Blog 7 - Sleeping in all the Wrong Places

The next morning after Nick’s volcano adventure, we filled ourselves up on breakfast, ready for the journey to Honduras.  In order to fit in all the places we want to go to, we were only using Honduras as a one night stopover on the way through to Nicaragua, which is a bit of a shame but we can’t do everything otherwise we’d never come home!  So the plan was to leave La Tortuga Verde at around 10am.  However, when we tried to settle the bill we found that stupid Natwest had blocked Nick’s card for a second time this trip.  So, much time was spent on the phone to them sorting that out before we could go anywhere.  Here's a helpful map to show you our journey so far - the solid red line is where we are up to this point, and the dotted line is where we'll be by the end of this blog entry.

To get to the border we left La Tortuga Verde and took a chicken bus from El Cuco to San Miguel which took about 1hr 30 minutes, then a second bus from San Miguel to Santa Rosa (a town 20 minutes from the border), which took another couple of hours.  Our plan was to then go straight over the border and find a place to stay for the night once we’d crossed over to Honduras.  However, we decided to hop off the bus at Santa Rosa at about 5pm as we were hot and tired (both of us) and grumpy (mainly me), and find a hotel.  This was much easier said than done.  After traipsing around the streets for 30 minutes, it transpired that there was not a single place to stay in the whole town, as generally it doesn’t get very many visitors, i.e. it’s a horrible place.  We got in a taxi and asked the driver to take us somewhere, anywhere where we could spend the night.

As some of you will know from my startled Facebook post a couple of weeks ago, he took us to the only hotel in town – a pay by the hour motel.  The lovely room we stayed in was fitted out with such splendid features as:  a tissue paper dispenser next to the bed, free condoms, a switch next to the bed to operate “seductive” music, a sign detailing how to turn on the “adult” tv channels, and of course....mirrored headboards. 

Needless to say, we got out of there pretty quickly the next morning, and continued on our journey.  So, it was back on a chicken bus to the border.  Getting through the checkpoint itself was relatively painless and only took about half an hour.  Once we were on the Honduran side of the border, we took yet another chicken bus to Chaluteca and then a minivan shuttle to the Honduran/Nicaraguan border.  The minivan section of the journey was a a little scary - the sliding door didn't stay shut and so someone had to hold it in place the whole time, lest we fall out the side.  Also the road was filled with potholes, some a metre wide.  This meant the driver was continually swerving onto the other side of the road in order to avoid them - not very Health & Safety.

This border was a lot more hectic…we’d hardly even opened the minivan door when we were surrounded by several men, who all wanted to take us the 4km to the checkpoint on their rickshaw.  We eventually chose our man and set off.  I’m sure everyone is aware of what a rickshaw is, but just in case, it’s a bicycle with a two-person bench seat attached to the back of it. We felt quite bad for the guy as it was ridiculously hot, and pedalling three peoples’ weight and all their luggage has got to be pretty hard work.  Once through the checkpoint and into Nicaragua, it was on to yet another chicken bus to Leon where we would spend the next week.

Here’s some useful info about Leon for you:  It is a university city about the same size as York and used to be the capital of Nicaragua, but during the revolution the capital was changed to Managua - I don't know why... sorry.

After 9 hours of travelling we finally arrived at our destination.  The hostel we had booked was called “La Pasada Gordita”, which by the way means “the incredibly obese woman” (and she was). Now, this hostel was the highest rated in Leon out of hundreds.  However, our room turned out to be the worst we have stayed in before and since.  The mattress was a piece of foam which a) was just really uncomfortable to sleep on, and b) foam is not the best material to alleviate the UNBEARABLE heat throughout the night.  The room was equipped with a fan off of the 70’s which was so loud it sounded like a helicopter was taking off next to our heads all night.  I ended up sleeping on the cold tiled floor instead.  I am very hardcore now.   

I will tell you all about our time in Leon in the next entry :-)