We got up this morning and again ate at the hotel's restaurant. The staff are such hard workers and prepare great food. Generally food seems inexpensive to us as we've never spent more than $3.00 for a meal and drink. One girl was most helpful as she spoke a lot of English. In fact, she's in Jay's Facebook photos.
From breakfast we walked over to the King Quality bus station. The terminal is only a few blocks away. We asked for tickets for tomorrow morning at ... ummm .. for the 5:30 am departure to Honduras. The agent spoke no English but printed tickets which showed a 2:30 departure this afternoon. They showed us getting into Tegucigalpa at 8:30. That is not a good time to arrive in an unknown city as the sun sets about 6:00 pm nowadays. It was then we discovered the El Salvador-based company will not be open tomorrow or Friday. We really can't afford that much time in this country although we do like it a lot. So, we accepted the tickets.
Then we went downtown for the last time. How busy it always seems!
We went back to the room, packed up, ate a lunch, and went back to the station 45 minutes ahead as stipulated. We really didn't need to. There was some sort of problem with the bus scheduled to take us. We waited and 2:30 came and went. Then 3:00. Eventually, our bus pulled up at 3:45. We had several hours of view when leaving. El Salvador is a bit more tropical than parts of Guatemala.
Then on, and on. Finally the border at about 7:45. We didn't have to get out of the bus at all. First, the El Salvador immigration agent came on the bus and checked the printed list including our passports we'd proviced when we bought the tickets. Then the bus steward took our passports and returned them with the Honduras visas. They cost $3 each.
The remainder of the trip was cold as the a/c on the bus was full blast. At 10:45 the bus pulled into a dark lot for that bus company. Unfortunately in Central America there do not seem to be big, general bus terminals. Instead, each bus company has it's own depot and ticketing agent. It's a bit inconvenient as these may not be near the town center. For example we paid $10 for a taxi last night. He dropped us at the Hotel Granada. It was okay although a bit more expensive than we've been paying of late. I'm really tired. If I think of anything else, I'll mention it tomorrow.
