Big bad Honduras. It was hard not to think of all the negative publicity surrounding that country. It was the birthplace of the migrant caravan and people were still leaving for the US border, poor things. Meanwhile we were barreling south in the opposite direction. We didn’t plan to spend too much time there. There is only one 90-day visa for all of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua and our six weeks in the first had drastically reduced our options for the other three. In the planning stages Honduras made me nervous but in the funny way life goes, by the time we left Guatemala I was wishing we had more time.
It is possible to drive through Honduras on the Pan American Highway in one day. At only 155 km across, most people leave El Salvador in the morning and are cracking open a beer in Nicaragua by nightfall. Poor Honduras barely gets a passing glance. The problem is there are two border crossings which means four stops: exit/entry/exit/entry. The CA-4 visa sounds great in theory, a simplified process for passing easily through the first four countries in Central America. In reality, if you are bringing in a vehicle, all the usual immigration and customs bureaucracy still has to be dealt with. If we didn’t have Pferdi, moving from one country to another would be much simpler but the bike is another matter. The same vehicle that entered has to be proven to be the same one that’s departing. On the other hand, if we didn’t have Pferdi, it’d be a very long walk.
After reading of too many people who’d undertaken the 2.5 hour drive only to spend 8 hours on the road, we decided to take two days to cross. Time at the borders can’t be controlled and driving after dark is not an option. Cows for example like to sit under the moon on warm tarmac, it’s just one of those things. We weren’t the first people our Italian landlady in San Miguel waved off to Honduras. After a big breakfast we drove a quiet, county road to the border. Leaving El Salvador was a simple process with the bike permit cancelled quicker than it took me to walk back and forth to the copy hut. The money changers were hanging around so I exchanged $40 and got a thick wad of lempiras in return.
Now nearing Honduras, the country road got narrower. A long queue of trucks took over the right lane. We passed them on the wrong side and already guys on motorbikes were pushily insisting we follow them. We reached a makeshift checkpoint and showed our papers to a female in a starched white shirt. The guys on bikes were joined by more ‘helpers’. Every border has its group of locals who insist you need them to navigate the bureaucracy of entering a new country, for a fee naturally. This is later determined when they are tightly holding all of your paperwork hostage. We were used to this by now but these guys were particularly good. They’d got themselves t-shirts, all the same color, with embroidered, official-looking logos. The fact that they were glued to the side of the border official further confused the situation. The real border was several kilometers ahead and we made our escape amid dire warning of Honduras being a “very complicated border amigo”(said in a very un-amigo like way).
The immigration and customs building was large with a small crowd of people milling around outside. Most of them just seemed to be hanging out, nobody was inside and I walked right up to the migracion window. It didn’t take long. Once I’d finished, I relieved Fran from watching the bike. It was causing a nice distraction for those waiting for whatever it was they were waiting for. After that I went to the customs window where I got charged a whopping $42.00 for a temporary vehicle import permit. Meanwhile outside a little guy in an ‘Irish’ t-shirt of all things had glued himself to Fran. We gave him a few lempiras and he went on his sad little way via one of the hot food stands.
We left the crowd and eased out onto the road. There it was ahead: Honduras. And what a great road! A perfect, almost new surface; not what we were expecting at all. On the other hand the countryside was scorched and empty. We were stopping in Nacaome for a quick visit with one of the Central America moto support group. It took some time but we eventually found the town’s center. We waited at the plaza but couldn’t connect with Ines. It was brutally hot and just in case nobody noticed two gringos with a sidecar, Fran took out the pink umbrella for shade. In the end we had to get escorted to Ines’s workplace by another motorcyclist who happened to know him, and don’t you know we’d passed it about four times an hour earlier.
This short stop was a lovely introduction to Honduras and would be our only social interaction with the locals. We went to a small café where I hauled my Spanish from the far recesses of my brain and attempted to tell the story of our travels so far. The pink umbrella hadn’t done a good job and Fran was still overheated from the drive. He was silently guzzling soda water and salted peanuts like his life depended on it. And maybe it did. Ines however was friendliest of hosts and easy to talk to; it was hard to believe we’d only met 5 minutes earlier. We will always be grateful for this short encounter. Even getting lost and having to wait was an excuse to stop and observe the people and everyday life in a country that gets endless bad press. Back on the road and enjoying the scenery I had a smile on my face all the way to Choluteca.
By the time we stopped, we were over halfway across the country and very hot. The hotel looked a bit dubious with its locked gate at reception but there was a good interior courtyard for parking and the room was nicely decorated, even if they did forgot to do the bathroom. It was close to a busy main street and after a very late lunch, with nothing enticing us to explore beyond the noise and the traffic, we went ‘home’. A few cold beers under the shade of the veranda were all that was needed before bed.
Early the next morning, we were handing back the permit we’d received less than 24 hours earlier. While I went from migracion to aduana (customs) Fran was entertaining children again, these were happier ones with families in tow. Then it was straight down the road to Nicaragua. Again we bypassed a long line of trucks, again Pferdi was fumigated and again I left Fran outside. I had an extra set of papers this time. The Nicaraguan government requires all visitors to apply online 7 days in advance to get permission to enter and surprisingly enough we received our approval in good time. In the shabby, 1950’s space age style building, immigration took about 10 minutes but oh what a hardship the bike permit proved to be. To start it was only me and three truck drivers waiting for one lone customs agent who told me to get back in line when I asked a question. Before long I was slowly pushed backwards as new drivers joined and made a mockery of the queue. Meanwhile two uniformed officers brought Fran and Pferdi around the back of the building to a large warehouse where they were placed under a scanner. It was designed for 18-wheelers and he got x-rayed twice. Poor Pferdi was so small he probably didn’t even register and the staff who’d come out to watch were falling about the place laughing.
At least somebody was enjoying themselves. When I finally got the permit it had two errors and had to be redone or we would have had trouble on the exit. I was not well received back at the counter but at that stage I didn’t give a flying banana what he thought of me. After two and a half hours we finally got out of there. All the while I was giving thanks we hadn’t decided to do this in one day or it might have ended up being a night with the cows.
And so it was that not only did we survive Honduras, we really liked it. As so often happens in my sidecar, I was too busy enjoying myself to remember I’d read Honduras’s cities were the murder capitals of the world. Instead I gave myself over to complex, philosophical musings, like would we be able to spend all our lempiras before we left. This was all just as well because it turns out I was wrong. San Pedro Sula and Tegucigalpa are way down the murder cities list, after St. Louis and Baltimore (thank God we didn’t stop there when traversing Maryland). Oh me of little faith. The perils of the road are nothing compared to the dangers of an ill-informed mind. And if you have to worry, like I so often do, save it for the border bureaucrats. They’re the ones who really know how to hold you hostage.