28th August
I have never had such a testing day in all my life and yet I am still alive and have been rewarded with many amazing experiences since...
so from the beginning...
I woke at 5:30am to another beautiful sunny day at the Hotel Chancletas. It was hard to muster the motivation to pack the bike and leave, I even toyed with the idea of a morning surf but knew I had a long day ahead and needed to get going early.
In theory it would take 2hrs to reach the border with Honduras, 2hrs to get through the border, 3hrs to ride straight through Honduras, 2hrs to pass the border into El Salvador and then a further 1:30hr to get to my hostel in a town called El Cuco. All in all it was going to be 10hr day. I figured if I was on the road by 7am I would get to the hostel by 5pm before the dark set in!
In true Burnham style I faffed around packing the bike and having breakfast and was almost ready for just gone 7am. Before starting breakfast I asked the guys to get my bill ready, a young local lad of maybe 17 sat with a tick sheet detailing my stay and asked for $160... I had worked it out the night before to be $140 and after some debating we agreed that he had overcharged me by 1 night... no problem but it then took him 15mins to rewrite the entire tab, then add it up wrong, then get the tipex out and so on until it was 7:30am.
Finally ready to leave I typed in my destination to my phone's GPS which, because I was currently off the map, wigged out and said it couldn't find a route... I would have to do the entire ride using my famously crap map reading skills, the utterly useless latin road signs and a map that was so lacking in detail that it covered the whole of Central America on one A1 page!
Off I went trying to remember my way back to Chinandega using roads that weren't even on the map... I made it within an hour and only took one wrong turn! At Chinandega I re-fuelled and nailed it down the PanAmerican highway to the border with Honduras. By now I had the border routine fairly well sussed and was out of Nica and into Honduras within 2hrs, it was 12pm and I was an hour behind schedule.
I had been warned that Honduras was the most dangerous of all the Central American countries with a reputation for car jacking at gun point and other such friendly antics. With this in mind I rode as quickly as the bike would take me, weirdly everyone else had the same idea, even the lorries were hitting 100-120k's! To add to the fun the road looked like it had been shelled, pot holes bigger than my front wheel and half a foot deep littered the road causing the trucks, cars and bikes to slalom all over the road. Overtaking was a complete gamble... I'd wind the bike up to over 120k, clench butt cheeks and pray that the truck wouldn't jump lanes and that there were no craters awaiting me on the other side of the road.
After another hour I arrived at a town called Choluteca, the road split and I went left for no other reason than there were lots of people in the street and I figured I might find a place with wifi and get the GPS working... The word internet was met with blank faces in two cafe's in Choluteca and the people seemed annoyed that I had disrupted their sitting doing nothing so I resigned myself to the use of the map and rode on. At the end of town the road split offering five different options in some kind of abstract version of a roundabout. I needed route CA1 for which there was one sign with a town name not on the map... I took the turn after checking the other direction which said CA3... semi confident I was on the right road I continued on riding towards a dark looking sky draped over an inviting set of mountains. For the next hour and a half I wound my way through the mountains getting absolutely soaked constantly reassuring my self that the road felt right and I was definitely going the right way... I even stopped and asked a guy on the side of the road who told me it was only another half hour to the frontera!!! When I arrived at the frontera I handed my documents to a guy in a hut who then passed them to an overly friendly young lad (coyote) who took me to the customs office and ran in to get my papers stamped... 'Amazing!' I thought to myself I had made it through Honduras in 2:30hrs... when the little man came running back out and asked me for $20 to pay for entry to Nicaragua I almost believed he was joking... he wasn't, I had managed to ride 1/3rd of the way across Honduras before taking a road North East back to a different border with Nicaragua... Man was I pissed. It was now 2:30pm and I would have to ride another 3hrs to get to the border with El Salvador... despite the obvious rage venting from my person the young lad insisted that he needed paying and asked for $20... I, not so politely told him to go do one, gave him $4 and sped off back down the mountain.
Three hours later after speeding as fast as I could go in the still heavy rain, I arrived at the correct border, shattered and hungry having not eaten since 7am... it was 5:00pm and the sky was beginning to darken. Exiting Honduras was relatively quick and I began to think I could make El Cuco before dark... entering El Salvador was not... immigration was easy and I sailed through with growing positivity but then I had to sort the bike... Customs was about 2km down the road and filled with a que of trucks and their associated truckers who were impatiently waiting/hustling the friendly but slow and somewhat meticulous officials. I joined the que and filled out the necessary forms... whilst I waited I watched as they unloaded the trucks, sent in the dogs and gave everything a thorough once over... I had not seen this kind of competance in any other country!
My forms were accepted after a small group debate about the weight of my bike... the official insisted on needing to know the weight and when I said 'I dunno, 150kgs' he took his time asking around the truck drivers as if it were some kind of sweep stake... any way I then had to go sit in a shelter and wait for the Portacabin team to enter my details on to the computer system. The whole process (with me hustling them along) took about an hour by which time the sun had dissapered, the sky had turned black and a huge storm had started to shed it's load... I was anxious to say the least, an hour and half to go with no GPS in a huge thunder storm in complete darkness except for the lightening with a crappy 50W bulb to guide me!
