Day 61: Juticalpa, Honduras to Ocotal, Nicaragua

When in a foreign country and no one you ask seems to think the road you're looking for exists, what do you do? Go looking for it anyhow, of course. We had one of these experiences this morning trying to head south from Juticalpa. Yesterday we purposefully headed to Juticalpa in order to take this road, which we had seen on two out of three maps we studied, in order to avoid having to navigate through Tegucigalpa. We followed our instincts and just as we headed down a dirt road into the unknown a nice old man on a bicycle assured us that we were headed for "El Plomo" a town that had an important right turn to keep us headed on the right track. Well, while every town we came to had nice green signs informing us of it's name, none of them had the title we were looking for so after 45 minutes or so we pulled over to ask if we were still on the right track. Of course, none of them had heard of "El Plomo" and for at least 10 minutes, none of them had any suggestion besides heading through Tegucigalpa. A crowed of people began to gather and finally a guy who had been there silent the whole time stepped forward and proceeded to tell us exactly what we were looking for: El Plomo was really Bijagual and that if we turned there we would be able to get to Danli, the town where the road from Tegucigalpa meets up with our ellusive route.

It's a good thing we were so persistent: that was one of the best roads we have traveled on. Starting from the flat dusty pature land we had been traversing for the last hour plus, the road headed up into the hill country. Several stream/river corssings (sans bridges), tight switch backs and incredible vistas at every turn led us through the next couple hours of travel.







The border with Nicaragua at Las Manos was trouble free and with both immigration and customs offices all in one place, there was no need to tote border agents around for 60km or make redundant trips to a bank. Apparently this is a border many truckers choose to cross at as there must have been about 100 big rigs parked all along the two lane road heading up to the crossing necessitating some fancy weaving and manuvering on our part in order to make our way through. Nicaragua is the first country on the trip that has required insurance for our motorcycles (Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras didn't even have it as an option, at least for us).

Heading down from the pass which the border was perched on, we entered a whole new temperate zone. I would liken it most to Utah or Colorado with dry low bushes and grasses patched across the steep slopes on either side of our riverside route. We made our way into Ocotal in the fading light searching for an ATM and a place to stay for the night. Without much trouble we founds both although once again discovering that VISA is the preferred card here in Central America.