We decided not to do much travelling in El Salvador and Honduras. The decision was easy to make as there is some serious problems in these countries due to gang violence. Honduras has the highest murder rate in the world and El Salvador the second. We had seen in the paper that in El Salvador there was 125 murders in 3 days and 677 in July in a month of deadly violence. Honduras had more than 7000 murders reported last year.
The main gangs MS13, Barrio 18 and the Mexican cartels fight mainly for control of the cocaine smuggling business. The gangs actually started in America as Central Americans originally went to the states as war refugees, after the war they were sent home and the gang culture was taken with them.
However a few places in Honduras are unaffected, the main tourist attractions such as the Bay Islands in the Caribbean are far enough away from the main land to be affected and the ruins of Copan on the Guatemalan border ae also relatively safe and popular with tourists. However neither of these was on our to-do list. It was a similar situation with El Salvador the things we really wanted to do were in Guatemala and Nicaragua.
We still had to go through both El Salvador and Honduras to get to Nicaragua but realistically we were unlikely to be effected by the violence. We weren’t going through any of the major cities and we are neither involved with drugs or gangs.
The two options to get to Nicaragua were to take the Tica bus which was the cheapest option and took 36 hours, the second option was the more expensive private shuttle bus that took 24 hours. Neither of which we felt like we could handle. So we decided to take a stop in El Salvador at the popular surfing and party town of El Tunco.
El Tunco
It took ten hours to get to El Tunco, the border crossing into El Salvador was painless. The first thing that we noticed about El Salvador is that it appears much more developed the Guatemala, the roads are in good condition and the drive to El Tunco is smooth. As we got out the van to cross the border we noticed the temperature increased making it feel hot and sticky.
El Tunco is primarily a surfer town and party town. It’s small and well developed with lots of bars and restaurants and of course there’s good surf, we spent the evening drinking beer watching the sunset over the rocky volcanic beach whilst the surfers played in the ocean waves.
For us the party was short lived, none of the three cash machines give out any money, so with only $20 left between us we had a slight problem. How were we going to pay for the hotel and pay for a bus to Nicaragua? We were not the only ones, another girl in the hostel tried going to the town if La Libertad and still couldn’t get any money.
We tried to pay for the hotel and the card didn’t work but it was a relief when the second card worked. We also had to pay for the shuttle bus on card both of which added a 10% surcharge.
We left for Nicaragua with $3 dollars between us in the hope that there would be a cash machine on the way as we needed $18 dollars per person to get through the border.
We stopped a the shopping mall at La Libertad and tried 3 cash machines, none of which would give us any money. We were getting quite worried by the lack of cash when at last the fourth cash machine gave us some money, we let out a huge sigh of relief.
If you ever go to El Tunco we advise you to take plenty of cash with you.
Honduras To Nicaragua
We passed through the Honduran border relatively easily and drove for around 4 hours, all we really saw was from the window of the van and the American style service station at which we stopped for lunch.
The border to Nicaragua took much longer to pass, the van had to be fumigated and the driver spent several hours getting our passports checked. We were really thankful we paid a tour company to take us through all the borders as it really simplified the process.
Once through the border we continued the journey to Leon driving through a fantastical electric storm as the light faded and so ended a journey that took us through 3 countries in one day and lasted over nearly 12 hours.
