The road chose me

Before crossing the actual border I decide to mingle with some Hondurans and so sit down in a little cafe for lunch. I order tacos, which turn out to be the delicious rolled hard kind with cheese, onions and tomato. I immediately order another round. Striking up a conversation with the locals is pretty fun and I can’t believe how far my Spanish has progressed. For the entire day, with all the borders and bribery attempts I’ve understood about 99% of everything said to me. The week of lessons is paying off ten fold and making life a lot easier and more fun.

At the border I have to cancel my Honduran paperwork for the Jeep before exiting the country. The guy at the final check looks in my passport and tells me about four times this is absolutely the last thing in Honduras, and I won’t have anything else to deal with. He slips in that I just have to pay $10 USD and when I ask why and ask for a receipt he instantly bows his head and waves me through. Can’t blame the guy for trying I suppose.

Welcome to Nicaragua

In Nicaragua I walk up to the immigration window and am told I have to pay $7 USD to enter. Again I question this, thinking my CA-4 stamp gives me free travel. Apparently this is not the case, so I pay and move on to more paperwork. I find it amusing the official fee between two countries is in US dollars, considering neither country has that as their official currency.

The paperwork for the Jeep is fairly run of the mill stuff, and thankfully free. It turns out I did have to pay that $7 fee and need my receipt. The police guy does a thorough inspection of the Jeep, making me pull most of the stuff out of the back. I have to exchange my money for the second time today and have no idea what the exchange rate is, having never looked it up. The guy offers me a rate that I barely even listen to before immediately saying I want a better rate. He bumps it a little. I pressure hard and he bumps it a little twice more before walking away, saying that’s the best he can do. OK. I’ll take that.
The border here is extremely quiet and not a single person hassles me or even begs for money. This is my cleanest, quietest, friendliest border crossing yet.

Driving away from immigration some enthusiastic people come up and I have to pay $3 USD for something I don’t entirely understand before they’ll lower a rope and let me pass. The military guy standing right there says it’s legit and they give me a receipt, I think it’s some local municipal tax thing. The guys run their eyes over my paperwork and passport and I’m free to drive into Nicaragua.

I’ll be the first to admit I’ve picked up some horrendous driving habits since crossing the border into Mexico. Road rules simply do not apply down here and more often that not it’s safer to ignore them anyway. I honestly have not even looked at a speed sign in months, couldn’t care less if I’m at a give way or stop sign and completely ignore double lines on the road. Extremely slow vehicles are a common occurrence and I zip around one on the outside of a somewhat blind corner, over double lines, doing about 90 km/h. Two police are at the bottom of the hill and wave me over, looking very official.

After taking my license it becomes obvious they are going to fine me for all of the above, about a $20 USD ticket I’m told. The catch is they are going to hang onto my license while I goto the bank to pay the fine, and they’ll give it back to me when I return. I was absolutely breaking the law and caught red handed, so I’m happy to pay the price. The problem comes when they want me to back-track about an hour to pay the fine, with the sun already very close to the horizon. After talking around the problem for a while we figure out they need some money for gas, so I give them 100 Cordobas ($5 USD), literally everything I have in my wallet. After this they are my best friends, forgetting all about any ticket, giving back my license and they happily give directions to my destination.
Only the second speeding ticket in my life, and I bribed my way out of it.
I like it

It occurs to me that maybe Nicaragua is a little more strict with road rules and I should watch it more than I have been. That lasts for all of about five minutes before I fall right back to my old ways of doing as I please.

I seem to have over-estimated the distance I would cover today and I drive through dusk for quite a while before it’s completely dark. Horses, bicycles and children materialize out of the darkness every couple of minutes, making me work overtime on concentration. I remember why I avoid driving at night now. On the outskirts of Leon I pull in to a gas station and am surprised to see such a familiar sight – it’s extremely clean, bright and even has the requisite junk food & fast food joint attached. The top 100 music in English helps finish the picture.

Finally, at 9:30pm I climb stiffly out of the Jeep, safely parked in front of the Big Foot hostel in Leon, after driving about 500km across three countries in fourteen and a half hours.
A cold shower and beer put me right to sleep.

-Dan

I’ve driven only a few kilometers into Honduras when I see some military guys stand up from the shade of a tree and wave me down, obviously waiting for a tourist to come along. I initially stop in the middle of the road again, but they are very forceful about having me move onto the shoulder, so I obey. The youngest of the three, who can’t be more than 17 comes over to the window and goes through the usual routine. First he gets my (copied) license then starts demanding a fire extinguisher and triangle. I immediately produce the fire extinguisher, but make him work really hard to earn my understanding of triangle, “triangular” in Spanish. I say “no entiendo” so many times even I’m sick of hearing it while he goes off on a big tale about how a triangle is used in the event of a flat tire, while kicking one to emphasize his point. I immediately light up and happily tell him in a horrible accent that I have 5 tires, grinning madly while pointing to the spare on the back.

