Wednesday Jan. 3, 2007
The assistance and advice I've received from fellow moto riders and locals along the way has proven priceless. Some of these people I've known for years, others are acquaintances, and some I've never even met before. Their help may come in the form of a friendly email listing contacts for an upcoming city, or a warning about a bad road, a great moto repair shop, accommodations, a push or lift with the bike or simply a tasty coffee shop. Some have gone out of their way to personally lead me out of a confusing city, others have bought me breakfast or a drink, while others have scoured their records to provide me with important details they knew I would need. Thanks to all of you for your help!
One of such pieces of advice I received was that crossing at smaller, less popular borders is usually quicker and easier because of the lack of traffic and need for so called 'helpers'. These are the guys who ask you if then can assist you in everything from guarding the bike to getting you through the lines quicker, neither of which I've needed so far. Then there's the money-changers. It's necessary to have enough cash to pay for the paperwork to get out of the present country (in their currency), and then change it to the new country's currency so that you can pay for entry there (unless of course you prefer to pay an increased rate in US dollars). It's necessary to haggle a little to get a better rate, and I always check the bank rates online just before I cross a border to make sure I'm not getting fleeced, but so far they've been pretty fair and professional.
Border crossings are still a little stressful for me though, and just days before leaving Guatemala I convinced myself not to go through El Salvador. I told myself "it wasn't very big so I wouldn't be there long, it was yet another border to cross, it wasn't necessary for me to go there to continue my route, and it didn't seem to offer anything unique from its neighboring countries". I decided that the Copan crossing into Honduras from Guatemala was better than the large crossing on the Panamerican highway into El Salvador, but was still leery about the heaps of paperwork I'd heard that Honduras required (something my view into the shabby office confirmed when I got there where one man plucked away at a manual typewriter to create said paperwork). Fortunately, aside from three Russian guys in a car with US plates on it, I was the only one there, so everything progressed surprisingly quickly and I was in the town of Copan by late morning - my shortest border crossing to date.
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Copan is a small tourist town only a couple of kms from the site of the more famous Copan ruins. I was told these ruins were significantly smaller and easier to view than Palenque or Tikal, and that two hours would be all that I'd need to see them. I arrived so early that I had time to find a hotel, get a bite to eat and some money from a bank all before visiting the ruins. They were significantly different than the others. The buildings were much lower and stone estelas carved in stone stood everywhere like wooden totem poles. Inscriptions of all kinds were on almost every stone surface, and several large scarlet macaw parrots had made this their home.
The next day I decided to take a shuttle bus to a hot springs in the jungle where I had a choice of sitting in the large and nearly vacant pool filled with boiling water from the springs or in the river with a couple of locals where cold river water mixed with hot spring water. Of course I tried both.
On the bus I met a nice US couple who were searching for a place to retire and we stayed busy swapping travel stories while the large Hyundai diesel minivan carried us up into the dense jungle on rather dodgy roads. Along the way we spotted a boy picking coffee beans and had a tour of a very small coffee processing station where the beans were soaked, dehusked and then dried on a large concrete pad under the sun before being placed in 50lb bags and sold for the unbelievable sum of something like $1 US/bag. Obviously, there's no money to be made in a cup of coffee.
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