This post will finally put us up to date!
We woke up at 5:30am in Santa Rosa de Lima, El Salvador to get on the road at dawn. We wanted to get both Honduras borders done in one day if we could, because we have heard they are the worst in Central America for corruption. We check ourselves and the bike out of El Salvador in an astonishingly efficient process and arrive at the Honduras fronterra. We pull up around 6:30am and are promptly stopped before the border by a guy with a gun who demanded all our papers (to keep!). The thing is, at all these borders there are many guys - all demanding your papers to help you through the border in exchange for a tip. They swarm you as soon as they see your fancy gringo big bike rolling up. They grab at your important documents to try to hook you into paying them a tip for guiding you through the process.
So I didn't believe this guy was really an Aduana official. He had a sort of uniform on, but it just said "Seguridad" on the front and a kind of home-made looking patch that was supposedly the Aduana logo on the sleeve. He did have a small pistol and nobody seemed to mind that, so that was one thing going in his favor as an official. I told him "No Gracias," that we would hand in our papers ourselves at the office. But he wouldn't let us by. I said I didn't think he was actually an employee of Customs and he just laughed and insisted he was. So we had to hand over our papers - bike titles, registrations, passports, drivers licenses and our very important cancelled El Salvador vehicle import permits. It's 6:30 am and he says - I'll see you at 8am. Marion was thinking - "did you just give that dude all our stuff!!!?"
So, with not a whole lot of choice, we proceeded without most of our documents (got the passports back) to the actual border to try to at least complete the Migracion step of checking ourselves in to Honduras. We completed that relatively easily because it was so early that nobody was in line. Then, around 7:40am I walk back to the shack to check on our precious documents. Turns out that the guy is for real and that he has to do this until the Aduana (customs) staff shows up for work. They are supposed to start at 6am, but today the first worker rolls in around 7:45 and the guy with the gun finally lets me have my papers back so I can bring them to the window.
Getting to the border so early makes it relatively painless as we're first in line and we get our 50 copies of everything under the sun and finish the process - bikes checked into Honduras in around 2 hours! There was one entertaining part where a guy claimed that he had bribed the Aduana lady for me so that she would be fast. "Not much," he said, "just five dollars per bike, so you owe me ten dollars." I just smiled as said, "pienso que no es la verdad" - which is my bad Spanish version of "bullshit" and he dropped it fast enough to make it obvious that he was not out of pocket $10 (a huge amount of money for the guys who hang out at borders).
Set loose in Honduras, we fly across the country - stopping only for grilled steak on the road side and for gas (but they had no gas at the station...). In an hour and a half or so, we are at the Honduras - Nicaragua border to start the process all over again. We are dreading the Honduras part, but it turns out the border is also empty and we complete the process painlessly. A guy tries to change our Lempiras for Cordobas at a ridiculous rate and when I protest that this is not the correct ratio, he adjusts his exchange rate by 25%! Slow day at the border so he was trying to earn a day's pay on us.
After some trouble finding the Nica facilities and momentarily not having enough US dollars to pay for our entry, we make it into Nicaragua in another couple of hours and even purchase our mandatory insurance from a lady sitting under a tree in the parking lot.
At the Honduras border we realized we were not at the border we had intended to go to, so we were nowhere near the city of Esteli, Nicaragua that we were planning to stay in. Turns out the only way to get there is 100 km of unpaved road that was rocky and sandy and steep and exhausting. But very beautiful, through Nica's cattle farms and low mountains. Marion did amazingly and completed some of her toughest off-roading yet. We arrived in Esteli exhausted and covered in dirt, so naturally we checked into the nicest hotel in town. Much to the staff's amusement. There are some more great shots of Marion's face when we arrived in Esteli. We have enough for a series of dirty Marion faces for our hallway someday...
Tomorrow morning we're off to Leon, Nicaragua for a few days and then to Managua to try to locate new rear tires and some more oil for an oil change on the Yamaha. It's great to be back in Nica!
