Crossing Honduras

The Pan-American in Honduras is really bad with lots of potholes. This is by far the worst stretch of the road that we have come across in any country.

Honduran police are notorious for stopping travellers driving on the stretch of road between El Salvador and Nicaragua and we had gone less than 30km before being stopped.

In fact we passed a couple of motorbike cops who had stopped a truck and as soon as we passed them had a feeling that we would be seeing them again. Only about 2 minutes later they came cruising past and waved us over to the side of the road.

It didn’t take long for one of them to get to the point and tell me that I owed a USD100 fine. He then explained to me that the reason why was that we didn’t have any reflective tape on the front of the truck. I told him that our front number plate was reflective and refused to pay.  After about 10 minutes of back and forth where I alternated between telling him I didn’t understand and I wasn’t going to pay he handed me back my licence and told us to get on our way.

We had decided to drive only to Choluteca as we couldn’t face two border crossings in one day. There is a hotel here where you can stay in the car park and use their pool. Very welcome as the temperature here was hot.

The next morning we stated very early and drove towards the Nicaraguan border. This involves going up into the mountains and we didn’t see any cops – I think it was too early for them to be up. The turn up into the mountains is also onto a much quieter road with virtually no trucks and no potholes. Its still officially the PanAm but most traffic stays in the lowlands.

When we reached the border crossing it was 8am and pretty cool – nice !