B and lots of BS - Blogabond

300 Km to Leon in Nicaragua, our next destination. We made it to the El Salvador / Nicaragua boarder pretty quickly on the good paved roads. The boarder crossing was another easy process: check our passports, log the information and pay a couple bucks. We had heard from other travelers that the main roads in Honduras has a lot of police stops. Since we were mostly on mountain dirt roads before we had not encountered any of these yet. BUT not even 2 minutes out of the boarder crossing we hit our first one. Two Honduras transit police whistled and pulled us over. One guy came up to the vehicle with a kinda bad attitude and said he was going to write us a ticket for not wearing our seat belts. Mind you we read and heard prior that there are no road rules in Honduras. Anyways after looking at all our paper work to make sure the van was legit he was still adamant about giving us a ticket for something. We ended up paying him $20 to let us go. Another 10 minutes down the road we came to our second police road block check point. This time the police checked our vehicle paper work and passports again and asked if we had a “triangle”. Triangle? What? He was talking about the reflective triangle thing you carry in the car if you brake down on the side of the road. No we don’t have one. So again we paid him $20 not to write us a ticket and let us move along. Another 10 km we came to our third police check point. The cop asked us for our paperwork and the triangle again. This time we were not going to paid. We told them we didn’t have a triangle nor any money since the first two police stops took it all. Round and round and on we go (without paying this time). 15 Km another police check point. Paperwork, Triangle? No and no money! On we go. By this time we have figured out the drill. The more they rambled Spanish to us the more we rambled English to them saying, “We don’t speak ANY Spanish, we don’t understand them and we don’t have any money”. Subsequently, in the 200 km from the El Salvador / Honduras boarder to the Honduras / Nicaragua boarder we hit 13 police blocks in total. Each time the same thing. We went through the Nicaragua boarder fairly easily besides waiting an hour for a vehicle permit. The people in the boarder offices work as slow as snails. Ok last stretch till Leon. Everything was going great. Great roads, great scenery, and great time. BUT… 5 km out of Leon we hit a Nicaragua police check point. This time the police said he was going to write us a ticket because Ryan was driving with is shirt off. Yeah, yeah we know what you want. “We don’t speak Spanish and we have no money!!” Surprisingly this guy was not budging as quickly but eventually we BS our way out of it. So this is where the B and lots of BS comes from: 300 Km, 14 police road blocks, 2 we paid ($40 total) and that’s an 85%. Not too bad!!

Police Check Point in Honurdas

Police Check Point in Honduras Again!!!

written by

ryan & debbrial on October 29, 2009 from Leon, Nicaragua

from the travel blog: Us Discovering the Latin Americas

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