Our Longest Day ... so far

It was fortuitous we got on the road early. It was a short ride to the El Salvador – Honduras Frontier. It was Saturday and everyone says don’t cross boarders on weekends because of the “home for the weekend” traffic. To add to the poor planning Honduras has the reputation for being the most challenging boarder process to navigate. When we arrived at the border we found long lines and to add to the stress it was Saturday and the banks at the boarder close at Noon. If we had followed our original plan to stroll the beach and eat we would have been really screwed. You don’t want to spend the night at a boarder, excuse me, Frontier. Hum, Maybe that’s why they call it that. It does remind me of the street shots used in the HBO Deadwood town series. All you see is a flurry of activity in the streets that only to a local does it makes any sense and order.

As you enter some Frontiers you have to literally hit your pause button, scan the area attempting to separate official administrative buildings from commerce establishments. You also have to discern officials from the people trying to make money from the tourist. It doesn’t help that a number of people standing around wear some type of badge to look official even if they are not.

Back to the story of one long day and empty stomachs. So to compound our poor planning we did what I would not recommend to anyone. We didn’t want to spend the night in Honduras because of its reputation. So we planned to processed out of El Salvador, processed into Honduras, ride across the southern tip of Honduras, about 75 miles, processed out of Honduras and in to Nicaragua. Did you follow that? So what happen? Getting out of El Salvador and into Honduras took about 3 hours. And yes we got through and in to Honduras without using any helpers. On the road I decided to not take any of my normal landscape road pictures. If you can’t shoot/say any thing nice… On the road we added another headache to our hunger. While in Honduras we ran into a 2 mile traffic backup on a narrow two lane highway. We found that a serious accident was blocking the entire highway. After waiting about one hour in the hot sun, we managed to squeeze our motos through the traffic maze, across the police tape and got on our way. The police and rescurers were distracted trying to use a front loader to separate the remains of a small pickup truck from a bus. The headaches were not over. We spent another 3 hours at the Honduras Nicaraguan border in sweltering weather. Once through the borders we had maybe 3 hours of sunlight left to make it to Leon Nicaragua. So we continue with no time to stop for food. I never did agree with Michael Douglass’s famous line “lunch is for wimps”. I did have a few energy bars stuffed in my side case. The heat had deformed them to an almost unrecognizable little mass but they hit the spot for both of us. We also were grateful that we both had about a liter of water. That was a major lesson to not get caught on the road without water.

So what was the final headache? Chris picked up a nail in his rear tire. Of course we were in the middle of nowhere. We managed to get to the next town, Chinandega, Nicaragua just as it was getting dark. We left the nail in the tire and put enough air into the tire to limp over to the hotel we found. The hotel we found a comfortable hotel owed by a Nicaraguan that returned from living in the States, so the longest day had a pleasant ending.