I really am kind of having fun now and the kid knows that he has no chance at all to tell me what he wants. Finally he resorts to blatantly asking me for money, begging for it. He’s so young for a split second I feel like giving it to him, but still continue with my not understanding bit. Eventually he waves me on and in my mirror I see his buddies give him a hard time when he returns empty handed.

The Jeep reading the rules of Honduras

Driving across Honduras was by no means in my plans from the start, though lately it has just felt like the right thing to do. All the books I have read, and the travelers I have spoken to basically say the only reason to go to Honduras is the North Coast, which is only worthwhile if you want to pay to get out in to the Bay Islands. I thought about driving through the heart of the country to check it out, but my books said all of the towns are unsafe after dark and it would have meant a lot of back-tracking. I think it’s a bit of a failure to drive across a country in one go, without even getting out once or meeting a single person.
So be it.

This military bribery routine is repeated twice more, in more or less similar circumstances and always with the same outcome of me being waved through with all my money in my pocket. One guy tries to work the angle of me not having a number plate on the front of the Jeep, another wants to know if I have a jack. One of the stops has more of an official air about it and the guy very politely asks to see all my documentation, asks a few quick questions about my origin and destination and waves me through in less than 30 seconds. I gather this is the “authorized” checkpoint and the others are just military guys doing what they want. It’s extremely hot, dry & dusty here reminding me a lot of Mexico and the thermometer hanging in the Jeep holds at 40 °C (100 °F) for the entire day.

I turn off the main highway, aiming for the border crossing at El Espino and am immediately happy about my decision. The Pan American Highway here is excellent and has almost zero traffic, the convoy of enormous trucks having continued on to the much busier border crossing at Gausaule. The road immediately begins to climb and for 45 minutes I drive up a very impressive windy mountain road, without a single military checkpoint in sight. I thoroughly enjoy this part of Honduras, and briefly think about spending a night somewhere, though no hotels present themselves.

The beautiful mountains of Honduras

I roll up to the Nicaraguan border about 2 hours after I entered Honduras and am so surprised by what I find I have to ask someone if this is the actual border. It’s very clean and quiet and not a single person hassles me. I’m really happy I came up to this border, probably the nicest I have seen yet.

Back towards Honduras at the El Espino border to Nicaragua

Here I go, aiming for country number three in a single day…

-Dan

So far we’ve had a great run with the Police in Mexico, who have all but ignored us everywhere we’ve been.
Neither of us thought for a second that was going to last.

We’ve been told over and over again the main drag of downtown Puerto Vallarta is fantastic at night, so we set off on a little adventure. Two of the guys we are walking with have been smoking a substance that is not illegal here and we’re all drinking beer, again something that is perfectly legal. We’re walking down a narrow, built-up residential street when we see the Police coming straight at us in their pickup-truck cruiser. They jump out and very quickly grab our hands to smell them – asking if we’ve been smoking anything tonight. It’s very obvious they can tell who has been smoking and who has not, and they line us up, hands on the hood of the cruiser to frisk us.

The atmosphere is very relaxed and I don’t feel scared or threatened at all, in fact it’s all quite amusing and I continue to drink from my beer can while everything is going on. I have not been smoking, so they are not really focusing on me. The only hint that this is serious comes when one of the officers puts his hand protectively on his sidearm as I walk behind him. Even though the tone is quite relaxed he clearly didn’t want to risk me making a lunge for it.

The officer frisks me very, very throughly and goes to work on my wallet which has almost nothing in it. He opens every compartment and puts everything on the hood. Interestingly, he makes me remove my money and hold onto it while he’s searching – apparently if he blatantly took it from me I could launch a formal complaint against him and he would be in serious trouble. After all the frisking and searching turns up nothing, it becomes clear they want money from us.
Then, just as quickly as they came, they drive off leaving us standing there wondering what happened.

We walk only a few hundred meters further down the road before they show up and start demanding money once again. We are later told they are trying to avoid a scene as they don’t want others to see they are extorting money from tourists for no good reason. This charade is repeated twice more before it’s very clear they are not going to leave us alone until we pay them off. Exactly how much money they want is difficult to determine, and I’m happy when they make it clear they want nothing from me as I have not been smoking. Even though we have technically done nothing wrong, they know we are tourists and therefore seem to be fair game. The unspoken threat here is throwing us in jail for the night, which from all accounts is pretty unpleasant.

The two smokers eventually hand over 100 pesos each ($USD 7.70) which turns into another big charade. The officer snatches the money and deliberately throws it on the floor of the cruiser, before launching into a speech about how he’s actually the good guy here. If he wasn’t ‘helping’ us, we’d all be in federal prison for the night and would wind up paying ten times more money to get out. He makes a point of telling us he doesn’t need to tell us how nasty federal prison is.
In fact, we’re all very lucky he came along to help us out and we should be thanking him for being such a nice guy.

Yeah, right.

They zoom off into the night and we have no more trouble for the night. So it cost our group all of $15 USD to get a lesson in Police corruption. I’m later told Police in Mexico work for very low wages and operate under the constant threat of serious violence, so bribery is their way of making things ‘fair’.

Lesson learned with no harm done.

-Dan