Day12-If it’s Tuesday, we must be in Nicaragua!, Fri, Dec 10, 2010

Real life changes our priorities!

Honduras/Nicaragua Border Crossing #5

Start & Stop: Choluteca, Honduras to Managua, Nicaragua

Mileage: 384 (618 km)

Weather:  Hot, warm

Lodging:  Hotel Camino Real, Colonia Brisas del Sur, Salida a Guasaule, Choluteca, Honduras, Phone: (504) 7822860 – (504) 7804920; $35 USD Single

Fuel:  $

Money Exchange:  $1 USD = 21.79 Nicaraguan Cordoba Oro NIO

Lisa: After our unfortunate deal entering Honduras, we actually thought we’d hightail it out of there and headed for the Nicaragua border.  We got within a few miles of it and realized there were no hotels near there and we were losing daylight.  So we turned around (we do a lot of that it seems!) and checked into the first hotel we came to.  Hotel Camino Real is a faded shell of what must have been a very nice place.  It’s on a beautiful property and well laid out but in need of a lot of help.  Whatever, it was fine for us. There were very few other guests there but the parking was right in front of the rooms in a secure area, they said they had internet (which is different than actually *having* it, we are coming to discover), and they had a restaurant so we could get something to eat after our day.  This’ll work.

Dean: It was a dump!

Lisa: It was time to do some maintenance on the bikes so I walked over to get two Coronas and my mechanic went to work.  Dean adjusted and cleaned my chain and checked on some other things.  Don’t we have a great system?  I do borders, he does maintenance.  Sweet!  He went into his room to try to get internet as we hadn’t been connected in almost 48 hours and he has a big company to run.  I was still outside, enjoying the tropical setting and sorting out my bike.  I always laugh at how unorganized one motorcycle can become on a ride: we each carry a gallon of water and we fill smaller bottles we can drink during the day, we keep smaller bills and change available, fun children’s stickers para los ninos along the way, our documents need to be handy but in a safe place and each day the stack of papers changes depending on the next border or police stop, faceshields cleaned, ipods charged, etc.

Since we had gotten to the previous night’s hotel at dark, more than usual needed to be done tonight as I enjoyed my cold beer.  [note: as my husband of 30 years will tell you, I do NOT drink beer.  Ever.  I never have either.  Until now.  I have developed a taste for Corona beer.  Is there anything better than a cold beer after a hot day?  Wowzers!  What a discovery!!  Good thing too, since vino blanco has not been widely available in Central America so far.  But I digress]

Dean: It was like taking a fish to water!

Lisa: At some point, Dean came out of his room carrying his computer and walked right by me without a word, entering the main building of the hotel.  Clearly something was not right and he waved off my question but sometimes you need your space so I stayed put and waited for him to return.  About 20 minutes later he emerged after getting a good internet connection in the lobby, to tell me some sad news: Dean’s beloved father, the 90 year old family patriarch, had taken a turn for the worse and had entered hospice care.  Dean’s wife Sue had been trying to reach him for the last 36 hours.

There are these moments in life when everything changes and this was one of them. We went from having a casual evening planning the next day’s ride to figuring out how to get Dean the heck out of Central America and back to California.  Now.  And nothing else mattered.

We checked flights and determined Managua was the best option and then went to work finding a place to store the bikes.  Silly me, I didn’t think to ask Mike Kneebone for help here.  Sometimes you get so focused you can’t see the most obvious option and having sporadic and lousy internet complicates the problem.  [Mike found us a fellow rider who so kindly offered space but it was after we were settled at the hotel - thanks so much Salvador!!!!]  Using a loaner sat phone,  I reached a hotel across the street from the airport in Managua (MGA) – also called the Camino Real -  and even though we had a very bad connection, it sounded promising.  I had always planned to fly home for 6 days at Christmas to surprise my husband while the bike was air freighted over the Darien Gap and Dean wanted to take the sailboat to Colombia.  Now he’ll just be surprised earlier

Friday morning, for a variety of reasons, we got a late start out and headed toward the border again.  As I hand my passport to the border guard, another man yells out LISA!!!!!  I said yes, that’s me.  He was so excited and he was there to help me!!! <eye roll> I asked if he was a friend of Rrrrrony Garrrrrrcia and the poor guy answered affirmatively. (this is all one big organized ring of thieves and he was waiting there for us)  Well, dontcha know, I let loose about what we thought about this whole gig.  So, get this, the guy says, “No No No, I’ll take good care of you, etc.”  He must think this blond  is my natural hair color.  Anyway, he tried some new (to us) tricks to get money from us but we weren’t playing anymore and he vanished into the border crowd.  We crossed into Nicaragua and did our own paperwork.  Completely painless, relatively fast and very cheap.  Boom.

Dean: We learn something with each border crossing.  Lisa knows the procedure now.  1-Get us out of the old country (emigration), 2-get bike out of old country (customs), 3-get us into new country (emigration), 4-get bike into new country (customs), 5-sometimes get country vehicle insurance.  The confusing part is the above sequence require hop-scotching back-n-forth between the steps.

