Rican crossing.

__________________
-Dachary & Kay
http://www.CorporateRunaways.com

Kay
I had a look at my passport and....
I had no El Salvador stamps but did have the Tourist Card which was stamped and the bike import papers.
As for Nic.stamps I had them both ways north and south for entrance and exit.
My passport was stamped for leaving Honduras with the following..... Se Retiene temporalmente la forma******** Por salida a Nicaragua aduana Las Manos...... and was given, after I asked, 90 days.

It is all a bit confusing but part of the adventure!!

We have no "Se retiene temporalmenta laforma...." in our passports from Honduras even though with our limited spanish it was still very clear during the discussion that we would be returning to Honduras and that we were ok with the 72 hour limit.

we also have nothing in our passports from Nicaragua We have a bunch of paperwork and receipts from immigration (and customs), but no stamp in the passport.

Honestly I find it bewildering that a country would bother with the formalities of immigration but not stamp the passport.

__________________
-Dachary & Kay
http://www.CorporateRunaways.com