border purgatory

OK, so I guess we gloated too much about how easy it was to cross from Mexico into Guatemala. Our hubris has been duly punished. Very long story. Here goes ...

Very little information out there about crossing from Guatemala into Honduras. Things are changing fast in both countries, so information doesn´t stay current long. And I guess there just aren´t that many North Americans driving their cars through that border. So we just went.

We chose the easternmost border crossing to put us closest to our destination, the Caribbean beaches of Honduras. Generally, you go through an exit procedure in one country first, then drive a bit of no-man´s land, then do an entry procedure in the next. But when we drove out of Guatemala, all we saw were big empty buildings. Someone had told us there was a new agreement with simplified border crossing among Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador. So we figured, hey, this is going to be easy.

The first Honduran town is Corinto. The border is secured by two orange plastic cones, a guy and a tiny gate that he lifts by pulling a rope. So we come on in, and park. There are two wood shacks, each with one guy and a desk in them. On each side of the shacks are some shacks that serve food and beers. We go to the first shack where we pay $3 and get a little receipt for $3. No stamp in the passport even. Simple! He sends us to the other shack for vehicle permit.

At the other shack we are in line behind another North American who is apparently moving to Honduras and importing his car. He finishes his business and heads over to one of the other shacks to have a beer. Looked simple. When we get to the shack, we find out they do not have the facilities to handle vehicle permits at this shack. We have to go 60km further on to Puerto Cortes, a big port town, where they can handle our vehicle permit. OK. To make sure we don´t flee into the country without getting our vehicle permit, they have to send along a "custodian". OK.

After a little wait, we meet Oscar, our custodian. And William, the other North American. Turns out Oscar will ride with William and we´ll follow. Oscar is going to be custodian to us both. My passport, vehicle title, etc. ride with Oscar and William. At this point we realize we better get to know William a bit. He´s from Tennessee. And yeah, you northerners, he´s just what you´re imagining. He has a cutle little chihuahua with him named "Cocita". We seem to get confirmation from William that he understands how important it is to us that he not lose us.

As we drive, I read up on Puerto Cortes. A "seedy little port town with nothing to see - not a good place to spend the night. You´re better off basing yourself out of Omoa, 17km away, with a great beach." Omoa sounds great. We decide that if it takes a long time to get through things at Puerto Cortes, instead of driving on to our planned destination, we´ll go back 17km to Omoa and get a night of rest.

Oscar takes us, after many turns, to the back side of a big building. He takes our paperwork into an office. When someone has your passport and vehicle title, they might as well have a chain connected to a ring in your nose. You follow. There are tons of people coming and going into and out of a couple different side and back doors. They all carry manila folders filled with people´s paperwork.

Inside is one very big file cabinet, and several desks and chairs that no one can use because they are covered in gigantic stacks of paperwork. Gigantic stacks. It´s like a surreal parody of bureaucracy. A few guys standing around looking like they have nothing to do, a couple women selling coconuts to the people in the office, and one fat woman in tight clothes, high heels, and the kind of hairdo that makes you know she is the queen bee and she likes it that way. Much talking, all so fast and loud, we don´t know what is being said. We go back outside. We go back inside. Outside again.

We are introduced to Esteban who tells us that normally it´s $250 per car, but since there are two cars at once he can make us a deal - $300 for both cars. A deal? We spend some time confirming that he is talking about American dollars. The Mexican permit was about $30 and the Guatemalan permit was about $20. And the Honduran economy is much poorer (cheaper) than the rest, so this just didn´t add up.

We didn´t have that much cash with us. They can wait while I go to the bank. Meanwhile, William explains that the $150 isn´t for the permit. It´s for Esteban, our lawyer. Apparently you need a lawyer to act on your behalf. Yeah. And we had already paid 500 limpira ($30) for Oscar to ride with us. It´s all beginning to sound like a con. And it´s wierd that we keep dealing through the back door. But at this point Esteban and the queen bee have our passports and title. We´re kinda stuck.

