Nicaragua's Border & Roads

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In between we are bothered by other guides, who try to tell us our guide does things wrong, and it should take longer, and we would have to pay more bribes, and anyhow they're better - all of which was bs...
Finally our guide emerges from the AVON lady's office with all our papers wearing a smile on his face. One of the other guides, obviously drunk, still bothers us, so we all 3 get into our truck and drive down towards the final checkpoint, where some of the copies will be collected. We hand our payment happily to our tramitador and say "Goodbye" him. We hand over the appropriate papers and finally, after at least 3 hours, we are through. But no! Right behind the final border check point we are once more stopped, this time by the police, just for a 'chat' and a few nosey questions. This will be a constant experience on our journey along the Honduran Pacific. After these experiences on the only eastern border crossing between El Salvador and Honduras we would almost reconsider recommending that other travellers pass through El Salvador...
Only 10 kilometres later we are stopped by another group of police, and the otherwise friendly guy is trying to find something, anything, to get a 'fine' out of Juergen. First he claims we need reflector tape on our truck; this is the typical red adhesive tape which most (but not all) vehicles here have stuck all over them, usually in combination with white. Juergen gets out of the truck and points out to him all the reflector lights on the truck, demonstrating with a cigarette lighter that they actually do reflect and tries to explain, in his best Spanish, that white reflectors on the back are illegal in other countries. After a final count (7 in the back, 5 in the front, and 3 on each side), the cop comes up with the next point: triángulo. We had read about this and had actually bought one of these emergency triangles in Mexico. They are to be put out on the road behind broken down vehicles (the locals use tree branches or rocks in such cases - triangles are mostly put on the roof to advertise a parked car for sale). Next: fire extinguisher - yes, there's one in the camper. This gives him a sneak peek inside our house, too. He finally gives up and asks openly for a soda; we would have no problem giving the guy a Coke or Fanta, but we never drink any sugary soft drinks, which Juergen explains, and then hands him some cookies instead.
We continue our journey, but not for very long, because first we have a really slow truck followed by a bus in front of us, and huge potholes in the opposite lane make overtaking too risky. Then we enter the first town and are stopped by the next police check, who actually orders us off the road - bad sign! This time he is seriously in search of money. He states that we were speeding and shows us an overhead sign with the flashing lights either side of a 30 km/h sign - except that the lights are not flashing. So we say that we have learned that they only apply when they are actually flashing. "Si, pero mucha agua y no electricidad"... He insists that he has to give us a ticket but at the same time appears to be reluctant to do so. He explains that we will have to go to the bank and pay it. (Yasha didn't understand that he would hold on to Juergen's license while we did that.) It was after banking hours and he said we would have to pay it tomorrow, to which Juergen replies that it is impossible to drive on without a license, since there will surely be more police down the road. Yasha said that we would pay at the border if we could because we were going to cross into Nicaragua - he said it was possible. She kept asking him to give us the ticket so we could go, but he kept stalling. In the end, he said that it would be simpler if instead of having a ticket we would "comprar agua". Now even Yasha's limited Spanish understood those two words - but not in the sense he was using them. She asked if he meant we should buy water for him and he answered, "si". It happened to be raining at the time so she put her head back and opened her mouth to catch the rain, and then said, "no necesario - mucha agua"! He laughed at that and went on a bit about buying water for him and his colleague. But Yasha kept asking for the ticket. It dawned on us finally that the buying water was a euphemism for a bribe, but we didn't let on - just continued to not understand what they were talking about. The frustration of not being able to make us understand by innuendo what they wanted finally made them let us drive on. It was getting late and we didn't know where we were going to stay. We knew of a hotel that would let us stay in their parking lot in Choluteca, but we had no idea how far it was.
One of the biggest problems we are facing as we drive further south is finding a place to sleep. Of course we have our own house with us, but finding a safe place to park it is often difficult. We don't really know how dangerous it is to just stop somewhere on the side of the road, but that's a very good reason not to try it. Yasha says that she would never have thought that she would feel such relief as she does when we drive into some place, when it is almost dark, and there is a man with a big gun at the gate who says, yes, we can park there. In Guatemala we had already had some experience with this problem, but in Honduras it got a little more difficult and El Salvador also. Now that we are in Nicaragua we expect it to get to be even more of a problem because the land is so sparsely settled and there are very few large towns. And we haven't seen a balneario yet which had proved to be a good bet in the previous two countries.
Since it was getting close to dark and we had the worry about where we would spend the night, we were most annoyed at seeing yet another police post up ahead. They had a whole line of trucks stopped and seemed to be taking their time in checking them. There was a petrol station on our side of the road so Juergen drove into it, paused for a bit, and then drove out the other side ahead of the checkpoint. We didn't know if they noticed and didn't particularly care. We were more than pleased to find Choluteca only a few kilometres ahead and to find the Hotel Gualiqueme on the edge of town. They were happy for us to stay in the parking lot and, despite the fact that we had to pay $20, we were happy to be there with the man with the gun at the gate!
