It felt good to mount back up and hit the road after four plus days in "one place". The road east rolled and twisted along, moving us forward quickly among sparse traffic. When the road intersected with the north-south road heading towards Puerto Barrios we experienced some pretty heavy truck traffic due to the port city being Guatemalas primary east coast shipping center. Turning east again we rode through huge tracts of land covered in banana trees and came to a cluster of trucks around some speed bumps made of thick rope.
Figuring this must be some kind of customs/immigration office, we voluntarily pulled over to see if there was anything we needed to do seeing as we had yet to fill out any paperwork for permits for the motos. Sure enough, this was the office where we were to have our passports scanned out and without any request for permits or whatever, we carried on towards Honduras.
The Honduran border outpost was the beginning of what became quite a saga. We had found through our research that Honduras had an arduous importation process, but descriptions in the guide books about a "police escort" couldn't prepare us for what we went though. At the first checkpoint, surrounded by enthusiastic-money-waving currency changers, we gathered that we needed to proceed to the monstrous building to our right to do something about our bikes. With the language barrier in full effect, we communicated with the officials slowly getting the story as to what needed to be done. Paperwork was followed by inspection of the bikes with the officials insisting to see the vehicle identification numbers so as to match them up with the paperwork.
Ok, next we go to the immigration office across the lot. Three dollars later we had flimsy pieces of paper with entry stamp stapled into our passports and then it was back over to the bikes. After taking our passports and bike titles from us, the officials informed us that we would have to pay 500 limpira each (about US$25 each) and proceed to Puerto Cortes with one of their agents onboard. I guess this is our police escort. After transferring my dry bag to J's bike, we mounted up with the pint sized border agent sitting right behind me carrying our passports and bike titles under his arm for the 60km to Puerto Cortes.
A wide smooth roadway led us towards Puerto Cortes interrupted only a couple of times with dusty dirt sections and at one point by a horse who, having escaped his roadside tether, had decided to chill out in the middle of the road eying the traffic zooming by on either side of him. Crazy horse. Arriving in Puerto Cortes, the agent began to direct me with hand signals which seemed to be all the same. Only upon swerving one way or the other would I find out weather I had made the right decision based on how wildly he waved his arm. Having successfully swerved our way to the customs building I headed off on foot to find a cajero automatico to take out some money for our dealings. Turns out that MasterCard is not accepted worldwide or at least not in this part of Honduras. With money in hand, we managed to move our paperwork along and sent our escort agent on his way. Now we have a new whole set of officials to deal with.
The guy who took our paper work proceeds to ask us in broken english:
"so do you want a permit for the motos? It's gonna take 2 to 3 hours"
"do we need one?"
"if you want to ride the motos in Honduras you do"
"ok then yes, we do"
Why else did we just ride 60km with a dude chillin' in back of me, sheesh. Ok, so now it's gonna take 2 to 3 MORE hours? We already have spent over 2 hours just arriving at this point in the process. Do they want people to come visit their country or dont they? Alright, lets find out what's gonna take 3 more hours... two more trips to the bank for "invoices" and we have to part with another US$75... then wait for a while, then a while more.
Eventually we left the premises of the customs office and in the toasty afternoon sunshine headed back south to the town of Omoa where there's reportedly the "best backpackers in Honduras".
Roli's Place is a chill spot indeed. A compound just 100 meters from the beach in a little "up and coming oceanside town". With our tent set up in the beautiful courtyard we headed down to the waterfront where we found a beautiful sunset unfolding over a narrow dirty beach. Several cigar smoking Canadian ex-pats have set up businesses here and seem to think that this place is going to be a destination in the near feature. We get the feeling that all these northerners come down to central america to run away from something. Dinner of garlic-butter sauce fried red snapper, nachos and cervezas cost a whopping US$15 and then we headed back to the hostel to crash out.
buenas noches
-Colin
2 comments:
huge tracts of land!
If you come back through this way on a Saturday, they will actually take payment at the border instead of Puerto Cortes. But get an early start, because on Saturdays, the Guatemalan side needs you to make payment in the downtown Aduana office in Puerto Barrios. The banrual branch closes at 1:00 on Saturdays. Oh and to make the short drive "illegally" into P.B., the customs official held my daughter's passport so I would return with the bank receipt
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