Leon

We took on the next day slowly with some amazing french toast and a small stroll around town. Leon is a very pretty city, one of the leftovers of the Spanish colonial era with big churches, narrow streets and colorful colonial-style buildings. It used to be Nicaragua's capital and was of great importance in the north of the country while having a strong rivalry with Granada in the south. We had heard of another hostel in town that was meant to be really nice and went to check it out with all our stuff. It was a short walk away but full unfortunately, so we headed out to yet another hostel that we had seen on our way and which had rooms from only 5$ a night. It turned out to be OK and it had a guest kitchen and a pool table which convinced us to stay there for the next nights.

That night there was a stage set up on the central plaza for a jazz festival that was touring through Central America and we headed out to watch it for a while. It was very nice, there were a lot of people watching the show and the vendors stayed open til late selling souvenirs and a lot of different food options ranging from hot dogs and pizza to traditional enpanadas and fried bananas stuffed with cheese.
A Dutch girl who we had met in the hostel told us about the beaches closest to Leon and said that she liked staying there a lot. We hadn't really planned to go there but found ourselves on the bus to Las Penitas, said beaches, the next day. The bus was really packed and I was as worried as never before for my board which was stuck between a row of seats, a fat Nicaraguan and two sacks of rice but it survived without being damaged too badly. It took some time for us to find a good hostel that we liked but after we found one we still had time to check out the area before it got dark. The beach wasn't as great and the surf was either small and mushy or breaking on to rocks but I still had a short session with the advantage that only one other guy was out there with me because of the crappy conditions. We shared a dorm with three French-Canadians who were the only thing that made our trip to the beaches worthwhile. Their names were Jonatan, Alex and Mia and they were great company, a lot of fun and of course, like all French-Canadians I had met on my travels so far, wacky and simply crazy (these ones in the best possible way!!!).

Packed in the back of the bus

Quiet time at the hostel

I didn't enjoy the beaches very much and convinced the others to go back to Leon the next day from where we could then go to other beaches that at least had good waves. Our friends were also leaving to Leon and said they would try to save us beds in the hostel they were staying at. The bus ride back was a lot better than the last. We had a lot of room and were even entertained by some grown men who started a fistfight in the back of the bus. Two guys kept going on against each other with a lot of yelling and punching and the most interesting thing was that one of them, the one who took most of the hits, actually was a cop who tried to put handcuffs on his opponent. I was just happy that no one drew a gun and started shooting.
Back in Leon the hostel the Canadians stayed in was full again so we went back to the place we stayed at before. We bought some stuff from the market and Bekki cooked up great food while we mixed ourselves a Piña Colada from scratch. It was really cool to make a drink like that out of a whole pineapple and a coconut and without just pouring things together out of different bottles. The drink turned out really well even though it didn't completely taste like a conventional Piña Colada but we had a lot of it. We had only used half of the ingredients which still gave us about 2 liters to drink and everything together had only cost about 4 Euro. If we had made all of it we would have had 4 liters and 1 Euro for 1 liter of great Piña Colada isn't too bad if you ask me...

After dinner we visited our friends at their hostel where we chatted and drank some more before we played a few rounds of pool until it was time for bed.

