Oh my god we had a day yesterday. Every resource we had (the internet, lonely planet, our cab driver) told us the bus left at 5 or 5:30am. Okay. That sucks because it's early but we can deal with it. We got up at 4 am, Oscar was there to pick us up about 4:40 (which is what passes for the agreed upon 4:30) in his little ¨taxi¨ (I use the term loosely because it was just a gutted out Corolla painted yellow - no taxi sign, no interior on the doors). So we get to the bus station, wait because they don't start selling tickets until 5am, find out the bus leaves at 8:00 (or ¨8 or 9, more or less¨ as one guy said) or 11:30. My friends, that is a long time to wait in a San Salvador bus station. In desperation, we cabbed to another bus station only to find that THAT bus had left and we would have to wait until tomorrow. So we cabbed back. In a real taxi with tiger print interior. With a driver who ran every red light we had.
I'm just happy we got out of San Salvador alive.
So we bought our tickets for the 8am bus and we sat in the bus station for hours. Literally hours. 5:30-almost 10am, when our bus FINALLY arrived. That's right, we bought a ticket for the 8am bus and we left the station - after idling for about half an hour - around 10:20. The brochure also claimed that we would reach Managua at 6 or 6:30. LIES. Want to know when we really got there? 10pm.
In order to get to Nicaragua, we had to pass through Honduras. This means we went through 2 borders: El Salvador-Honduras and Honduras-Nicaragua. Now, my Lonely Planet says that there is an agreement between those 3 countries and Guatemala to allow tourists to pay one ¨tourist card¨ fee for all 4 countries, and receive only one passport stamp... but that border guards will often ¨forget¨ about this new law and charge people anyway. So when our bus asked us for $13 to enter Nicaragua (which is $11 more than the land migration fee we were supposed to pay), I started to get a little rage. I tried to explain this to our bus attendant in pretty mediocre Spanish, and she told me there was no such agreement and she would take me to the immigration people so they could explain it to me. Well, the explanation was ¨$12¨(the guy was pretty snippy, actually). He said my book was bad and there was no agreement (folks, FYI, this book was published October 2010). He told me this after he dug my passport out of the pile to identify me. Awkward.
And I'm still not exactly sure what that extra dollar was for, except that our bus probably kept it.
I talked a bit to a guy on the bus who was born in Nicaragua and is living in the States; he said he always has to pay the extra tourists fees for every country. Not only that, he had to pay about $200 for the girl he was travelling with to leave Guatemala... I'm not sure why. This place is ridiculous.
On the bus we ran into one of the girls we'd met in Xela (from our sister Spanish school), who was on the way to Granada with her mother. We split a very expensive taxi to Granada (another hour away) and finally arrived at our hostel, which has a pool and free internet. These are good things. Especially since even at 11pm I was sweating in the heat. I am constantly glistening. It's not very pretty.
We went out this morning for a massive breakfast and we plan on taking a well-earned relaxing day.
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