Honduras – Nicaragua Border Crossing

I’ve not been looking forward to this border crossing. My paper work says I’m to leave the country at El Espino. I chose that location because that’s were Carolyn and I crossed on the way down (the devil you know) and because of Roberto. Roberto has a small Bed and Breakfast place in Honduras near El Espino.

I had been planning on calling Roberto and getting him to drive down to the border and help me cross. Roberto speaks english quite well and Carolyn and I had a memorable experince at his place on the drive down. Honduras was getting downright scary, we found ourselves driving at night through bandito ridden towns when we stumbled upon Monte Lorenzo (Roberto’s place).

Anyhow I called Monte Lornezo and got some relative of Roberto’s that doesn’t speak english. I learned that Roberto’s won’t be back for at least a week. I don’t want to wait around.

I did a little web research on El Espino and learned that a couple of months ago the Honduran banditos attacked the police at the border with machine guns. Hmm.

In the same search I learned about a small town a couple miles from the border named Somoto. The person making the posting had had a great time there and in particular spoke highly of the Hotel PanAmericano and it’s english speaking owner. So I decided to drive to Somoto and cross the border first thing in the morning.

I arrived in Somoto and found it to be a friendly place just as advertised. No tourism. I checked into the PanAmericano ($7 per night by the way, including hot water, shower, cable tv, secure parking and dog friendly).

When we first started this trip I thought I’d be able to make the border crossings and country crossings easier by teaming up with someone else doing the same thing. That might work but for there isn’t anyone else doing this kind of touring.

I had an amazing dinner in Somoto. Pollo en Planca. The place had no appeal, other than being next door to the pool hall, but the food was great. The chicken was cooked and served on a steel plank, with fried potates, vegetables, beans and rice.

Things went very well at El Espino. I was across in about the same time it took at the Costa Rica-Nicaragua border. I’ve decided that one key element is altitude. The high the border the better. Everyone is more calm when the weather is cool. The process is very messed up, even more so than on the trip down. This time they stamped my car information into my passport. In addtion to having to travel back and forth to have the passport, dog passport and car passport stamped and restamped they made three copies of the page in my passport containing the stamp and then took these three copies to three more places to be stamped!