Lisa: It was not without trepidation that we entered Nicaragua but it was all good and we kept up a good pace.  We needed to get the bikes taken care of and had nothing firmed up.  At one point we made the mutual decision to override the GPS and take a slightly longer route that would keep us from crossing through downtown Managua to get near the airport.  It was an interesting decision as the newly paved main road turned to garbage about 5 miles into our chosen route.  And kept deteriorating until we were standing on the pegs and just riding it out.  It was less than 40 miles so we just went with it and it turned out to be a really scenic trip through very small villages.

As we drove into Managua we were on high alert for any place where we MIGHT be able to store the bikes should the hotel not pan out.  Nothing presented itself.  No garages, no motorcycle dealers, no storage facilities.  Nothing.  And we had some time to actually look because the traffic was unbelievably bad on the cobblestoned web of intersections.

Dean: Today in Managua we rode by an “open” man-hole in the center of the street!  I have heard that people were stealing man-hole covers for scrap iron.  If any motor vehicle drives through an open manhole, it would be serious damage.  If a motocicletas rides into that, it is an instant endo with serious damage to the whole steering and suspension system.

Lisa: We finally pulled into the hotel under the porte cochere and I went inside the very nice resort casino entrance and straight to the front desk, asking for the MOD.

A delightful, professional woman speaking beautiful English emerged from the back office and Tamara immediately became my angel of the day.  I explained our situation and she walked outside with me to discuss our options.  She told me they have no covered parking there.  Ok, so we’ll wrap the bikes up well and if that’s the best we can do, then we’ll make it work.  I am in “Get It Done” mode and I all can think about is getting Dean back to California.  We don’t have the luxury of time to figure something else out.  It’s almost 4 pm, it’s hot, we don’t know the area and the traffic is BRUTAL.  We didn’t see any other hotels close by and haven’t seen even one long term parking place.  While Dean and I are talking about how we can best prep the bikes to leave them, Tamara disappears inside.  She came back less than 10 minutes later with another idea: ride your bikes around the back of the property.  The guard will open the gate and I’ll meet you there.  Ok.  We had no idea why we were doing that but we did as we were told (I suspect that Tamara has that effect on most people) and much to our delight, we were led well into the back workshop area of the resort and a spot was cleared for us under a carport in the yard, behind two locked gates.  Completely awesome.

Dean: We take a hour to re-organize our loads, disconnect both battery terminals, lock the saddlebags.  With this change in plans, we have the opportunity to dump stuff that we did not need.  I take home: a Gore-Tex Biv Sack, pair of water shoes, extra heavy duty cable lock, X-large microfiber towel, sheet liner.  All our riding gear goes into huge garbage bags and stored in the hotel’s bell hop storage.

We depart the hotel at 5AM (airport is across the street) and are home in SoCal Saturday evening.  I’ll be dark for a while.  Thanks to Lisa for getting me home ASAP!

Lisa: I took home a lot of stuff too - a pair of hiking tennis shoes that are too bulky to bother with, my travel sheet and towel, assorted odds and ends that have become too annoying to pack and repack every day without using but I am also looking forward to bringing a certain 2 items back when we return.  I haven’t mentioned this before but it’s pretty funny: I had no pants with me on this trip.  Not kidding.  Somehow the little mesh travel packing cube with my two pair of REI convertible pants never got in my Ortlieb bag.  So the only thing I’ve had to wear other than t-shirts are my LD Comfort tights.  Let me start by saying I LOVE my LD Comfort tights.  I do.  They’re awesome.  Under riding gear.  But not being able to get into something a little less, well … tight … has been more than a little annoying, especially since 1) they are quite form fitting and Latin American women do not dress like that and 2) the temps were rising daily and I really needed shorts or looser pants.  I can’t believe I did that and Alan was so nice to offer to mail my pants ahead but he didn’t know I was coming home at Christmas.  I had just told him a ‘friend of Dean’s was coming down after Christmas’ and would bring them to me.  That was TRUE, I just neglected to say that *I* was that friend.

I’ve delayed posting this because I wanted to surprise my husband  Alan and he is in Kansas City until Tuesday night.  (I told him our SPOT batteries were dead….sorry honey, KIDDING!)  But too many of you have been concerned that we were having trouble since SPOT wasn’t moving and we haven’t posted anything so I’ll just let the cat out of the bag this way: Honey, I’m HOME!

So thanks to you all for following along the last two weeks and we hope you enjoyed sharing our adventure.  It’s been very fun for us to read your comments and feel your support.  Dean is in Central California and got to his Dad’s side by 8am Sunday morning.  YAY!  Our current plan is to return to Nicaragua January 15 and continue on toward Ushuaia.  If you are subscribed here, you’ll get a note from us to let you know for sure.  We hope you all have a wonderful holiday and please do keep the Tanji family in your thoughts and prayers!