Another LONG travel day.

The time has come to move on from the wonderful country of El Salvador. As far as visiting Honduras, most of the places to see are on the Caribbean Coast which is quite a trek to get to from where we’re at as well, it being peak season right now, we decide to stay on the Pacific coast and head to Nicaragua instead. After researching where to go and seeing how many local buses it would take to get across to Leon, we took the easy way of travel: the tourist shuttle. Since we were in San Salvador and the tourist shuttle unfortunately only picks people up from El Tunco we had to backtrack North quite a bit only to leave the country in the South. At around 1:30 in the afternoon, the shuttle arrives and we board for the supposed ten hour drive.

Stopping at a gas station for lunch, we skip the choices as we had eaten prior to boarding the shuttle, and were told that we’d be stopping again in a few hours. A few hours later, we enter Honduras, which turned out to be a rather uneventful and surprisingly simple crossing. Another hour passes and we enter a small town, where the driver pulls over at a gas station and we sit in silence for sometime until a strange woman hops on board. We ask who she is, and he says his girlfriend, which was a little surprising to us all; it’s quite late already and we paid for a direct shuttle to avoid stops like this. But oh well, not the biggest issue. About half an hour later, the driver turns down some side roads in a little community and stops the vehicle; he gets out and on his way out says, “We are changing drivers now.” and disappears with the woman. All nine of us are sitting there wondering what the hell just happened! It’s dark outside and we are in a neighbourhood we don’t know in one of the most dangerous countries in the world, and the guy that is supposed to be responsible for us is now gone.

A couple minutes later (felt like hours) another guy shows up in the bright orange shirt that the company is known for and is visibly unimpressed with the lack of professionalism of the previous driver. He seems very serious and responsible, and a few minutes after pulling away, he shows it. Turning back to where we were a few minutes earlier, he tells us that there is a problem with the brakes - which explained the horrible grinding noise we heard over the past six hours driving at highway speeds. Now the group of us are standing on the side of a road with our backpacks and luggage, waiting for another shuttle to arrive that’s headed to Nicaragua from Northern Honduras. About an hour later the shuttle turns up half-full of very confused passengers, and we pack our stuff onto the roof and finally continue our journey.

Unfortunately, we didn’t get too far before another hiccup. A little down the road a man waves us over and tells the driver to go behind a building for a ‘random’ check. A few men - who looked official enough - went through all of our bags, checked our passports and asked many odd questions before finally letting us go. Though we’re not sure what the point of the check was, our driver certainly wasn’t happy about it. After some small chatting with the new ‘tribe’ of travellers, we eventually arrive at the Nicaragua border around eleven o’clock. At this point we know the journey is going to take much longer than we had expected. Our friendly driver told us that there was wifi at the border, so if we had to contact our hostels in Leon, we could. I emailed our hostel telling them we should be a bit late and that we had just arrived at the Nicaragua border and had already passed our planned check-in time. The driver took our passports and went into the office.

We waited. Then waited some more. Then a little more. This was getting ridiculous. Finally the driver comes out, nearly two hours later, and asks us for money to pay the border fees. He takes our money and goes back inside. Another half hour later, he returns, and we’re finally on the road again. Eventually arriving in Leon atfter three in the morning, having been on the bus now for over 13 hours, we’re all delirious and hungry. Remember that second food stop I mentioned? It was another gas station, that had empty shelves, aside from some rum, and only took Honduran currency - which none of us carried.

The driver slowly drops everyone off at their respective hostels. Seeing as we have been to Leon before we decided to stay somewhere away from the center, for a different experience, and as a result were one of the last to be dropped off. No sooner do we grab our bags from the roof, the shuttle drives off, and I remember thinking “maybe he should wait for us to get inside before leaving?”

Of course, the gate is locked. Yelling towards the main door and shaking the gate, we get no response. It’s now 3:30am, another two hours after the update from the border. The city is dark, we don’t really know the area we are in, and we have all of our bags laying on the ground. We’re defeated, we are fed up and we don’t know what to do. After realizing that nobody was coming to the door to get us, we picked up our bags and head back to the centre of town, which is probably a half hour walk. Luckily, there was a car that drove passed us, he said he was a cab, and so we were so tired we hopped in (don’t tell my mom). We agreed on a price $1 per person and set off. Knowing of a hostel that has 24-hour check-in, we ask the driver to take us there, hoping they have a room available. The random man dropped us off and we paid, he then demanded more money. At this time I was so fed up, I looked at him in the eye sand said a very firm NO! He quickly got back into his car and drove off. We ended up checking in and having to pay way too much for the five hours we’d have the room for, but it was better than the sidewalk.

The next morning I called the place we were supposed to check into and they said they had went to bed at 2am after we hadn’t showed up. All was good from that end of things, so we grabbed another taxi - legitimate this time - and went back to our original spot. The new place was very accommodating, it was a family owned place and the older gentleman was super nice.

Like most things with travel, everything worked out in the end, it just took way longer than we had hoped.