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Another day another country. We knew this was going to be a tough section, no one comes to central America for the cities. To get anything out of San Salvador you need to speak the language and be used to being stared at. San Salvador is simply a stepping stone to cheaper rural destinations that are less hard work.
It is an 'expected' five hour journey to the next stepping stone Guatemala city. As I sit in one of many border snarlups I am wondering if this is normal and part of the five hour journey. I would say it was organized kaos but it does not seem to be organized. There is a long queue of trucks (probally 10-20 miles) bumper to bumper on a single carriageway. Cars and other lorries including our coach keep using the wrong side of the road to overtake without a gap to move into. Instead they will keep driving until they come face to face with the traffic coming the other way. Both sets of opposing traffic would then simply stop and look at each other. The blog picture shows an offending Chicken bus (ex USA school bus) that was ramed to the rafters. All the occupants eventually got out and walked despite being at least five miles to the border.
Eventually the police will come along and unravel the mess thus allowing the process to start again. Wierdly the police don't seem to be bothered about the overtaking cars causing the snarls, their job appears to be just to unravel the mess when it happens.
Many more snarl ups later I sensed that we were close to the border going by the increase in the number of heavily armed army personnel standing around. Love to get a picture but that is a very unwise thing to do in these parts.
It was the border, first we had some one on board checking the passports then we had to go out into the night and try and find the imigration office (even the locals were struggling). Anyway we got the important stamp without any questions. It did raise a couple of questions in my mind. In a country where they have masses of people doing the job of a single person, they only have two people stamping passports. El Salvador is not that big I wonder if the queues for the three borders ever meet?
So it has taken 4 hours to do the 40 miles to the border and the traffic is snarled up on the other side also (probally because they are also overtaking without a gap).
The worry I have is that the police may have gone home so there is no one to sort out the mess.
Three hours later in the same spot I think that this may well be the case. The bus crew explained something in Spanish (just caught bus) before turning off all the lights, and everyone is bedding in for a long haul. The worse thing that could happen now is if the bus goes and drops us off in the middle of the night in a dodgy city.
Strangely that is what happened, at about 2am the bus started moving and we were decending down mountain roads. The cause of the delay then became evident - landslides. The weather here has been poor to say the least.
We got to Guatemala city about 4am, with a noticable absence of guns. As it was a posh bus we were on, it dropped us off at the holiday inn, but the prices even with a massive reduction here were way more than what we could afford.
We could not face catching the local bus at 5am, so we got the safer but more expensive taxi ride to Antigua.
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