08/30 Yay, a new country. Easiest border crossing ever but getting to it was over the muddiest road I’ve ever been on. The location of the border between Honduras and El Salvador in this area is disputed so there wasn’t a customs post on the E Salvador side. The lone Honduran guard probably wouldn’t have checked my passport had I not brought it up. A mile or so down the road I did end up getting stopped at military checkpoint and would have been through there in 10 seconds had it not been for a higher ranking guy that basically just wanted to act cool in front of the other guys because he could speak a little English.

Spent last night in the town of Marcala. Not much going on there but it gave me a chance to remove both my fenders. Karen had warned me about the mud and she was right. It was pretty brutal. I would have been stopping a lot if I still had them on. The road was so bad in many places that nothing short of a truck with high clearance would make it through even under somewhat dry conditions.

I’m going to stay here tomorrow and relax before heading south and then back into Honduras before cutting into Nicaragua. My fenders need to go back on and my poor legs are sore. Riding 32 miles through mud and then carrying a 100 lb bike plus 70 lbs of gear up a massive amount of stairs to get to the hotel room did me in. Glad they had a hose here I could use. My bike was filthy.

Perquin is a pretty significant place in that the FMLN (rebels) made this their home during the Salvadoran Civil War which claimed the lives of 75,000 people. The Museum of the Revolution has exhibits related to the war so maybe I’ll ride in tomorrow and visit. I can’t help feeling weird going there as a US citizen knowing what our government did–kind of like how I felt at Wounded Knee in South Dakota.

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08/27 Decided not to stay in Gracias even though I’m going to miss that shower at Hotel Guancascos. I met the owner when I was leaving (the motel; not the shower). I forget her name but she was from the Netherlands and was really nice. Lonely Planet kind of ripped the service at the restaurant and the management a little but I didn’t see anything wrong with either.

After an uneventful ride yesterday I spent the night in the village of San Juan. The motel was recommended by Karen and Martin who are a few days ahead of me riding the same route I’ll be taking. Each night Karen emails a summary of the days ride so I know what to expect. I never would have found the place in San Juan without the email. It’s called La Posada de Rosario. There’s no sign and nothing in front to indicate it’s a motel. It’s about 300m south of the Texaco to the left of a white building with the word “agroveterinatio” or something like that.

This rain is driving me nuts. Every day at 1pm it starts and usually doesn’t stop completely until well after I’m in bed for the night. It’s nice in the morning though. Usually the sun is out and it’s nice and hot. I grossed out some guy when I wrung out my sweat-soaked shirt at a rest stop. That was at the top of a hill that I’d been riding up for about half an hour.

I’m going to start a rating system for stares. Level 3 is when someone stares at me so hard I have to look down to make sure I remembered to wear my bike shorts. I’ve been getting quite a bit of that and it’s making me paranoid.

Staying at newer place in La Esperanza called the Hotel Margarita (or close to it). It’s not too bad but there’s no mirror in the bathroom. Kind of weird. At 5600 feet, this is the highest town in Honduras. The climb to get here was kind of brutal just because it was basically riding up a mountain for 20 miles. There were no steep sections which was nice because the last 10 miles was on dirt. Lots of muddy spots. In one place I was riding really slow down a hill to avoid a mud-filled pothole when my bike started sliding sideways. That was kind of exciting.

Walked around town for a while checking out the sites. Up on the side of a hill is an old cave called La Gruta which has been turned into a chapel. There is a noticeable lack of stray dogs here which has me wondering if some sort of “program” is in place.

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08/25 Not long after leaving Santa Rosa the road dropped down pretty fast into a valley which afforded some nice views for almost the entire day. Not too many villages but there were a couple little tiendas were I could get some aqua. The mountains in Honduras are not quite what I expected based on the ITMB map. I kind of thought I’d be in some crazy, rugged mountain ranges since the map has so many shades of brown on it. The mountains here are all tree-covered and generally not more than 5000 feet or so. There was one big range just to the west called Cordillera de Celaque that apparently has the highest mountain in the country at 9300 feet. Maybe I need to wait until I get into the Andes. I’m spoiled by the northern Rockies.

I beat the afternoon rains by about an hour. Karin and Marten told me about a place they stayed called Guancascos so I checked in there. Love the shower and the views are pretty impressive since the hotel sits up on the side of a hill overlooking the town. The restaurant upstairs serves the *best* rollitos de pollo. The order they brought over was so good I ordered second round.

I might stay here 2 days so I can check out the town but riding has been so easy I hate to lose my momentum.

After digging around a little I found a Wordpress plugin called OSM that can read in GPX files and display the map. Now it’s easy to see where the heck I am (Stephanie). Now if I can just figure out a way to show elevation info I’ll be happy.

