Driving through Central America and Border Crossings

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Crossing ALL borders between countries is a chaotic, long, drawn out process. If you're bringing a car into the country, like we did, it gets even more complicated, as it adds paperwork and means waiting in more lines to get the paperwork approved.

There are children of all ages that spend their days hanging out at the borders. Most of them barefoot and in ragged cloths. They rush up to cars and hang onto the door handles as they run along the side. The older ones, jump onto the bumpers or any other protruding part of the vehicle they can cling to. It's dangerous but they don't seem to care. They just hang on and look into the car with pleading eyes and try to yell louder than the others, "I can help you", "Pick me, I'm the best", "No, I'M the best", "My brother can help you, he's an official"! These are just the kids. Behind them come a group of men, from teenage to middle age. They eventually shoo away the children unless you've already decided on one of the kids. If you have, you must be firm, and stand your ground. If not you must have a good eye and ask a few questions before you decide on a helper, but not too many or you can get overwhelmed.

The first time we crossed a border, I couldn't decide. I didn't know if we really needed anyone's help. I thought, "we could do it ourselves". I had to tell these men several times to leave us alone. Fortunately, I speak the language, Spanish. I can't imagine crossing the borders without speaking the language. Especially in the beginning when we didn't know what to expect. I told the men I knew what I was doing and didn't need their help. Of course I really didn't, but I stood firm, and they finally backed off. I noticed that a couple of the boys just backed away but still kept an eye on us. We waited in long lines and were sent from one small run-down building to another. Sometimes the office was just a tiny room in a small tin hut, and other times we were sent to offices in the nearby town to make copies of our car title and our passports. We were all over the place, and it was all very disorganized. I had many questions, and although we tried to look like we knew what we were doing, I'm sure we looked confused. A couple of the boys who had been watching us from a distance came up and offered to help.
"Just give me your passport, I'll run and make copies". No way! One thing I had decided early on was that I wasn't giving my passport to anyone. I told him to show us the way and we followed along to a tiny office with a copier. It was very inexpensive to make copies, so I had a handful of copies made of our passports, our vehicle title, (without a title, you can't drive the car in most countries), and my driver's license (which no one ever asked to see). It saves a lot of time if you already have copies of all of these things.

Having a helper turned out to make the process a lot easier. The young boys told us that there are "official assistants" at every border but it takes years to get that title. There are only so many of these positions allowed per border, and someone has to quit or die before another one is appointed. Hanging out and working at the border for many years can earn you a spot if you are eventually noticed by one of the officers. But even then, you must take a test to show you can read and write and help fill out paperwork. Most of the helpers are not "official" but are allowed to hang out and try their luck as long as they don't cause any trouble. Some of the kids just try to get work for the men, or the "official assistants", and get a little "commission" for rounding up the work.

The "luckiest" of these "helpers" were the ones that could speak English (or any other language) and were picked as translators for tourists who didn't speak Spanish. I overheard many conversations where the tourist was having big problems and was trying to make himself understood. I tried to help some of these people and was grateful that I spoke Spanish.

Bringing your own vehicle into a country requires that you get car insurance from that country, even if you're only driving through and will be there for just a matter of hours. There are a few insurance agents that hang out at the borders and some of them even have a small desk in a corner. You fill out a form and pay a fee depending on how long you will be in the country. In some of the countries there's a two week minimum, in others, you have to get insurance for at least a month. The cost is anywhere from $12 dollars to $30 dollars. Crossing the borders (with our car) from one country into another and clearing both sides took us anywhere from 2 hours up to 6 hours depending on the border staff. There were times we had to wait for people to come back from their long midday meal when there was no one to cover for them. Sometimes the electricity went out and we'd have to wait for it to come back on.

Finally, we crossed the border into Guatemala, our first Central American country, and we felt we were making progress. Guatemala is a lush, dark green country. There is almost an instant change when you cross over the border. The vegetation is thick, and wild, and beautiful. We started our crossing early in the morning and drove all day long. The countryside appears ancient. There's no other way for me to describe it. It is scattered with "mounds" or hills, that are all being farmed using the ancient technique of "terrace farming". Some of the mounds are small and some are huge and it is hard to tell, because of their strange locations, (some out in the middle of completely flat fields), whether they are man made, or natural geological formations. The terraces are everywhere, scratched into the steep mountainsides. Every hillside available is terraced for rice or bananas.

