Dawn broke long after we hit the
road. We followed the highway south, and then exited toward El Florido,
a sleepy border town reachable via a dirt road. Or so we thought. It turns
out Guatemala is in the process of paving the way through, perhaps turning
it into a more major point of entry. The only problem is, all but about
the last 3 miles is paved. and oh, are those last 3 miles a bear!! They
took us right around an hour to traverse.
  The
crossing took us just over an hour, after winding from office to office.
It was the archetypical Central American stereotypical sleepy border post
- guards lounging about with machine guns propped on desks, dogs all over,
money changers, muddy dirt roads on either side, and mildowing ledgers
full of information from the early 80's. Everything is done by hand, and
manual typewriters are used to fill out 'official' papers.Honduras has
instituted a $20 fee on vehicles brought into the country with non-Central
American license plates, so we got charged that along with the typical
entry garbage for a total fee of about $33.
Once we got done with the crossing
formalities (ha -the visa for the truck was 3x as long as my visa!!), we
headed through Copan Ruinas and scooted towards San Pedro Sula. We actually
only got turned around once, and that was actually in the city, and by
early afternoon we'd made it to the school!! We did a little more of the
waiting around thing (Wayne was making great headway into his book) while
admin got up to speed with us - we hadn't been expected for another 3 days.
Once the truck was unloaded, we were shown to a house that we could stay
at. We were set in Honduras - time to kind of take a day off.
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Day 9 (Wednesday,
July 26)