Esteban fills out a lot of paperwork and asks a lot of questions about our car. He takes one of our license plates off the car and into the office. We wait. And wait. Occasionally, Esteban walks by from one door to another and politely asks us to wait un momento. We haven´t eaten or seen a bathroom in way too many hours at this point. I head off into town to find a bathroom and a bank.

Generally, bathrooms aren´t hard to find, and people are nice about letting you use them. But every place I go in this town says no when I ask if they have a bathroom. Every bank doesn´t have an ATM. Oh, did I mention that at all the banks in Central America, the doorman who insists on opening the door for you, is carrying a gigantic fucking gun? Anyway, finally I find an ATM, it doesn´t work. A few more banks and I find another ATM. It takes my card, and does nothing, and won´t return my card. Yeah, my only ATM card. Sigh.

I still have to pee. I explain to a teller that my card is stuck in the machine. This is kind of advanced Spanish for me. Luckily a woman there knows a bit of English and helps out. They tell me I have to come back in a couple hours when the guy who works on the machine will be back from lunch. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention we had already waited an hour back at the vehicle permit place because someone had gone to lunch. I sadly leave my ATM card behind and head off, my sole mission to find a place to pee. I went into a restaurant and when I asked about the bathroom she asked if I was ordering lunch. My car, my car title, my passport, my license plate, and my husband are stuck at immigration, I have no local cash, I´m out of cigarettes, and my ATM card are stuck at the bank. No I´m not fucking having lunch. (I didn´t say all this. I just said, "No, may I please use your bathroom?" because that was all my Spanish could handle.) She said no. I said please and almost started crying. If I know the Spanish to tell her I was going to pee on her floor I would have used it. She relented. Phew.

Back to the big building. It´s been several hours now. Esteban needs money. We have none. William offers to pay and we can pay him back later. Very nice of him. By this time, we are pretty tired of him and he´s the last person we want to be obligated to. Ah well. The process continues. Waiting, waiting, waiting. Not in a waiting room. Not even in an office. On a backstreet next to a port, on a narrow sidewalk with people coming and going rapidly and crabbily.

For the 28th time, Esteban says un momento, but this time he says, "Pequeno problema." He passes by a few more times saying this. Finally he comes out and explains, as best as we can make out, that the Administrator, the Jefe (pronounced Hefe, like a hefer cow, it means chief), the guy - the only guy - who can sign off on our paperwork (now a big stack of papers, each with different stamps and signatures on it) isn´t here. And won´t be here until tomorrow morning.

What? Why not? We press for more information. OK, the rest of the story is the Jefe was shot. The new one won´t be here until tomorrow. Shot? By who. Rumors are it was a gang. Maybe he´s dead. It happened in San Pedro Sula where this stuff happens all the time. Everyone around nods and groans when you mention San Pedro Sula. William demands his money back and we demand our paperwork back. Much arguing and wandering in and out of back doors ensues. Eventually, amazingly, we get our papers back. Even our license plate.

Then they explain to us that we need to stay in a hotel in Puerto Cortes ... with our custodian and with William. Yeah. Seriously. They can´t let us leave. Or we´re in trouble with the border policia.

I say we´ve got to go back to the bank to get my card. Another struggle with my Spanish to explain what happened to my card. I don´t have the machine with me now to point at and make my charades clear. Anway, the entire entourage, us, William the annoying guy from Tennessee, Oscar the custodian, and Esteban the lawyer, follow me back to the bank. Luckily I had an entourage. I think this helped make the bank take me seriously and find my card. Yay!

We all go back to the big building and our car. We´re thinking we´ll just drive back to Omoa and spend the night there. We also notice our Spanish phrase book is missing. Nobody has seen it. While we are talking to everyone about our phrase book and they are explaining that we can only take our car if Oscar comes with and we stay in a hotel in seedy Puerto Cortes, William quietly takes off.

