9 Hours, 7 Busses, 3 Countries, and 2 Borders

Today we went on an epic bus journey. To make a long story short, we wanted to get all the way to the ruins of Copan in Honduras. The only problem being that from El Salvador that takes at least a thousand hours, and I hate spending precious time on busses when I could be writing longer blog entries instead. So we decided to take a short-cut through Guatemala. It was hard to tell if this was a good route (or even a route at all), because our room only had one light that was too dim to read by (better than the bathroom, which had no light).

So we got on a bus at 7am (which took two busses that I'm not even counting to get to) in Santa Ana, and rode it an hour and a half north to Metapan. There we waited, looking for our next bus, until we were told that it was the same one we had just arrived on. So another thirty minutes later we were at the Guatemalan border (Anguiatu), and after thirty more we had survived immigrations. With no bus to our next destination in sight, we got invited on a "private" bus, which I am guessing was a pack of travelling elderly female comedians, because they all kept laughing at us. We squeezed on, backpacks on laps, and in an hour and a half arrived at Esquipulas, home of the most famous Catholic shrine in all of Central America! The next bus took about an hour before arriving in Chiquimula. From there a friendly local took us to a bus (for a tip) that was supposed to bring us to El Florido. Instead it left us in a town not even on my map, and we had to pay for another bus to finish the journey there. Another couple hours and a border later, we arrived at our last bus. It was a short journey but we got stuck behind a slow truck on a steep mountain down-grade until it decided to pass on a blind curve. At last we arrived in Copan Ruinas. This is a neat little cobble-stoned street tourist town. I'm just glad to finally be here.