Travels of the Bay family and the Yoda Van

Choluteca is a city in Honduras.  Now you know at least one city in Honduras.  How many of you know what the capitol of Honduras is?  I’ll give you even more points if you know how to pronounce it correctly, because it is a mouthful.  Tegucigalpa.  We never made it to the capitol, but the two days we have spent here in Choluteca just leave me wanting more of Honduras. 

When we crossed into Honduras we were really expecting the worse, but we have only been pleasantly surprised since we’ve been here.  Choluteca has such a lively center.  And the church and old town are beautiful and honestly charming.  Once the sun sets I’d advise staying close to your hotel room, but that is the case in a lot of Central American cities.  With little kids we don’t venture far from “home” at night anyway, so it isn’t any sort of imposition at all for us. 

We’ve turned heads like never before here.  Women of all ages have been real suckers for our two blue-eyed boys in all of Latin America, but we’re drawing attention to even the men.  Yesterday when we were walking through town I remember we passed a billiard hall where about 10 men were sitting on a window ledge.  As we walked by at least 8 of them turned around to stare at us.  But it doesn’t stop there.  William and Julian showed interest in a woman selling sweet tamales on the street.  We were planning on eating dinner later so we told them we wouldn’t buy any right then.  But the woman insisted on giving them each a tamale.  Matthias asked how much we should pay, but they refused.  They were gifts for our beautiful boys. 

Choluteca is also very hot.  During the hottest part of the day the temperature was around 103º F (40º C).  This kind of heat sends Seattleites into a frenzied tailspin.  But here, life seems to have the requisite pace to deal with that kind of heat on a regular basis.  Everything moves slowly, and even the street vendors don’t bother you with aggressive sales techniques.  It is just too dang hot to exert that much energy.

We also found a nice Comedor (eatery) where we had most of our meals.  The menu isn’t complicated – there is only one thing on it each day.  They only thing you specify is how many plates you want.  Most of the meals were traditional for this area: beans, eggs, tortillas, meat for dinner and fried plantains for breakfast.  They were substantial, filling, tasty meals, and each plate only cost around 2 dollars.   

We didn’t do much other than eat, sleep, check out the city and spend time at the playground.  But the slow-placed, friendly atmosphere pleased us so well we spent an extra night there.  Choluteca doesn’t have any “sights.”  Other than the surrounding beautiful countryside there wasn’t much of interests to tourists, other than regular Honduran life.  We most likely won’t be traveling back to Honduras on the rest of our trip, and we think that is kind of unfortunate.  If this is just a sampling of what a lot of Honduras is like, I think this country is worth visiting and I’m sorry we won’t get to see more of it.

After leaving Alajuela we spent two more nights at Playa Hermosa, where we had already been 3 other times.  This has been one of our favorite spots on our entire trip and it seemed like a nice way to end our time in Costa Rica. 

The next day we headed for Nicaragua. 

We had planned on having a relatively stressful couple of days ahead of us: 3 border crossings in 4 days.  We arrived at the Costa Rica-Nicaragua border and found an unbelievably long line.  People were estimating that it would take 3 hours just to get your passport stamped.  Since we are traveling with our car we have a bunch of other paperwork and steps to go through, so we were a little worried.  I decided to just get in line and start waiting.  Matthias was close to the front office with William and Julian.  He inevitably started talking to people there (since they don’t leave you alone) and a guy said that if we were to give him $20 he would get us through the line in 10 minutes.  There are all sorts of people at this border telling you they can get you through faster.  They were there the last time when we crossed into Costa Rica.  Eventually we found out that if you are traveling with kids all you have to do is go to the front of the line and they’ll let you right in.  We tried it and it worked.  We saved ourselves about 3 hours and 20 dollars!  I had always wondered if those guys were for real.  While I was waiting in line I started talking to a guy from Nicaragua and he eventually paid 3000 colones (about 6 dollars) to get a guy to get him through faster.  As I was walking out of the office with our stamped passports he was at the front of the line.  So it actually does work.  I imagine these guys have a deal with the guards and they get of cut of what people pay to get through faster. 

We eventually made it through the border and headed into Nicaragua.  We were nervous about driving in Nicaragua again since we had such a rough time on our way through the last time.  We ran into lots of police controls, corrupt cops and just plain unfriendly people.  This time things couldn’t have been more different.  It took us over an hour to run into our first police control.  We’ve heard from a bunch of people that the police in Nicaragua always ask for your emergency triangles.  Most people don’t have them and this is how they get bribes out of a lot of drivers.  We actually picked some up in Leon on our way through Nicaragua and they sure came in handy.  Of course they were buried under the seat with the kid’s car seats, and the policeman made us wake both William and Julian to get them out.  He was chuckling and looking around our car when on the other side of the road 2 more people they had pulled over were giving the police a hard time.  I mean a really hard time, and they were getting loud and started pushing the police, and the policeman slammed his clipboard on they guys head.  I saw what was going on and started to become alarmed.  Our policeman saw too and raced over to help his fellow officers.  At that point we put everything back in our car as fast as possible and just drove away, unscathed.  The next police control went totally fine also and he let us go without even giving us a hard time.  We spent one night in Masaya, which turned out to be a great city.  And then we spent 2 nights in Esteli, which was also great. 

We were also worried about the Honduras border.  The border crossing the last time we went through Honduras was by far the worst (and was what prompted Matthias to write his own blog entry “The other side of the border”).  But we chose to cross in a different city this time and all we encountered were nice helpful people, and we were through in 45 minutes.  The last time in Honduras we also had our first encounter with corruption within about 5 minutes – a guy wanting 20 dollars for nothing.  He didn’t even pretend we did anything wrong.  He just said “viente dolares”.  But this border went so smooth and the drive afterwards was spectacular.  It is a contender for one of our top 5 most beautiful drives on this trip.  And since we’ve been in Honduras we’ve just been so pleasantly surprised.  Nice people, smooth border crossings, beautiful landscape. 

After the border crossing we saw a car wash on the side of the road (2 guys with a pressure washer, soap and a big bucket of water) and decided to get the car washed.  We had parked the Yoda Van under a tree in Alajuela, and if you’ve done any reading on Costa Rica you know how many species of birds there are there.  Needless to say, our car was desperately in need of a good cleaning.  But it was so pleasant standing there in the sun for 45 minutes while these men washed our car, and talking with a few people who walked by.  It is strange how your impressions of a country can change so fast.  Neither Matthias nor I were looking forward to driving through Nicaragua or Honduras.  We had such rough experiences on our first way through that we decided to go through as fast as we can, straight to El Salvador.  Now we are both wishing we had more time in both of those countries.