(29) Antigua Guatemala to Granada Nicaragua
We’ve mostly been on the road for the last week just covering some distance. After two restful days in Antigua and several trips to the Antigua Brewing Company 😀 it was time to hit the road and make some progress south. However, never being ones to take the direct route we headed north up to Lake Atitlan first.
We never really got great weather in Antigua so didn’t get a lot of great pictures of the volcanos around the city. It did clear up one evening enough that we could see steam rising from the Fuego Volcano just outside of town though. There are some pictures of them in the gallery section. As usual when we spend a couple days somewhere it was laundry time and just some wandering around the city. Back in 2009 I had come down to Antigua and rented a motorcycle for 5 days and done some guided rides around town. The company I used then still has a web site and I was hoping to stop in and get some advice on where we could go to do a couple short day rides. Unfortunately, when we went to check them out the place was all locked up. We checked with a guy in the business next door and he said that CA Tours (the tour and bike rental company) had been closed for around a year. Looks like they did not survive the COVID business downturn. I was looking forward to chatting with them, but no such luck.
No visit to Guatemala would be complete without a stop at Lake Atitlan. So we decided to head up there for a night before turning south and getting through El Salvador and Honduras. The original plan was to stay in one of the major towns along the lake called Panajachel. Once I started looking there I couldn’t find a hotel I liked that also said they had secure parking for the motorcycles. In the end I chose a hotel in a little town about 5 miles along the lake from “Pana” called San Antonio Palopo. We had a nice room with a view over the lake in a hotel that had just been bought a few months earlier by an American couple from Baltimore. They said they had been in the country for about 9 months total and were still in the middle of renovating the hotel. They decided that a small town in Guatemala would be a better place to raise their kids (3 boys and 2 girls) than Baltimore. They were really nice people and made us feel very welcome.
The next morning we set off continuing along the lake a bit before taking a very steep dirt road back up to the top of the mountains that surround the lake. The folks at the hotel said the road wasn’t in the best shape but that the steepest parts were paved and that we shouldn’t have any issues climbing out. In the end it was no problem and it provided a few spots to get some great pictures of the lake on our way out. Once back up at the top, it was straight on to the El Salvador border. It was a pretty easy border crossing. About 2 hours in total. Two hours after we actually got to the border that is.
Somewhere between 2 and 3 miles before the boarder we hit a line of parked semi trucks stretching as far as the eye could see. We pulled up behind the last truck and waited for a bit until we saw another local guy on a bike just go by in the oncoming traffic lane and decided if he does it so can we. So off we went. After looking at several of the trucks where the drivers had strung up a hammock under the trailer they were towing we figured out that the line wasn’t going to be moving and that wee made the right decision to just ride up to the front of the line. Even if we had to either pull off as far as we could into the left (our left) shoulder of the road or dive back in between parked trucks whenever a semi was coming at us in the other direction. Best guess is that those trucks at the end of the line would be there for a couple days before they got to the border, inspected and cleared to proceed.
Once we got to the border we just zipped in front of the trucks and did all our usual border stuff. Immigration first and then on to customs to have our import permits canceled. Guatemala, El Salvador Honduras and Nicaragua are all part of a group called the C4. They have some reciprocal agreements about borders. One of those appears to be that once you enter you do not get stamped in and out of the other C4 countries. So no El Salvador visa stamp in our passports. The American family running the hotel in Guatemala said they were still in the country on tourist visas and were required to leave the country every 90 days to reset the tourist visa timer. Since the C4 countries don’t stamp passports when entering from another C4 country that means they have to go at least into Mexico once every 3 months to renew their tourist visa until the residency application is approved.
The whole border crossing process only took about 2 hours and we continued into El Salvador to the town of Los Cabanos where we stayed at a nice beach front resort complex for a night. It was our first glimpse of the Pacific Ocean since Mazatlán in Mexico. And only about a week since we were on the Caribbean coast in Belize. We need to make up some time after having several down days in Belize. So our plan was just to move through both El Salvador and Honduras as quickly as possible. So after Los Cabanos we headed to a bit short of the Honduras border for the next night in Santa Rosa de Lima. We had heard that the Nicaragua side of the border can take a long time so we didn’t want to try to do two border crossings in the same day. As it turned out that was a good plan.