There is no such thing as a short conversation or a simple direction in Central America. By this point we are hot, tired, hungry, pissed off, and feeling a little screwed. But no one will let us leave because they all want to tell us what hotel to go stay in. We find one in the Lonely Planet book and take off.

The hotel is $20 - a little expensive by Guatemalan standards, but whatever. Turns out later, the shower doesn´t work. It´s fine. Oscar stays with us until we check in and then he leaves. There is a guy with a gun stationed in some kind of little shack across the street from our hotel. I´m not sure who he is there to protect or shoot. There is a little balcony. We go out there so I can smoke and we check on our car. And watch the guy with the gun across the street, who seems to be watching us. Meanwhile, kids go by on bicycles with guns laid casually across the handle bars. Seriously.

We start to wonder how deep a con we´re in and how we get out. We´re trying to figure out who´s in on it and how we can bypass the con now that we have our title and passports back. And who stole our phrasebook? They told us a hundred times we had to meet them all there at 8:00 in the morning. We wander over to the office in the evening, hoping to verify it really even is the permit office.

There is a front door with windows and everything, and we figure that´s where we go. Fuck all this backdoor stuff. The place is closed but there´s a bunch of men in blue uniforms - with guns of course - having a meeting outside. They yell "Hey!" at us as we get too near the front door. We verify with them that the place opens at 7:30 a.m. and is the vehicle permit office. But when we ask how much a permit costs, they don´t seem to know, and say it depends, you have to ask the agency. (The agency, we found out from the woman at our hotel, is a private operation - the one Esteban, our "lawyer", works for.)

Back to the hotel, because the streets are starting to look not so safe. Alan calls the U.S. Embassy in Honduras. Closed. Open at 8:00 a.m. We go over every possible scenario for how to handle things in the morning, depending on who is waiting for us where. We decide to not meet them at 8:00 or try to beat them at 7:30, but rather to call the embassy at 8:00 and verify how this is really supposed to work. We vow not to hand our paperwork to anyone who is not wearing a uniform and standing behind a window.

I wander out to the balcony a lot to check on the car and look at the guy with a gun. Fairly late at night, after we´ve gotten undressed and climbed into bed, there is a knock at the door. Yeah, OK, I was a little scared. We get dressed, put all valuable things away, and ask what do you want. A nice man tells us we left the light on inside our car. Alan goes down to turn it off, and I spend ten minutes thinking he´s going to be attacked. He comes back up and we turn off the light and don´t sleep.

Next morning the embassy verifies, yeah, that´s exactly how it´s all supposed to work. We go back to the office. Oscar and Esteban are waiting. No new jefe yet. We find another man who works there and speaks excellent English. We get the whole story. This office is very remote by their standards. Other border offices can handle this easily and without lawyers and have people around who can sign things. This border really had only one guy who could sign. And he commuted every Friday back home to the capital with all the cash from the various transactions. Apparently, someone figured that out and followed him, stopped him somehow on the road, shot him and took all the money. We really were all waiting for the new hefe.

But this guy said we could be waiting for days. He suggested we get our paperwork back, go back to Guatemala, and cross at a different border. Easier, cheaper, no problema. We told him we had our paperwork, but he explained there is one form, the one we were sent from the border with, that we´d need to have when we returned to the border, or they couldn´t let us out.

We explain our new plan to Esteban and Oscar. They go try to get our paperwork back. We´re back to dealing with the queen bee. She tells us we´ll have to wait a few minutes, maybe half an hour, maybe an hour.

We go have breakfast with Oscar. He´s a nice guy. He´s wearing a New York shirt and we ask if he´s ever been there. No. Nowhere in the U.S. He went all the way through Guatemala and Mexico, but got turned back at the border. Hmm, like us, we say. Silently, I think not really like us because we´re on vacation, he was probably looking for work. And it´s only hard for us because we´re dragging a car along. Our blue passport gets us almost anywhere. I really can´t be justified in getting too enraged about any of this, really.