We woke up at 5:30am in Santa Rosa de Lima, El Salvador to get on the road at dawn. We wanted to get both Honduras borders done in one day if we could, because we have heard they are the worst in Central America for corruption. We check ourselves and the bike out of El Salvador in an astonishingly efficient process and arrive at the Honduras fronterra. We pull up around 6:30am and are promptly stopped before the border by a guy with a gun who demanded all our papers (to keep!). The thing is, at all these borders there are many guys - all demanding your papers to help you through the border in exchange for a tip. They swarm you as soon as they see your fancy gringo big bike rolling up. They grab at your important documents to try to hook you into paying them a tip for guiding you through the process.
So I didn't believe this guy was really an Aduana official. He had a sort of uniform on, but it just said "Seguridad" on the front and a kind of home-made looking patch that was supposedly the Aduana logo on the sleeve. He did have a small pistol and nobody seemed to mind that, so that was one thing going in his favor as an official. I told him "No Gracias," that we would hand in our papers ourselves at the office. But he wouldn't let us by. I said I didn't think he was actually an employee of Customs and he just laughed and insisted he was. So we had to hand over our papers - bike titles, registrations, passports, drivers licenses and our very important cancelled El Salvador vehicle import permits. It's 6:30 am and he says - I'll see you at 8am. Marion was thinking - "did you just give that dude all our stuff!!!?"
So, with not a whole lot of choice, we proceeded without most of our documents (got the passports back) to the actual border to try to at least complete the Migracion step of checking ourselves in to Honduras. We completed that relatively easily because it was so early that nobody was in line. Then, around 7:40am I walk back to the shack to check on our precious documents. Turns out that the guy is for real and that he has to do this until the Aduana (customs) staff shows up for work. They are supposed to start at 6am, but today the first worker rolls in around 7:45 and the guy with the gun finally lets me have my papers back so I can bring them to the window.
Getting to the border so early makes it relatively painless as we're first in line and we get our 50 copies of everything under the sun and finish the process - bikes checked into Honduras in around 2 hours! There was one entertaining part where a guy claimed that he had bribed the Aduana lady for me so that she would be fast. "Not much," he said, "just five dollars per bike, so you owe me ten dollars." I just smiled as said, "pienso que no es la verdad" - which is my bad Spanish version of "bullshit" and he dropped it fast enough to make it obvious that he was not out of pocket $10 (a huge amount of money for the guys who hang out at borders).
Set loose in Honduras, we fly across the country - stopping only for grilled steak on the road side and for gas (but they had no gas at the station...). In an hour and a half or so, we are at the Honduras - Nicaragua border to start the process all over again. We are dreading the Honduras part, but it turns out the border is also empty and we complete the process painlessly. A guy tries to change our Lempiras for Cordobas at a ridiculous rate and when I protest that this is not the correct ratio, he adjusts his exchange rate by 25%! Slow day at the border so he was trying to earn a day's pay on us.
After some trouble finding the Nica facilities and momentarily not having enough US dollars to pay for our entry, we make it into Nicaragua in another couple of hours and even purchase our mandatory insurance from a lady sitting under a tree in the parking lot.
At the Honduras border we realized we were not at the border we had intended to go to, so we were nowhere near the city of Esteli, Nicaragua that we were planning to stay in. Turns out the only way to get there is 100 km of unpaved road that was rocky and sandy and steep and exhausting. But very beautiful, through Nica's cattle farms and low mountains. Marion did amazingly and completed some of her toughest off-roading yet. We arrived in Esteli exhausted and covered in dirt, so naturally we checked into the nicest hotel in town. Much to the staff's amusement. There are some more great shots of Marion's face when we arrived in Esteli. We have enough for a series of dirty Marion faces for our hallway someday...
Tomorrow morning we're off to Leon, Nicaragua for a few days and then to Managua to try to locate new rear tires and some more oil for an oil change on the Yamaha. It's great to be back in Nica!
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| Morning at the Honduras border |
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| Bank "system" down, no sign for Migracion, no sign for Aduana. Nice ceiling. Overall, a top notch operation. |
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| After 100 km of bad (but fun) off roading, we think the roads improve a bit |
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| Big head Davis without a riding jacket. Tsk tsk... |
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| Marion is completely worn out by this point - but having a great time. The road has greatly improved by this point to hard packed rocks. It's amazing we didn't puncture a tire this day. |
Beautiful Marion---you look soooooooooo tired!
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