Gettin' to El Salvador

El Salvador is a charming little country in Central America.

But by golly, it sometimes is a challenge to get there!
Here’s how the KBs found El Salvador:

We set out from Leon, Nicaragua at 9:30 AM on Friday in a rickety old retired Canadian school bus filled with Nicas and us, the KBs and Andrew of Boston. Lucky for the KBs Andrew’s father is Mexican and Andrew speaks Spanish like a Nica. The first problem - bus left about an hour late. This apparently is fairly common here, but in our case it proved to be the start of the undoing of our escapade.

To get to El Sal, we first had to pass through Honduras. The country which had just recently deposed their president.

Further delays along the road and we arrived at the Honduras border more than two hours late, and by then Honduras had closed her borders. We weren’t the only ones trying to cross the border in to Honduras that day. The recently deposed president was trying it too. He wasn’t going to be let in and we weren’t either. Not just yet at least. We had arrived barely minutes after they closed it to us.

So we sat in that rickety rackety little bus for fourteen long hot sweaty hours, from 3 PM on Friday until 5 AM on Saturday. At 5 AM, without any forewarning or announcement the little bus coughed to life and moved us out of Nicaragua and into no-man’s-land, where it stopped again. There the Honduran guards told us the border would not open until 6 PM that night. With no guarantee we, the KBs and Andrew of Boston, decided to return to Leon. (We learned later they were overly optimistic on the Saturday opening - it remained closed until about 6 PM on Sunday.)

We arrived back in Leon early Saturday afternoon. Got cleaned up, had a good meal, arranged a flight for late Sunday from Managua to Guatamala City (being $200 cheaper per person than going to San Salvador), did our laundry, went to a movie, and got back to the hostel with plenty of blogging time remaining!

Sunday started quietly - the church bells were silent until after 6 AM. After a good breakfast and a slow morning, we packed up and left for the bus station. The bus from Leon to Managua was an easy two hours. We arrived with plenty of time to get to the Managua International. There we met and played with a delightful team of young Nica basketball players. Katt taught them how to moon walk, and they kept us amused for an hour practicing their new skill. Kee wasn’t allowed to bring her remaining jellies into the secure area, so she passed them out to the basketball team and their coaches.

We arrived in Guatamala mid-evening and got quickly checked into a nice clean hostel where we enjoyed a good night’s sleep and pleasant continental breakfast.

After running a few errands, we set off for the bus station in order to complete our epic journey to Ahuachapan, El Sal. Except this bus doesn’t go to Ahuachapan. So we had to cross the city to another depot for the bus we needed. Except when we got there we found this was an express bus and doesn’t stop at smaller towns along the way. We would have had to go three hours beyond our destination and catch another bus back! How many bus depots would we be trying before finding the right one? Sound like a Guatemalan taxi drivers conspiracy? Not any more - this bus would let us off at the border where we could catch a local bus for our destination. Home (almost) at last? Well, not exactly. No one told the bus driver to let us out at the border! Again we were heading three hours beyond our destination. Fate as it sometimes does smiled on us at this point, and the driver dropped us off only two kilometres shy of our destination, which we finally reached eighty-one hours after setting out.