We had walked across the border from Belize into Guatemala and gotten our entrance stamp.  We weren’t on a bus and as it turns out that was a good thing because others who had entered on busses weren’t so lucky.

When we got to the border of Guatemala and El Salvador, we all piled out of our bus to get our exit stamps.  The first 10 people went through without a problem.  And then the Australian kid in front of me turns around and asks if anyone speaks Spanish.  Crap.  So, I lean down to the window so I can hear the officer and he tells me, “El no tiene la entrada.”  He doesn’t have his entrance stamp.  So I turn to the kid and ask him if he got his entrance stamp when he entered Guatemala.  He has no clue.  So I asked where he came from when he entered Guatemala and he said Belize. “What happened at the border?” I asked.  “Our bus just drove on through so we didn’t think anything of it.” These busses carry around 12-14 people and the driver knows they all need their entrance stamp.  Something’s fishy…

The officer has now come out from behind the glass to where we’re standing in line and he motions for not only the Australian kid to come with him, but me too!  I’m supposed to be his translator?!  Before I knew what was going on, we were whisked through a door and sat in front of a lady behind a desk.  She starts telling me that he has two options how they can ‘fix’ his little problem of being an illegal alien in Guatemala.  He can either pay $200 quetzales, go back to the border of Belize or Mexico and exit, then re-enter and get the correct stamp.  There are a couple of problems with this option.  He would have had to get on a bus (Nowhere to be found from where we were) all the way back to the border of either Mexico or Belize.  A 12 hour ride at least.  And once he got there, he’d go through this same situation of not having the entrance stamp!

Or option 2!  He can pay $800 quetzales (works out to $100 American), and they’ll just stamp his passport with the entrance stamp and corresponding date he entered and he can be on his way. It’s also at this point that the woman behind the desk tells me in no uncertain terms not to discuss outside of this room about this ‘deal’ she was making for him.  It’s kind of a no brainer…we have to go with option two.  Except that we had all just changed our quetzales into American dollars since that is what they use in El Salvador.  Oh, but there’s an ATM about ten minutes walk back the way we came!

So we leave the room and go outside to where our bus and it’s passengers are still waiting to get going into El Salvador.  The bus driver is getting impatient.  I tell him that the kid needs to go to an ATM to get some money and the driver gets pissed off.  He wants to leave the kid at the border.  There were a few of us standing around and when word got around that the driver wanted to leave him at the border, everyone got off the buss and told the driver we’re not going anywhere without him.

As luck would have it, one of the guys on the bus had exactly $800 Q on him because he was planning on going back into Guatemala at some point, so he didn’t change out all of his money.  So he decides to loan the money to the kid so we can get on our way.  The kid goes back inside and pays his fine and we were on our way.

Unfortunately, we would hear this story come up time and again from other travelers, and we can’t figure out the scam.  The bus drivers have to be in on in because they’re the ones who are going right through the borders without letting anyone off for stamps.  The emigration officers have to be in on it because they’re just ‘fixing’ the stamps for an ungodly amount of money.  Do they just pool this money and split it at the end of the month?  It was so strange, but we added another checklist to our lessons we’ve learned.

Always get your stamp.

Except in El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua! Those three countries along with Guatemala have a system in place where you’re given 90 days to get through all four of them and if you cross at the border on land, you don’t get a stamp.  They just check to make sure you’re still within your 90 days.  We won’t get our next stamp until we arrive in Costa Rica.

Anyway…we made it to El Tunco beach, El salvador without any other issues!

It was amazing!  We stayed in a place that had a pool, our own private room, and was 2 minutes walking distance to the ocean.  There are only 2 streets in the entire town but it was cute!  We watched the sunset almost every night, then we’d wash off the black sand from the beach at the outdoor shower, and then jump in the pool.  Then we would lounge around in hammocks.   We rented a boogie board and didn’t kill ourselves or anyone else in the process.  We found a street stall that popped up at night that served for $2.  El Salvador is known for their pupusas and these didn’t disappoint.  There were a few small stalls that had the local beer for $1, so we’d grab some of those after dinner.  Rinse, repeat for five days.

Oh, and there were some caves you could walk to at low tide, and we ended up doing that twice, once with Misty,  a friend we made from Canada.  All the friends we meet on the road are from Canada it seems.  I’ve stopped asking where people are from and instead started asking, “What part of Canada are you from?”  The last guy I tried that on was incredulous, asking, “Wow, is it that obvious?!”  “No man”, I replied…”You guys just haven’t left anyone to run the country up there, it seems.”

El Tunco was our only stop in El Salvador.   We also hadn’t planned on stopping in Honduras either because the only interesting thing there was on the Caribbean side and we were on the Pacific and weren’t in the mood to drive across the country.  So we were headed to Nicaragua, which meant we’d be crossing two borders in a day and it was as big of a pain in the neck as it sounds.