Escape from Honduras

Day 1 of 2:  Blasting through the rest of Honduras was a bit more adventuresome than we wanted or expected.  The mountains after the Copán Ruinas are for real, and the roads are in terrible shape.  Our rate of progress was even slower than we’d expected, and we’d already judged the Google maps estimate heavily.

As we drove into the fairly sizable town of Intibuca, our low tire warning light came on again.  SAME DAMN TIRE we’d repaired twice already!!  Mere moments later, we spotted a huge tire shop on our left and pulled in just in time.  We had to wait a bit – burning daylight – before it was our turn to be repaired, but we were so very grateful that it happened right where it did and nowhere else.

The real icing on the cake, though, was when we had only one more mountain pass to go and it was starting to get dark so we needed to have that one go smoothly.  We came to a kind of small traffic jam where a pickup truck had rolled over onto its side, and a delivery truck was righting it again by reversing tugging a tow strap attached to the outside of the pickup.  Everyone on both sides of the road were out of their cars watching.  We couldn’t see at first what was happening and we were hesitant to get out of the car in the middle of nowhere.  I got a little video finally but it’s not very good.  At last the pickup was righted, and seemed totally fine – an advertisement for Mitsubishi!  The passengers started piling back into it, the delivery truck drove off, and traffic resumed.

Just after passing the traffic jam, the fog started.  At first it was cool, but as full dark came on and the fog was just getting thicker, it became utterly uncool.  It started raining, and it was COLD.  Dmitri was driving and in many places could not see anything at all.  I held a flashlight out the passenger window to try and highlight the edge of the road for him.  Drivers who presumably knew the road would pass us giving us a temporary glimpse of which direction the road went but the fog would devour their taillights very quickly.  Trying to tailgate them was a bad idea for several reasons, one of the biggies being that our heavily-weighted vehicle cannot take the same pothole hits that empty pickup trucks can.  So we picked our way slowly around potholes, and teamworked staying on the road, wet, frozen right arm hanging out the window.

Around 9pm we finally pulled into Siguatepeque to a hotel with secure parking other Overlanders had used.  It was raining hard.  The $15 room was very cold, and the least-nice one we’d stayed in yet I think.  Damp smell, cobwebs and dust in the corners, teeny cramped bathroom that didn’t smell very good.  We skipped showers, and went straight to bed with the alarm set for 5:15.

Day 2 of 2:  We pulled out of the parking lot at 6:00 on the dot, hoping Nina would nod off immediately to give us another couple hours of quiet transit time.  That was not to be.  Instead she threw up around 7:00 – thankfully into a sick sack.  After a stop to Dramamine up, we had smoother sailing.  We arrived at the Nicaraguan border as planned mid-day, and checked into our cute B&B in Estelí Nicaragua in plenty of time to walk to dinner.