At this point, William, the dick from Tennesse, is nowhere around. He had quietly told us he wouldn´t come back and he´d deal with it later. Oscar tells us he´ll probably lose his job for losing William.

We go back to the office where the queen bee explains that we can´t go back until the new hefe signs off on our paperwork. Yeah. Oh yeah, and we can´t go back to the border without Oscar and Oscar can´t go back to the border without William. Alan punches a wall. Over breakfast, for Oscar´s sake, we had called William who had given us his number so we could look him up in La Ceiba, and asked him to come back. He said no way.

We call the embassy, who seems to want to help, but really can´t seem to believe there is only one person who can sign anything. The woman from the embassy talks to Oscar, then us, then verifies we have to stay there. Now we´re wondering how long we are fucking hostages in this shitty port town. We think back on the fact that when we told William we never saw any Guatemala exit office on the way out, he said he sure had to stop, and we wonder how much trouble we´re in for not getting our exit stamp, and if that will make it hard to get back into Guatemala. Are we stuck between Guatemala and Honduras forever? And in this shitty port town where gangs and kids on bicycles carry guns and jefes get shot? It´s like one of those annoying, avant garde, existential short stories from the 60s and 70s and we´re stuck in it.

Alan calmly explains to Oscar we´re sorry about his job, but William´s not coming back and that we are leaving in ten minutes with or without him. He says OK.

And then the new jefe arrives. There are cameras and TV reporters everywhere. And there is a huge armed escort. And there are vanloads of workers. Like an army of secretaries and assistants. Everyone is excited. The new jefe goes into the building. He comes back out, and walks down to the port, apparently for the camera appearance and interview. All the people waiting go from excited to a bit dejected, and a few bad words are muttered under breaths. We wait. Now this is fun to watch. Much activity. Eventually, Esteban tries to bypass the queen bee and go directly into the front door of the big building. Someone explains to him that the new jefe says we can just go.

So Esteban explains to the queen bee that the jefe says we can go. Now lots of people start shouting. It seems the only means of communication between the back of the building and the front of the building are people running back and forth, and failed attempts to call each other with cell phones. No one can verify that the jefe said that. More shouting. On and on. We are about to just leave when finally the queen bee follows us to our car, verifies that the car is the one on the form, asks us if we´re sure we don´t want to just wait and get our permit, and finally gives in and gives us the damn form. She scolds Oscar for a long time, and then tells us that normally things aren´t like this, she hopes we come back to Honduras and don´t think badly of the country. Yeah.

Oscar gets in, and takes us on the beach route back to Corinto because over breakfast we told him all we wanted was a beach. We ask him what kind of music he likes, and he says country, so we put on the Dixie Chicks. He finds our phrase book in the back seat. We all feel a little lighter to be moving.

Back at the border, the important guy is eating lunch. We wait. He finishes. There is much explanation, but very little yelling. It looks like maybe Oscar isn´t in too much trouble (hard to be sure) and they let us go. The Guatemalan entry is no problem once we tell them the whole story. We´re very pleased we now know enough Spanish to tell the whole story.

As we head back into Guatemala, we reflect on the fact that we like Guatemala so much, so very very much. And that everything was as each person had told us it was - even our phrasebook wasn´t stolen, just misplaced behind the seat. It feels better to realize you´ve been at the mercy of a horrible bureaucracy rather than a malicious con ... especially once you´re back out. And we had stayed calm, and found reasons to laugh all the way through it. And it was kind of interesting. Not so bad ... especially now that we were back out of it.

Driving toward the bigger border, we stopped somewhat randomly in a town called Chiquimula. We picked it because it has a hotel with a swimming pool. We´re staying two nights here until we have slept enough and laughed enough to be able to face another border.