Update: Wandered around town a little but it’s raining and, although the town is nice enough, there wasn’t much draw to exploring the side streets. I’m pretty bummed about something that happened to another bicycle tourist today too. She was riding (alone) near Limon, Costa Rica when 2 guys came riding up to her, kicked her off her bike into the ditch and then stole her handlebar bag. She ended up losing her camera and passport not to mention her sense of security. Fortunately a guy in a car saw what happened and the little pieces of crap cowards ran off before they could steal her bike too.

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08/24 In the town of La Entrada I splurged on a rather luxurious hotel room. It was about $30 and was probably a 4 star place. AC in the room (sweet), a fridge and a nice soft bed. The shower wasn’t so good. It was the Hotel Mayaland. Here in Santa Rosa, the only hotel I found (without looking very hard because it was raining) was another Hotel Mayaland. This place is $15 but it should be $5. This will go down as the most overpriced place I’ve stayed. At best its maybe a 1 star hotel.

A couple things I’m noticing about Honduras. Kids yell gringo just like everywhere else but I’ve had a few kids yell out, “Money!”. One kid walked up to me on the street and asked for money (just by holding out his hand and saying “money”). It kind of sucks that these kids were taught to see gringos as cash cows but when the average annual income per person is a 10th of what it is in the States its not surprising. Or when I write something like the first paragraph that doesn’t help either.

I’m pretty clueless when it comes to understanding what it must be like to live in a developing country. If it were me and I saw a guy wearing (mostly) clean clothes, riding a nice bike with a bunch of expensive-looking gear on it and I was living on what amounts to $1.62 an hour, I’d probably see things a little differently. The thing I have the hardest time with is when someone says/does something to make it known they they resent the person being there. This has happened to me a couple times since I got to Honduras. Nothing major–just a lack of trying to help with something like directions. Tourism can be a good thing to a point so not making someone feel welcome doesn’t make sense unless that person is seen as guilty of something by association–the US has backed successful and unsuccessful coups all over the region which, in some cases, led to some unimaginable suffering amongst the population (e.g. Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Cuba, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Haiti). So maybe that accounts for some of the unfriendliness. I still get a huge number of waves, honks and thumbs up from people driving by so all is not lost.

Had a little “encounter” today that I think could have gone bad. At the bottom of a hill a couple guys were picking through a garbage pile off to the side. They saw me coming and one of them started calling out in broken English things like “Hey gringo!”. I did my normal wave back and said hi but when I got past them and started climbing back up another really big hill one of them walked up to the road and yelled for me to stop. It was pretty obvious to me that this guy was probably bad news so I just waved and kept riding. He kind of reminded me of an evil troll that lives under a bridge and when that’s the first impression you give someone can you blame them for not wanting to hang out? Well I was about 100 yards up the hill by now and I could hear him jogging up the hill after me. He was pretty slow so he gave up after he saw that I wasn’t going to stop. I’m sure at some point someone is going to catch me in a spot where I have to stop and the fun will begin but I’ll always try to avoid a bad situation if possible.

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08/22 Honduras is shaping up to be my favorite country for the simple fact that they don’t use coins anymore. Makes for a much lighter load in the handlebar bag. Crossing over was a breeze. The normal gang of money changers were on me pretty fast to convert my Guatemalan quetzals to Honduran lempira. The exchange rate is 1 US dollar to almost 19 lempiras so I have these lemp bills in denominations of 500 that I’m finding hard to get change for and that’s in a big touristy town.

The road so far in Honduras has been in perfect shape. A couple landslides here and there but they only made it a little way into the lane. Great views, especially just before and then past the border. I even saw a flock of wild parrots next to the road. My picture taking has been hampered by the horrible lighting though. The near constant cloud cover and haze are washing out all my pictures. Even the ones at the Copan ruins were terrible.

The ruins weren’t my favorite but it’s hard to write anything bad about an archeological site. It’s impressive enough that they even managed to pull the jungle back over the last 100 years so people can visit it. About 20 buildings were destroyed by the river before they diverted it in the 1930’s and they are still working hard to keep mother nature at bay; tarp and siding cover nearly all the intricate pieces outside, even the very elaborate stairs on the main temple. I did get to see some Scarlet Macaws up in the trees and a huge rodent thing that I didn’t get a picture of.

I didn’t write anything for the last couple nights because nothing exciting happened. A nasty downpour hit when I was a few miles outside Jocotan. My clothes are still drying out from that one.

Based on my un-scientific calculations I’m going to be 2 days over the 90 day limit on my passport by the time I get to Costa Rica. It’s possible to get an extension but that sounds like a hassle so I’m going to try and make it in 28 days. That’s with almost no rest days and no time for mental, physical or bike breakdowns. I also have to catch up to Karen and Marten before they lose me.

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