Honduras

We had been warned but in the end the border crossing was worse than we imagined! The first sign that we had approached the border was a frantic flock of young men that stopped us on the road and shuffled their own photos printed on official looking plastic cards into our faces. Chattering in a mix of fluent Spanish and little English they tried to convince us that they all were official border crossing agents that would help us getting across in one piece and in as little as a few hours. Initially we drove right on but eventually agreed to accept some help from one guy. One guy became two rather magically and our "fixers" snapped Alex and pulled him away for hours and hours and hours of paperwork. As it turns out you need more paperwork to get a vehicle into Honduras then the local rain forests could sustain and help was really needed. None of the offices had even a sign above the barred windows so without local knowledge and fluent Spanish we surely would still be in the no mans land between El Salvador and Honduras. But even our hired local expertise was not enough to make the crossing in one day so a large amount of bribing was required to get anything going.
We got through after four sweaty hours and $100 dollars in bribes and obscure fees (among them an immigration fee we had already paid in Guatemala, and a hefty road tax even though we promised to leave the country that same day) . All together we spent about ten times the cost at other borders
We weren´t feeling too keen on Honduras after that experience and planned to drive straight through onto Nicaragua. We stopped for lunch and decided to spend a night before tackling another border crossing fearing the worst (another Honduras style experience).

Just after we arrived in a tidy hotel in a tiny mountain town called San Marcos de Colon Alex started feeling really ill. He developed a fever and went on to develop the worst case gastroenteritis I have ever seen, he was so ill and I was really worried. Luckily it didn´t last too long but we had to wait for a few days until he had the strength to drive. Slowly and gradually he was able to face getting on the road again.

The crossing into Nicaragua was a breeze in comparison and we almost enjoyed it! The fixer had a lot of bad things to say about the northern neighbor and entertained us with his seizable knowledge of European club football while waiting for the vehicle papers being typed up (free of charge!). We had heard good things about Nicaragua and were looking forward to doing more exploring.