For that $20 we had a place to plug in to the power, unlimited use of WiFi, use of the swimming pool if we desired, and even a key to a room to use the bathroom. And they had a laundry - it was such a relief to finally have that taken care of. It was still raining and didn't look like stopping so we stayed 2 nights instead of moving on to Nicaragua the next day. We were very glad we had when we discovered what a nightmare that trip turned out to be.
We headed straight to the border on Sunday morning at around 10 feeling rested and positive. There were a couple of police checks along the way (only 3 or 4 kilometers apart!), but these were fairly cursory inspections compared with Friday afternoon. We did wonder if the others had been trying to earn a bit more cash for their weekend! We found the border was very quiet (except for a lot of money changers that mostly needed to be ignored) and extremely straight forward. We found out why it was so quiet when we reached the final step - getting the vehicle permit from Nicaraguan customs - the official told us that the road to León was flooded and we should check first with the police to see if we would be able to get through. The policeman was very helpful - he showed us on the truck that the water would be halfway up our windows (which is also halfway up the inside of our camper, which is not flood proof), so we felt it was not really an option to drive through, but he asked for our map and pointed out an alternative route via Villa Nueva and El Sauce. He warned that it was a dirt road and not very good. We decided to go that way because what other choice did we have really - we had already left Honduras and had our car permit cancelled and we didn't want to pay another $40 or more for another one. Other than that, we were probably through the border in half an hour.
And things began to go downhill from there... The road was really bad from the border onwards. It made the ones we'd complained about in Honduras seem like highways! It was made worse by kids running alongside the truck begging for money. We were very lucky that we didn't hit any of them since we were driving slow enough for them to keep up with us and we were constantly weaving to try to avoid the roughest patches. The road improved after a while and then we found the turnoff to Villa Nueva. We were under the impression that the road to El Sauce was in the town so we drove 4km from the highway to the town looking for it. We asked a taxi driver who tried really hard to explain where we had to go, but in the end he gave up and offered to lead us to the right road for C$50. We had to drive back to the main road and then further on to another turnoff to the right road. The taxi driver told us that it was about 40km to El Sauce and would probably take us about 2 hours. He also mentioned that the road was 'muy malo' which directly translates as very bad.
In places it was o.k. for a dirt road, in others it was fairly bad, and in a couple of spots almost impassable. One of these places had fallen trees almost blocking the road, but the worst part was a series of deep mud holes that looked like they would swallow a small car. We put the truck into 4WD and headed through. It was much worse than the mud hole we experienced in Honduras, and halfway through we almost got stuck, followed by a loud *bang* in the back. When we came out the other side and stopped to check the camper, we discovered that it had knocked off one of our camper legs. Juergen had to walk back, partly through almost knee deep mud, to retrieve the camper leg, while I went inside and tried to establish some order in the chaos.
We finally arrived at El Sauce at 4.30, 2½ hours after leaving the taxi driver. It didn't really look like a place where we would find somewhere to stay, so we continued on. The road out of there was paved (with concrete pavers) and quite smooth, so we started to feel a bit more positive about getting somewhere. We hoped that once we hit the main road to León that we would have a chance of finding somewhere to spend the night. Unfortunately we were to be disappointed on that point and in the road, which was so badly pot-holed that even an expert slalom driver like Juergen could only drive around about 1/10 of the potholes and the rest we hit. It was slow going and it was getting darker. And as it was getting darker the potholes became much more difficult to judge. Not only were there no towns of a reasonable size along the road, the towns that were there were all under flood waters to about halfway up their walls, with people and some of their belongings sitting along the edge of the "highway"!
When we finally reached a brand new road with lines and reflectors, we were much relieved, but still could find nowhere to stay and we had no idea how far it was to León. The signposting is really bad in these countries and when there are kilometre markers you don't know where they are measuring from or to. We reached the outskirts of León shortly before 7.00 and pulled off the road to get our bearings, after hitting a particularly nasty speed bump that we simply couldn't see in the dark, just as a really heavy shower started. It was so heavy that the road ran like a river.
We drove on when it abated a bit, but had no idea where we were and no hope of finding anything in the pitch black. After some aimless driving through flooded streets which seemed to get us nowhere, we stopped on the side of the road and Yasha went to a panaderia to try to find out where we were. The young girl there and her two friends took her across the road to ask if we could park in a factory car park. Thankfully they allowed it and at 7.15 we pulled our truck into their parking lot and pulled our battered and exhausted bodies into the camper. We found enough energy to tidy some of the chaos created in the camper, prepare a simple meal and fall into bed. Juergen had been driving since 10.00 in the morning with no real break (except the one at the border) over the worst roads either of us has ever experienced.
Fellow travellers have told us that the worst roads in Central America are in Costa Rica - if that's true we are not looking forward to them.

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