Our Honduras experience

Everything would have worked out perfectly if things had gone the way we had planned but unfortunately that isn't how Central America works. I should have known that already but for some reason we put too much trust into the people and the public transportation and planned to get to the El Salvador-Honduras border, across the southern tip of Honduras and into Nicaragua in one day. It seemed very doable, there were no long distances involved and we had the whole day for the trip but something seemed to be working against us that day.
We had to walk the first 2km towards El Cuco because there were no transportation matters where we were staying and the sun was already burning down which got us sweating a lot before we even reached the first bus. That bus then took us to San Miguel, the major town in the east of the country from where we hopped on another one that brought us a little bit closer to the border and then another one that eventually dropped us of about 500 meters before the border. They didn't stop at the border because they wanted us to take one of the bike driven carts for the last few meters to maximise the profit they could get out of all the travellers who pass by the border every day. As usual we ignored the very annoying drivers who yell at you from one meter away and don't really accept "no" for an answer and walked to and over the border.
The border official asked us where we were going and as we told him that we were only crossing through to go to Nicaragua the same day he explained to us in  a very broken Spanish English mix that we didn't need a stamp for that. A guy from Italy who we had met on the last bus told us the same thing and so we took off to find a collectivo that would bring us across the country to the next border that we had to cross. It is very easy to find the next bus in Central America because there are always a few people who come running up to you and yell in your face where they want to take you so we quickly found our bus which was waiting for more passengers before it would leave. We still had enough time but after waiting in the heat of the midday we got a little bit nervous because still the driver didn't want to leave. We wasted about two hours of our, that day very valuable time before we decided to take a combination of public buses because we were afraid that the guy wouldn't leave at all. Of course everything took longer than we were told and by the time we arrived in the town we had to switch buses in again it was starting to get dark. Fortunately we had joined up with Robin, a fellow traveller from France who spoke some Spanish and the four of us found a collectivo that brought us to the border in time to catch the last bus going from there. They told us though that, if they left now only with us in the car, they would charge us ten dollars per person. We agreed, we just wanted to get across that border, but after we paid they filled up the car with people anyway who only paid 3 dollars... To stressed out and tired to fight for the lost money we hurried to get to emigration which again was a little bit away from the bus stop. We got picked up by some of those bike-cart drivers who told us they only wanted a small tip and my nerves were such a mess that I didn't resist when they took our stuff and loaded it onto their carts. At emigration the woman seemed to have all the time in the world when she checked our passports and, after a while, found that our stamps were missing. We had to come inside where a fat, sweating and stinking officer sat who played the really nice and helpful guy and told us that we had to go back to the first border between El Salvador and his country to get the entry stamp. We tried to explain to him that we were told that we didn't need a stamp but he said we would only get in trouble with the people on the Nicaraguan side of the border if he wold let us pass like this. He let his words sink in for a while before he told us that we could pay a "fee" of 20$ each to him and then he would give us the stamp. It seemed to be a well working game that the people at those borders play with/for each other because there are a lot of travellers who only cross through the southern tip of Honduras and the rules are very simple: At the first border you refuse to give someone his stamp and at the second border you either let them pay or have him go back where they came from. Sounds fun to me...
Robin had helped us to translate what the guy was saying but then took off to catch the last bus going to Leon. We were alone at the border now with two options, either to spend the night in a very sketchy border town and to go back to El Salvador in the morning or to bribe this guy with a bunch of money to get across this border where no bus was running anymore. The only thing we wanted was to leave this country that had given us nothing more than bad surprises and we managed to talk the guy down to 10$ per head (also thanks to Bekki's almost perfected "Imakeyoufeelguiltybycryingmyeyesout" tactic), paid the money and finally got our stamp. The bike drivers were still waiting for us outside and brought us across the border and to the Nicaraguan immigration where I lost my last dollars to the entry fee and after that dropped us of at the bus stop where a collectivo was waiting. It looked very much as if a little "birdy" had told the driver that there were some tourists arriving late who needed to get to Leon. As soon as we got our stuff off the bikes a flood of Spanish that was mixed with only a few English words broke out around us. My brain needed some time to comprehend what everyone wanted, it didn't seem to work very well that day, but eventually someone who spoke a decent amount of English got through to me and explained that the bike drivers wanted 10$ each for their overtime services and the collectivo would cost 400 Cordoba per person which was almost 20$ to go to Leon. We told them that we wouldn't and couldn't pay that much money and with a combined effort of Bekki starting to cry again and me talking as much English back to them as they were talking Spanish we managed to get out of that situation paying a lot less than they wanted us to. After all they had only asked for a tip and as Robin told me the next day they had pulled the same shit on him. The collectivo only brought us to the closest town though because we didn't pay him enough but luckily we got the last seats on another one that took us to Leon. From the bus stop in Leon a taxi brought us to the closest hostel and finally we could sink into our beds after about 14 hours of buses, borders and "barbarians" isn't really the right word but I wanted something starting with a "b".
This day was one of the worst days of the whole trip and I hope that I'll never have to deal with stuff like that again but looking back it was also a day that taught us a lot and made us stronger and after all, apart from it being very exhausting for mind and body alike, the only thing we lost was money. It could have been worse!