Guatemala To El Salvador

Friday morning and awake aboard GANNET2. The sand fleas are nipping a bit as the doors are open, I can hear sounds from the village which is starting to stir, cars and roosters mostly, but lying here in the back of our camper van I can hear birds calling and chirping mostly, starting their day under heavily cloudy rainy season skies. Why there aren’t squadrons of mosquitoes I can’t say but this is a new country to us, our first night here after a bizarre drive out of Guatemala yesterday. 

Our sleep at a Guatemalan gas station yesterday was fragmented by a lot of noisy trucks all night. Then at three in the morning I heard beeping from the front of the van and I asked Layne who sleeps inside me (nearer the toilet) to see if the electrical system had a fault. The idea is to switch off the inverter and reset it if necessary. Our roadside stop Thursday night in central Guatemala:

“Michael!” she said, her voice full of urgency so unnatural I snapped awake suddenly and equally unnaturally. “There’s a man in the van!” I tumbled out of bed and grabbed not my glasses but my metal walking stick, left over from my 2018 motorcycle wreck. Layne checked the cockpit for any missing items but he took nothing, it turned out. Rusty wondered what the commotion was from his bed. 

He was a curious drunk truck driver fortunately who kept apologizing for getting caught and wanted to be my friend.  I pushed him away. There is a central locking device in the van dashboard which we usually press when we settle in for the night when parked in an unsecured location locking ourselves in. Well, this one night we forgot we had stepped out to check on a vehicle parking nearby and failed to reset the door locks. The one night an idiot got too curious about our home! Luckily this wasn’t the United States and he wasn’t armed.

We got back on CA2, Central America Highway 2 at 6:30 in the morning with 63 miles to drive to the Salvadoran border. We arrived there at noon so you can imagine the stop and go traffic, and the hours spent idling in jams and the nudging forward through swarms of motorcycles as locals rushed to work. 

It wasn’t political protest but it is a vigorous program of bridge building along the Pan (“All”) American Highway in Guatemala. They build the new bridge over the old instead of alongside so the highway is closed or reduced to one lane or has stop and go traffic control for miles. It’s a mess. And this has nothing to do with the general strike which is currently on pause, or at least was as we drove through. 

Traffic eased on the last two hours to the border as we drove through gorgeous green landscapes full of huge spreading trees and vast fields of brightest green. It was so lush and verdant the countryside reminded me of  Spring in England (!) but with volcanoes. 

Layne bought cooked pork meat called carnitas, above for dinner and it stayed secure in our fridge uninspected at the Salvadoran border. We don’t empty our fridge at borders anymore unless we are returning to the US when they have strict rules and we are expected to follow them. Down here it seems a waste to worry as no one seems to care about fridge.  Rusty enjoyed grazing the thick grass under the sign that read “Fruit Tree Nursery.”  

In the fullness of time we reached the border, a small village after miles of empty countryside. We dropped off two Spanish hitchhikers we picked up on the way to the border and let them cross by themselves. Associating yourself with strangers at a police inspection is never a good idea! 

To exit Guatemala you get your passport stamped and you get your vehicle’s temporary import permit “suspended” so you can drive back easily if you want to, otherwise if you cancel it the car can’t come back for ninety days. Simple, no?

 It took a couple of hours of waiting and cheerful chatter with the officials to get the stamps done. Sigh. I met a German couple in a VW Eurovan who spent five hours at the border with Nicaragua to get the job done. Something to look forward to. This was easy friendly and slow. 

As you leave the frontier post a man with a clipboard checks the VIN of the vehicle and the exit stamp and smiles you on your way…

And then we joined the surge of trucks trying to get to the bridge across the river that forms the boundary between these two countries. I haven’t seen the interior of El Salvador since I was here during the civil war in 1986 and we’ve heard only good things about how much modernizing has been underway, public works projects arresting gang members and so forth. A country finally at peace. 

But to get there wasn’t going to be so quick and easy!  One final jam leaving Guatemala! The general strike has left the country without supplies so as soon as the roads opened trucks poured in and out getting commerce going again and the infrastructure can’t handle. We knew this might happen but we had to get going anyway so we sat out huge traffic hairballs all the way to this point and here we were at the end of the road itself and stuck once again. Double sigh. I couldn’t wait to enter El Salvador. 

The soldiers monitoring our exit from their country intervened and moved non commercial car traffic to the left shoulder. This seemed an improvement after an hour idling in 100 degrees waiting for something to happen. It turned out to be the scariest drive so far and I was a limp rag after a mile of pothole dodging on that shoulder, and I’m not exaggerating. 

The pavement had a six inch edge and the pothole ahead resembled a swimming pool. I knew we’d get stuck if we fell in. Layne got out to her eternal credit and stopped the trucks eager to enter Guatemala. They stopped for her and I nudged between the front of the truck and the edge of the immensely deep hole with my mirrors folded. The rear wheel slipped momentarily as though sliding into the hole but we were fine. Till the next one. 

The holes were deeper than I imagined and I struggled to get around them flashing my lights to stop oncoming trucks. Some stopped others rushed at me. In my mirror I could see a full sized coach coming up behind. I asked the driver when we were at the Salvadoran border how he managed. He shrugged and smiled as only a Guatemalan could when asked to drive such crap roads. I was spent. 

Think we’re going to fit between the rock and the truck? Barely and I had to gun the engine to get the car wheel over it. How we didn’t lurch into the truck I’ll never know. 

I know our photography isn’t the best at this point but Layne was sweating bullets just like me. The pick up is leaning at an angle we might hit the light pole. Was it better to stay flat with no room or put two wheels on the asphalt and risk it? 

These guys we discovered later are road construction workers for the Salvadoran government’s Department of Public Works and what they were doing in Guatemala I don’t know but I followed them very closely.  

Eventually the Salvadorans stopped oncoming trucks and non commercial traffic crossed the bridge in the left lane. Ironic considering El Salvador doesn’t allow right hand drive cars, ones that are driven on the left as in England…

Out of Guatemala at last. Next time I hope they will be traveling a smoother road, more for them than for us. I admired the determination of the protestors to hold their vote accountable and not to give in to claiming vote fraud without proof. Going without in a country with so little to start with was a measure of their determination. I know people in the US think the 2020 election was stolen but no evidence ever emerged to support that and the extent to which it bothered the voters were snarky comments on Facebook. Not putting their well being on the line for a patently false claim. 

The Salvadoran immigration officials were smiling and cheerful. “Welcome to El Salvador!” She said grinning broadly after checking the tricycle passenger’s passport. “Unfortunately,” she added and my heart sank, “we have to ask you for twelve dollars to process each passport.” Oh okay then and I handed over a twenty dollar bill. “They’ll need two,” my wife the mathematician gently reminded me. It had been a long day already. 

Five minutes later another official came out, handed us our change (to Layne for safe keeping obviously) and gave us our passports duly stamped with an official receipt coyly poking out. “Welcome to El Salvador!” Big smiles hand shakes all round and off we went to customs. That took a little longer hand filling forms and a quick external tour of the vehicle. No money changed hands and we got our import for 60 days and nothing required for Rusty. “Enjoy El Salvador!” Three people waved us out of our inspection parking spot and we drove away. 

We also noticed the inevitable dogs hanging around the offices were all in great shape and there were overflowing food and water bowls for them. Unbelievable.