To Nicaragua

Getting to Nicaragua from Honduras turned out to be a marathon, and not nearly as simple as it should have been. After spending the night in San Pedro, we were driven to the bus terminal at 4am, hoping to jump on the Tika Bus, which is a high-speed service throughout central America which runs bus lines only connecting the mayor cities. The journey to Managua (capital of Nicaragua) is still about 13 hours, but for 30 dollars it would have been in relative comfort and ease.

Well, turns out the bus was fully booked. Whilst irritating, we weren't really that annoyed with ourselves for not pre-booking because we couldn't really have - in Honduras you can only book a seat in one of the Tika bus agencies, and we hadn't been anywhere near one in the last week. Fortunately, we had lonely planet to hand so decided to make the journey south on our own, with the first leg being 4 hours to the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, on a comfortable-enough express bus.

After arriving in Tegucigalpa (there's no bus terminal there - just a number of bus stations near each other in a fairly rough part of town), we worked out where we needed to go to next, took a taxi to the bus station for this bus company (which was way over the other side of town), and got very ripped-off by our taxi driver (25USD for 4 of us for a 10 minute taxi ride...), but at least we got to where the next bus was leaving.

San Pedro to Leon - through Honduras

This was a further 2 hours down to the border town of El Paraiso, which had all the dodgyness you'd exepect from a boarder town in a narco-trafficking part of the world. Anyway, the locals in their cowboy hats and boots seemed rather intrigued by us at the bus stop and it wasn't a long wait in the heat before jumping on the last Honduran bus to take us to the border. This was only 10 minutes, but was our first experience of the day on the "chicken bus", which are the local buses that are retired US school buses sold to central American countries. Needless to say the seating arrangements aren't particularly comfortable, but tolerable given how cheap they are.

The border crossing was simple enough, paid 12USD to leave Honduras and received a receipt for 10USD, changed our money at the border, and hopped on another chicken bus to the Nicaraguan border town, around 20 minutes away. When we arrived here, before we'd even had time to say where we wanted to go, our backpacks had been taken off the bus and carried onto the next express service to Managua (I think this is the fairly aggressive technique used to make sure you take their bus for the next leg as there are a number of different-owned buses running very similar services). We communicated that we were headed to Leon, and the guy assured us he would tell us when to get off and change.

A few hours later at a cross-roads in the middle of nowhere, we were thrown off the bus and directed to the next, definitely-not-express service to Leon. We arrived around 8pm, after roughly 15 hours of buses. Despite the length of the day, everything ran pretty much as smoothly as it could have, and there was much less waiting around for buses than I expected. That does seem to be the virtue to the informal bus system here, in that there are no timetables, so the buses leave when it makes sense to leave, which more ofter than not is around 10 minutes after a connecting bus has arrived. I do have some photos to upload... but the internet is too slow here, so they'll have to wait.