After a couple days in La Mosquitia, our bikes were in desperate need of a bath to get the corrosive salt and sand off. After stripping my bike down, giving it a good scrub, and then coating it with WD-40, the bike looked like it had never seen dirt. It pained me a little to clean the bike for the first time since the trip began. The DR´s an undeniably-ugly bike (but it has a great personality), and I thought that the layer of dirt and grease that had built up over the last 11,500 miles, was the only redeeming quality that it had.
Omer and I wrapped up our time in Honduras with a two-day ride from Trujillo to the border of Nicaragua. The ride brought us through the mountains and along the edge of a couple National Parks. You know you´re spoiled when a beautiful dirt road through the mountains of Honduras, that rivals anything I have ever ridden in New England, now seems like par for the course. We spent the first night in the small town of La Union, and made our way to the border the following morning.
Honduras was so much more than I ever expected it to be. Unlike Guatemala, it was really easy to get off of the beaten path. Aside from our first day at the Copan Ruins, we never saw another traveler. The riding there was the best I´ve had on the trip. If you missed the other posts from Honduras, check out September´s Posts to read more. We did some rough calculations, and approximately 90-95% of our riding time was spent on dirt roads, horse trails, or on the beach. In addition, the people were some of the friendliest I have met on this trip. If you ask a group of Hondurans for directions, be prepared to wait a minute or so while they battle it out over who will get to tell you. It´s actually quite comical, and I found myself asking bigger groups just to see what would happen.
The border crossing into Nicaragua was as easy and straightforward as the others. I don´t want to jinx myself, but I never imagined it being this easy to import and export a bike. I heard so many horror stories of bureaucratic nightmares and having to ¨grease the wheels¨ in order to get anything done, but I haven´t experienced anything like that. I do have all of South America ahead of me though...
Nicaragua was the first border crossing at which I was bombarded with ¨helpers¨, or people ranging in age from 7 to 45 and wearing an assortment of semi-official looking vests, badges, etc; most of which I presume are fake. The helpers offer to navigate you through the post for a fee; although one of them said that he didn´t want money and that his help was by the grace of God. Something tells me that God would have wanted payment when it was all said and done. I´ve heard mixed reviews on the ¨helpers¨. Some people consider them an inexpensive life-saver, while others claim that they are useless, expensive, and sometimes outright thieves. Since we´ve each navigated every other border without problems, Omer and I declined their services, but a few insisted on tagging along anyways. I finally reached the point where I had to explicitly tell them to go away. I could understand the instructions of the border officials just fine, and having three "helpers" repeat every spoken word with differing translations, was actually making things 100x more confusing than it had to be. Finally, the helpers caught on to the fact that they weren´t going to make any money from us, and let us be.
About 40 minutes later we were in Nicaragua and on our way to Ocotal. I thought that "Ocotal" sounded familiar, and then I remembered the slogan, "Pencils for Ocotal". "Pencils for Ocotal" was a collection my high school did to send school supplies to a town that I had presumed was in Africa. Well Ocotal is actually in Central America and it´s a comfortable place to spend a day. We arrived during the middle of a large parade and it quickly became apparent that the people here were just as friendly as in Honduras.
The next day we were off to the city of Leon. The road to the city was one of the worst I´ve seen...ever. It was paved, but just barely. Huge, sharp-edged potholes, comprised more of the surface than intact pavement did. Most vehicles chose to crawl down the sides, half on the road, and half on the ever-expanding dirt shoulder. My guess is that the shoulders will eventually replace the paved road completely. Since our bikes are more maneuverable than the cars and buses, and the shoulders were bogged down with vehicles, we stuck to the middle of the street and made our way through the slalom course as quickly as we could. Thankfully it´s a relatively short stretch of road, so it was over before it became too tiresome, and before either of us had a flat.
Leon was a pretty city, but after one day we decided to move down to the Pacific coast. While packing my bike, I noticed that a bolt to my pannier rack had sheared; probably a result of one of the many falls in La Mosquitia. We made a detour to a machine shop on the outskirts of town, and they were able to fix the rack and drill and tap another sheared bolt on Omer´s bike. By the time we left the shop, the sun had already set, but we decided to break one of my cardinal rules, and make the 25km ride to the beach in the dark. I have to ride with my tinted visor up at night, and after a couple minutes of using my corneas as a windshield, eating swarms of mosquitoes along with bigger and tastier insects, and swerving around random cows, horses, and oxen that just seemed to appear in the middle of the unlit road, I realized why I had made the rule in the first place. We made it to the beach OK though and found a place to sleep. The next morning we awoke and realized the beach wasn´t anything to get excited about, so we made our way Northeast to Laguna de Apoyo. The Laguna is set in a volcanic crater, so the hills you see in the photo on the left are actually the inner walls of the volcano. This was the nicest lake I´ve visited in Central America, with clean and clear water that couldn´t have been any more inviting.
Continuing through Nicaragua, we visited Granada, and from there we took a day trip out to Volcan Masaya, pictured on the right. On the way back from the volcano, our trip had another interesting event, as Omer tried to pass a bus while doing a wheelie. He gave the bike a little more gas than he should have after changing gears and the bike almost flipped over on him. While trying to recover, he collided with the side of the bus and then went down. Thankfully he slid away from the bus´s tires, but I really didn´t know how bad it was going to be at first. After a moment of collecting his thoughts, Omer was back on his feet, smiling, and saying how stupid he was, and I was kicking myself yet again for not having invested in a helmet cam at the beginning of this trip.
We rounded out our stay with a trip to Isla de Ometepe, a volcanic island in Lago de Nicaragua. We arrived just in time to the enjoy the parades that marked Nicaragua´s Independence Day celebrations.
I´m writing from San Juan del Sur, a beach town close to the Costa Rican border. After traveling with Omer for nearly five weeks, we finally had to part ways today. His girlfriend is flying into Colombia on October 21st, and my girlfriend is flying into Costa Rica on October 11th, meaning that he needs to speed up, and I need to slow down. When I was planning this trip, I had my heart set on riding it solo, but traveling with Omer added so much to my journey, and made for some of the most memorable moments of my trip thus far. We´re both obviously really independent people, so how we were able to get along for that amount of time is beyond me, but I feel really lucky to have ran into him back in Guatemala.
I´ve picked up the books in San Juan del Sur, and I´m going to study Spanish here until the middle of next week. After that, I´m going to make my way into Costa Rica and explore the Pacific Coast while eagerly awaiting my girlfriend´s arrival! Until next time...
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