There was a much shorter line of trucks piled up at the El Salvador border, but after the prior crossing we knew just to ride up to the front. Just the normal stuff on the Honduras side. Clear immigration and have our TIP canceled and then it’s off to the Nicaraguan side. First stop was being waved over to the side at a shack in the middle of the road. With no place to really stop they had us jump the curb and stop the bikes on the sidewalk. We still aren’t sure precisely what we accomplished at this stop but we had our passports looked at and got a customs form. From here it was off to the fumigation stop. Just like coming into Guatemala we rode through a “tent” but there appeared to be no one manning it this time so we just slowly rode through it and never did get dowsed with anything this time.
First stop as always was immigration on the Nicaragua side. It was very hot so it was nice to get to spend some time in an air conditioned building. Nicaragua requires that you fill out an immigration form prior to arrival. They say you have to do it on line which I tried to do, but after multiple tries where either the form quit responding or fields were required that didn’t have anything to do with us and it failing I gave up. I contacted Serge the Canadian guy we’ve traveled with and he sent me a copy of a paper form he found somewhere. So we sat in our hostel and filled them out and emailed them in. Unfortunately when we got to the border I realized I had mistyped the email address on mine any they never got it. Thankfully a quick resend and they found it and all was Ok. Our only problem at immigration was getting pulled into an argument between an American family and the immigration folks. The family was trying to bring a cat into Nicaragua. They immigration folks said they didn’t have the right paperwork and the family swears they gave to to them already. Immigration found out that Neil spoke Spanish and tried to make him interpret for the disagreement. It took us a while to find a way to just move on from that.
So on to customs it was. And here things ground to a glacial pace. Lines all over the place, no real signage saying where one should be. So it was pick a line and hope you got the right one. Of course we didn’t. Even though the room was air conditioned with all the people in it there was no way the A/C could keep up so we were quickly drenched in sweat as we finally found the right line and got stage one of customs done. Then it was down to the other end of the building to get the bikes inspected and finalize the paperwork for our TIP.
More waiting in line again. After being in the first line (where we assumed we should be) some other people in line told us they couldn’t process us until we had paid for and received our fumigation receipt. So I stayed in the first line while Neil went over and paid for our fumigation certificate (for a fumigation we never actually received) and hopped back in line with me. Once we get up to the front of the line we are told they can’t process the TIP until someone goes out and inspects they bikes and the contents of our luggage. Having a sign about that somewhere would have been nice, but there’s nothing to be done but to find someone and get the inspection done. Surprisingly, that was pretty easy and straight forward. It seems like the only thing they were looking for was to see if we were bringing a drone into the country.
So back in line we go only to get up to the front and find out that the lady who did the inspection hadn’t signed our TIP forms and we were going to have to do it again. This time however the inspection folks allowed us to pull the bags off the bike and send them through an XRay scanner like at the airport and we got a signature. We weren’t done with the comedy of errors though. They had opened a second line up at some point and Neil and I were each in a different line. Both of us almost done with our paperwork when the power went out and all our info that had been input to the computer was lost and the folks had to start reinputting it once the power came back on, which was thankfully a pretty short period of time. Unfortunately that happened twice more before they were finally able to finish the work and hand us our TIPs. As they handed Neil his TIP the clerk told him to make sure and keep track of it or it would be $500 for a lost TIP when we left the country. We knew that already from a message I received from Serge saying he had lost his TIP and the border crossing for him to leave Nicaragua cost him $475 and took 12 hours! We are keeping a very close eye on that piece of paper.
Finally back on the bikes and starting to pull out we get waved down at the border exit checkpoint and find out we need to purchase insurance before we are done. Oddly enough that’s done by a couple of ladies right on the side of the road and only took a few minutes. Finally we’re on our way, about three and a half hours after we arrived at the Honduras side of the border. Thank God we hadn’t tried to do do both the Guatemala/El Salvador and El Salvador/Nicaragua borders in one day. It would have been dark for sure.
After the border it was a short ride into the town of Leon for the night. Yesterday we rode from Leon to Granada where we are now. We will be here 3 nights, then move on to the island of Ometepe in Lake Nicaragua followed by four nights on the Pacific coast in Rancho Santana. I’ll probably update again once we get into Costa Rica.
