Blood, Sweat and Tears

This morning I am writing from a somewhat unremarkable hotel about 45 minutes south of Quezaltenangoin Guatemala. We are in the mountains halfway to Quezaltenango because we couldn't make it up the hill. We drove for as long as we could and Tink did her best but eventually we had to pull over beside some other broken down vehicles for fear of overheating. We asked the locals how much further and they said it was another 1/2 hour which means another hour for us. We turned around and found the closest hotel for the night. It may be a blessing in disguise because now we must take highway 2 to El Salvador which is the coastal road and should have less hills.

Yesterday was a day that we wished we had flown to Nicaragua. We woke up at Jose's Cabanas sweating. It was 7 am and it was HOT. The van was hot already too and we hit the highway quickly to get the air flowing in the windows. We had stayed at Jose's Cabanas mostly due to a wrong turn. Emilie was waving at a bus full of locals and had completly unknowingly turned off the highway. I commented that the road didn't look like a highway and Emilie agreed. Forty five minutes later we were at the coast in a town of population 1000. We went with the flow of the day and stayed the night in Puerto ? (to be added later, I don't have a lot of time because laptop battery dying).

As we sweated down the highway our spirits were good, but also hot. We passed Tapachula (Mexican border town) without incident and headed for the border. There is a scam near the border that we avoided quite well. Every couple kilometers people try to pull you over and sell you permission to cross the border. We drove through them whilst honking and waving. The actual crossing is down in a hot, jungly valley packed with people. I would like to accentuate how many people were waiting at the border. It was shoulder to shoulder and nearly every one of them were yelling something at us. When we finally got through one of the throngs to accelerate a little, we were chased.

To be continued, really sorry. I am out of juice!