200 Miles to Santiago Nonualco
Day 26 Pines 2 Patagonia log
Red’s daughter Addison’s 18th Birthday 🎂 Happy Birthday Addy, you are one awesome young adult 😁 Love ya Budro
Now back to P2P stuff.
Antigue, Guatemala
To
Santiago Nonualco, El Salvador
It was hard to leave Antigue for many reasons, the history, the culture and the darn Tequila that Greg at Brooklyn Pizza Co. in Antigua kept dumping down our throats the night before. However, we rose early and headed down the road like normal.
It was a 200 mile day which in the states is no big deal… but down here it took over 6 hours to complete. It was quite warm and traffic was bad in the larger cities. Now the Moms reading this are not going to like it, but it is Standard Operating Procedure down here to pass anyway you can, wherever you can.
Most of Central American that we have traveled in the last 20-ish days have speed bumps called “Topes” to reduce speed. These make a great spot for a bike to pass cars and semi trucks. It’s a fun part of each day 😁 Even with our constant Shuck’n and Jive’n the leg still took 6 hours of riding and several more hours were spent at the border.
The border crossing into El Salvador was uneventful except we fell for a common “copy scam” where the locals who own copy machines next to the immigration offices post inline and have people telling you that you need (4) copies of every paper from Guatemala to give to El Salvador customs. This cost us each about $16 and a solid hour of our day. The first scammer who was 8 or 9 years old running a store the size of a Dari-Mart back home by himself, broke his machine so we had to finish the job next door… other than that, we had decent flow even though it was nearly 100 degrees and the loading docs and offices were visited were not climate controlled.
I’m sure El Salvador has beautiful areas that will blow your mind, but we didn’t see them on the roads we were on. Very sparse vegetation and trash, lots of trash. There were a few nice views but nothing that made you want to pull over and take a picture.
We booked an really Rad loft style Air B&B in a cool little town called Santiago Nonualco, El Salvador. It may qualify as a village, I’m not sure, but we did find some decent food and friendly people who welcomed the 3 White Martians into their town for the night.
After dinner we did notice Red’s bike had been Shived… it was a 3 inch long chunk of metal in the tread of the rear tire. After a quick inspection, we pulled it out and had a few good laughs. It didn’t go into the tire or tube, just the tread so we kept it for a souvenir and called it a night.