As the sun began to go down we realized that we had come a little too close to the border to find a good place to stay. You don't want to look for hotels in the border towns. Most of these towns are dirty and dingy and don't offer much in the way of decent lodging. I turned the car around and drove a few miles back to where we had seen a little group standing on the side of the road. The group turned out to be three men in uniforms all holding rifles. I pulled over to speak to them and we smiled and tried to look lost and friendly. They didn't smile back. They asked us what we were looking for. I got a better look at them, as I explained that we needed to find a nice hotel to spend the night, and were planning to cross the border in the morning. The uniforms they wore were impeccable. A dark green khaki color with neat skin-hugging pants tucked into shinny black knee-high boots. The jackets were tailored and had shinny buttons. These guys could have been triplets. All tall and slender with black hair and thin black mustaches and not one of them cracked a smile. They looked at each other for a second, and the only one who had spoken to us, said that we should not continue to the border or we would end up there at night, and that would be dangerous. He said that we should go back about five miles where we would find a hotel we could drive our car into and where there would be "guards". He told us not to leave the hotel compound. We thanked them and tried another nice smile but still got nothing in return. They turned around, even before we drove off, and continued talking amoungst themselves and smoking cigarettes. We had been dismissed.

True to their word, there stood an old building, a few miles back the way we'd come. It was surrounded by a stone wall, run down, and covered with overgrown flowers and vines, which must have once been beautiful gardens. The place was huge. We wandered around a little before checking in and stumbled across a mostly empty, ancient, Olympic-sized swimming pool, with a restaurant-bar on the side. This had once been a really nice hotel. We checked into our room and came back to the restaurant to grab a bite to eat. We were the only ones there and the cook herself came out to take our order and seemed really happy to have someone to cook for. Two guys came by, both carrying rifles, and I guessed these were the "guards" we had been told to expect. The rifles made me a little uneasy, so I was glad we already knew there would be guards. These guys looked a little rough and scary but they sat down a few tables away from us and had their dinner too, and although they were curious and kept glancing over at us, they smiled, and seemed friendly enough.

Back in our room, the really scary battle began! At first, everything seemed alright. The room wasn't particularly clean but it was large and spacious. The lighting was very dim. We got ready for bed and that's when I noticed that there seemed to be more and more bugs flying around. Not just mosquitoes, but all kinds of bugs, all different sizes. I went out to the car to get a flashlight and some bug spray, and remembered that we had run out of bug spray and still hadn't gotten a chance to pick some up. I turned the flashlight on and pointed it toward the ceiling. The room had a very high ceiling, twelve feet high or more, and I guess that's why I hadn't noticed that almost every inch of the ceiling was covered with bugs. All kinds of bugs. Huge mosquitoes, small flying insects that I'd never seen before and other scary looking bugs. I almost dropped the flashlight. I didn't want to panic my daughter, but it was too late, she'd already seen them. I gave her the bad news about the bug spray and grabbed a towel that I tried to use as a net to catch as many of the flying bugs as possible and put them outside. Meanwhile, my daughter was really tired and she was trying to be creative in finding a way to keep the bugs away from her. They were starting to drop down onto our beds. She got cotton balls and soaked them in fingernail polish remover. It smelled awful, but it was the only thing we had. She laid on the bed and covered herself with the clean sheets we always carry to replace the sketchy hotel bedding, and then placed cotton balls every few inches surrounding herself. I know this sounds crazy, but the craziest thing is that it was working. I sat next to her while she was falling asleep to make sure she wasn't being eaten up by the mosquitoes and none of the bugs were coming close to her. She opened her eyes for a moment and mumbled, "be one with the bugs mom, I'm too tired to worry about them anymore, go to sleep." Now, I started to worry that the smell could be doing more damage than the bugs. Was she slurring her words or was she just sleepy? I couldn't open any windows because there were no screens and the light would just attract more bugs. I started taking some of the cotton balls away until the smell wasn't so overwhelming. I laid next to my daughter and covered up with a clean sheet. I wasn't going to sleep in my own bug-covered bed. Needless to say, I didn't get much sleep that night. Every once in a while I'd get up and herd a small swarm of bugs out of the room using the towel. At about 5 a.m., I finally quit the battle altogether and gave up on trying to get any more sleep. I woke my daughter up and we packed our things and headed out, weary and tired, for an early morning border crossing into El Salvador.



The Journey / Travel With Me

A. Zudro a.k.a. Gloria

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