This is the story of two countries that seem to go completely opposite directions . El Salvador has been plagued by gang violence for nearly 20 years but has recently changed things around and is now surfing on a wave of positivism. Nicaragua on the other hand was the rising star of Central American tourism in the first decade of this century but has slowly been transformed into the Ortega dictatorship that it is today. The 2018 uprisings and violent repression have decimated tourism and there is not really a sign of improvement at the horizon…
Entry in to El Salvador was very easy and would later prove to be the best border crossing in all of Central America. Form the border we drove straight on to the Ruta de las Flores with a first stop in Ataco. The town is full of very nice murals and coffee shops. Not that many flowers around though as we are a couple of months too early for that. Our first night we spent in the parking lot of a farm/restaurant surrounded by volcanoes.
And one of these volcanoes is our next destination. The Santa Anna volcano is still very active. But it is not as spectacular as its erupting counterparts in Guatemala. We sleep at the trailhead and hike up early in the morning. No lava in the crater this time but a green lake and plenty of vents blowing steam and gasses in the air. Due to these gasses, our time at the top is limited and we are not allowed to venture out very far. As we head down the mountain, we cross huge groups of hikers walking up. It seems that despite its violent reputation, some parts of El Salvador are now well established on the tourist trail.
From the volcano we drive down to the Pacific coast, still blissfully ignorant of a condition that will stay with us for the next two months. When we get out of the van at our campsite by the beach, we the humidity and heat (39 degrees) slaps us in the face. However, there is a nice breeze so it is not all that bad. It is only a couple of hours later, as the sun sets that we find out that nights along the coast will not be as comfortable as expected. The winds that were cooling us down earlier, completely disappear and the air becomes incredibly hot and heavy. The temperatures stay around 30 degrees all night. Our van turns into an oven in which it is hard to even breathe and outside the mosquitos are attacking us from everywhere. The first night we still thought that it was just ‘a very hot night’. But talking to the owners of the campground we quickly realize that there was nothing exceptional about the past night.
We are next to the ocean but with water temperatures of 29 degrees, it is hardly refreshing either. However we are in ‘surf central’ and so we put our surfboard to the test again. The waves are very powerful however so surfing for us beginners, is rather frustrating. The currents are also too dangerous for the kids to play in the sea, so after a couple of days we move to another beach. Playa las Flores has more forgiving waves for surfing and is safer for the kids. We camp again on the parking lot of a beach side restaurant.
People keep telling us how, just 3 years ago this would not have been possible for security reasons. All though tourists were mostly left alone, the whole nation was terrorized by two big gangs for almost 20 years. When the USA did a massive deportation of gang members in the early 2000’s, they started their mafia business very quickly again in their homeland. The stories we hear from people are absolutely horrifying. Nobody was safe. Murder, extortion and torture were everywhere. Each night after sunset the streets all over the country would empty as everybody locked themselves in their houses. As they went to sleep, they prayed that they would not get a nightly visit that would destroy their lives and families.
This all changed when the young president (he calls himself a ‘cool dictator’), declared an ‘all out war’ on the gangs in 2021. Over 70,000 (!) suspected gang members were arrested and locked up during a ‘state of emergency’ that is still going on until this over two years later. As a result in one year time the murder rate declined by 70 (!) pct. A collective sigh of relief passed through the whole country. The country is now surfing a wave of optimism and business are getting started everywhere. There is a dark side to all of this however. Inevitably given the mass arrests, a number of innocent persons has also been locked up without trial. And conditions in the overcrowded prisons are rather inhumane. However after the horror that they have witnessed, it is hard to blame the public that they show very little empathy for the locked up ‘bad people’.
We can’t deny that the positive vibes are infectious and we really hope that there will come a long time solution for the problem.
After a couple of days (and hot nights) at the beach, we decide to move to higher (cooler) ground and we go camping on a volcano with some very spectacular views. As we drive up the mountain we feel the temperatures drop and our bodies relax. The sunset was nice but the main event is the sunrise. We get up at 5 am and see the sun rise above the pacific with in the distance our next two countries: Honduras and Nicaragua.
As most of the nice places in the country are on the other side of the country and the security situation is not ideal, we decide to not spend time in Honduras this time. We do have to transit through it, so we have a very ambitious plan to cross two borders in one day and go from El Salvador straight to Nicaragua. Very ambitious because Central America borders are by definition time bureaucratic and timer consuming. Moreover, the Nicaraguan border has maybe the worst reputation of the whole Panamerican highway.
Exiting El Salvador went smooth, entry in Honduras was a bit harder but after 2 hours (including an IT failure) we drive into the country and start our drive to the next border trying to avoid the corrupt police that know that we are trying to get out of the country quick and so are easy victims for their ‘bribe game’. We also still need to stop by a DHL office to ship our drone to Costa Rica as they are illegal in Nicaragua. We reach the border in late afternoon and are able to exit Honduras quite easily but then we hit a big traffic jam of trucks that are completely blocking the bridge to Nicaragua. We don’t feel like sleeping in ‘no man’s land’ so we ask a Hondurian border officer for advice. He directs us on the small pedestrian pavement. Now even Caro gets slightly nervous. So we manage to cross the bridge on the pavement but at the other side we are blocked again when the pavement ends. We will need to continue on the pavement of the other lane. Luckily some truckers are cooperative and we maneuver through and drive against traffic to the actual border.
As we see the sun slowly going down, we gather a whole book of copies of copies of every possible document we have, we put a smile on our tired faces and pray that our kids (that have been locked in their seat in a hot van all day) will behave…
In the end it seems we get pretty lucky. People are not really friendly or cooperative and everything takes time and money (there are taxes for everything) . But there is none of the ‘abuse of power’ or ‘authoritarian behaviour’ that we were expecting. We get our immigration stamps and can start importing the camper. This is the toughest part as usually the campervans are sent to a scanner and it sometimes takes hours before the results are analyzed. For some reason we get an exemption for the scanner and just have a 10 minute search of the van. Is it the late time of the day? Or is it due to a funny situation, where Caro misunderstands the question “Do you carry any arms?” with “Do you carry cameras? (In Spanish armas & cameras) and with a smile mistakenly declares we carry two arms -“a big one and a smaller one”. After a first awkward moment, one of the officers realizes the misunderstanding and finds it very funny.
Whatever it may have been, we get all our documents and are waved through without a scan. With the sun now setting and after just one more completely useless document check, we drive into Nicaragua. Two Central American borders in just 4 hours that must be close to a world record.