I rolled out of Customs at 6:30pm and was drenched before I made it to the main road. When I arrived at the final check point it was total gridlock... lorries on both sides had managed to wedge them selves so tight that not even the locals on their little chicken chasers could get through. We all sat in the pouring rain beeping and getting wet!
After 5mins a local managed to shunt his bike over a shin high curb and into the dirt on the side of the road... excellent I thought and attempted to follow... the front wheel went over with a hefty rev of the engine but as it did I heard a horrible crunching sound and realised I had beached the bike on the sump guard... never mind I thought and revved the bike hard to try and get the back wheel over. To my dismay and the amusement of everone else the wheel span and skidded sideways along the curb until I was wedged between a pickup and the curb! Well and truly stuck I got off the bike and asked the bemused driver to inch forward so I could pull the bike off the curb.
At this point I would have loved to be in one of the nearby cars watching me struggle trying to drag the bike backwards slipping in the rain until just as I almost had the front wheel up my foot went and I slipped off the handle and dropped the bike onto the curb with all the weight landing on my precious surf board... cursing at myself I got back up and heaved the bike back up right. With a sudden burst of angry energy I managed to bounce the front wheel up and over the curb and back into the que of complete ass holes who didn't once offer to help.
After an awkward ten minutes sitting in the rain a truck was allowed through the checkpoint and everyone burst out onto the highway keen to get away. I could see about 20m in front of me through a blurry, rain covered visor and decided to try and follow a couple of cars as a guide to where the road was going. Unlike English roads there are no cats eyes and the only clue as to where the centre and edges of the road lies are the white lines on the ground which are almost impossible to see when they are under water!
We crawled along at about 40mph and after 20mins I spotted a sign to La Union and took the turning off to the left. I was really struggling by this point, my eyes were straining and my whole body tense with the expectation that there would be a pothole or turn in the road... the cars had continued straight and I was on my own in the dark. I was looking out for a hotel and would have happily admitted defeat but it wasn't for another hour that I would see the inviting neon lights. In the mean time I had been getting impatient and had raised my speed to 55mph on the basis that I hadn't come off yet and despite not being able to see I would never get there if I kept going slow... then, out of nowhere I hit a huge puddle that covered the entire lane and sent me flying across the other side of the road desperately fighting the handlebars trying to keep the bike upright, the bike aquaplaned and as I let off the throttle the speed dropped off and I came to a stop my heart pounding hard in my chest. I really thought I was going down and god knows what I would have done then!
When I finally came across a hotel I pulled in and and asked the guy how far I was from El Cuco and was there a restaurant... he told me at least two hours from Cuco which I knew was bull shit and there was no food other than a gas station 5mins away at La Union... I said I would get some food and come back. At the gas station the guys said I was only half an hour from Cuco and as I watched a lady dressed in a skirt and linen top (no stylish waterproofs like mine!) jump on the back of her boyfriends tiny bike and ride out into the storm I told myself to stop being a pussy and keep going.
It took another hour to get the hostel and it was far from simple... whilst on the main road I came across a roundabout which I had been told to go left at (the roundabouts in El Salvador are a hybrid between a motorway slip road and elongated traditional roundabout, it makes no sense in the light let alone the dark!), as I went passed a sign I took a left and mid way round the corner a car shot out of the darkness and skidded to a halt in front of me... I was going the wrong way round the bout and the guy had just stopped short of my front mud guard!
As the car drove off shouting out the window two random guys jumped out of hammocks in a thatched shelter and walked over to me in the middle of the road... I was shitting me self thinking I was about to get jacked when they started asking in a very friendly tone 'where was I trying to go?'. They pointed me in the right direction and I rode off wondering what the hell they were doing lying in hammocks by the side of a dual carriageway roundabout in the middle of a raging thunder storm????
Anyways about half hour from the garage I saw a sign pointing to Playa Esteron... this was not were I was aiming but I recalled that this was part of the lonely planet directions... I rolled into a desolate town and saw an old man sat in his doorway... I asked for directions to La Tortuga Verde and he said "Que"! Fortunately his son and daughter came to the door and spent five minutes repeating complicated directions which didn't make sense. I carried on as directed..."Directo, directo!!" and as the cobbled road turned to mud I began to question the decision to keep going... the unlit track went on for another 15mins and I came across two groups who said to keep going... I was far from Ok at this point and didn't have a clue what to do but keep going. Then in the middle of nowhere as I bounced through a deep muddy puddle I came across Douglas riding his bike with a brolly in one hand. As I asked for directions he told me with a big, gold plated, toothy smile that he worked at Tortuga Verde and that I should follow him! I had made it!!!!!!!!!!
I arrived at La Tortuga Verde at 8:30pm having been on the road for 13hrs, piss wet through, boots full of water and starving hungry... I have no idea how I managed to get there in one piece and am very grateful that I made it alive. So many things could have gone wrong and yet my luck held with the exception of the huge hole in my board. If there is a god he/she was watching over me that day!
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