Greg and Mandy's Travels

Our accommodation in Leon

You know how bad days are. They just sneak up on you. Just when everything seems to be going well, everything falls apart. Well, that’s probably a bit overdramatic, but it wasn’t a great day. We left nice and early to make sure we were standing outside the hotel at the appointed time for the shuttle bus pick up. Took us about 20 minutes to walk out of the El Tunco township, and along the highway with no footpath to the nominated motel, and then we stood and stood and stood. Found out the next morning that they sent us an e-mail half an hour after they asked us to be at the stop saying that they had moved the pick up point. Pretty useless, but then that summed up the bus company pretty well.

An hour after we were meant to be at the bus stop, and just as I was about to give up and go to Plan B, whatever that was, the bus came from the wrong direction, did a U-turn in front of us, and picked us up. Seems that they had either misunderstood our location or had completely forgotten about us – it’s a bit hard to tell in Spanish, but they had come all the way back to pick us up. Meant that we were now all an hour late. Headed off along the coast towards the Honduras border.

Now, to explain, we had to cross two borders today. To get to from El Salvador to Nicaragua, we had to go into Honduras, and then back out an hour later.

If you had asked me before we started this jaunt, I would’ve said that El Salvador was the country that I was least confident in. However, it’s turned out to be a real surprise, and it’s my favourite country of the trip. We’ve never felt unsafe, and the infrastructure is really good. The people are friendly, and everything seems to work. So it’s no surprise that it’s the one country that the Australian government recommends you don’t travel to!

Bottom of the pops has been Honduras. It seems antiquated and inefficient, and the border staff are really disinterested and slow, and this is the second time we’ve had to endure it. When we eventually crossed into Honduras from El Salvador, mile after mile after mile on the side of the road was littered with plastic, generally water bottles, but all kinds of plastic bags and containers. Not just one or two, but thousands and thousands just strewn in the fields with no attempt to clean them up. So I moved Honduras to my least favourite country.

But that was when until we got to Nicaragua.

Once we were across the border in Honduras, after having stood around for ages while everybody got through, we were only about 30 minutes into the next drive when the driver suddenly pulled off at a Pizza Hut, left the engine running and us in the bus, and disappeared to get his dinner. A few mutterings around the bus. It turned out later that the pizza was for his dinner, but also for the border guard’s dinner, presumably in an effort to grease the wheels and get us through quickly. Mind you it was almost 2 hours after he picked it up that the border guards chowed down, so I’m not sure how impressed they were. Eventually we got back on the road and our kamikaze driver headed towards the next border.

For at least 10 miles prior to the Nicaraguan border, trucks were parked single file, queued up and waiting to cross the border. On our previous trip to Nicaragua, we’d found that truck drivers often queue for 2 to 3 weeks to get across. Now that doesn’t sound too bad, but they were of course parked on the road and so anybody in a car or a bike who wanted to get to the border had to drive past them on the wrong side of the road – for miles and miles. It was dark, lots of cars have neither headlights nor taillights, and there we were driving down the wrong side of the road. Of course, it gets worse. There are cars coming across the border in the opposite direction. So would you believe to get down there we drove on the verge on the other side of the road, and let cars pass between us and our correct lane.

Then we got to the border, and things got even worse. We had to endure another disinterested border crossing exiting Honduras, which took an hour, including yet another set of fingerprints. Moved to the Nicaragua side of the border, and first of all we had to queue up to have our Covid tests checked. After 20 minutes in the queue when nobody had moved, our driver came across and told us that we would probably have to wait a while as the lady had to go off to have her dinner. Another half an hour went by, and she strolled across and started to process people. All she did was take a photo of our documentation – ‘originals not printed’ they said – however you achieve that when our originals are printed! And for the record, it’s the only time our vaccination certificates have been viewed by anybody in over 12 months. Some of our passengers were diving back into the bus as our useless driver insisted we needed our yellow fever cards, but the disinterested lady couldn’t care less about them.

Eventually it was down to the immigration section where our passports were collected and taken away by our driver, who eventually returned and started unloading every suitcase from the roof of the bus. We had to walk every suitcase and bag into a room, put it on the x-ray conveyor belt, and bring it back out again to the bus. Of course there was nobody checking that every bag had actually gone in – but at least it was off the roof. And then a security guard came out and searched the bus, but didn’t search all the disgorged luggage of course.

We hadn’t sighted our driver for a while but eventually a shout came from another room that we were all required inside. We filed in without a passport, of course, and milled around as they called one name at a time as that particular passport emerged from a back room. Our useless driver started yelling at all of us, because we weren’t standing in straight lines even though we didn’t know who is next to be called – of course. Eventually, he got frustrated and disappeared behind the immigration counter into the back office to sort the problem out. Good grief! It’s the first time that I’ve seen a bus driver organising an immigration office. He reappeared with all the passports, handed them out and then forced us to stand in lines. Mind you there were six immigration officers all sitting around watching us doing nothing. We all filed to the window in turn and went through the immigration process, but they didn’t return our passports. Obviously there were a few extra steps for them to worry about. Once we were all done, the driver shooed us all back to the bus with those emotional words – ‘I’ll get your passports back when I pay for them’.

Sure enough, after pizza, coffee and a bit of money had changed hands, the passports reappeared and then he started to repack the bus.

We finally arrived in Leon around 11pm. I’ve never been to a slower immigration process. Over three hours to get 12 people across the border, and there was absolutely nobody else about, so we weren’t waiting for others.

14 hours since we left, so we just fell into bed after rousing the security guard to let us in.

Hostal Tortuga Booluda

A very boring photo of our shuttle bus