El Amatillo, Honduras

Note: To read from the beginning, click here.

With computer problems solved, Boat Shoes returns to my forms, forms he's laid eyes on three times now. Then, there's a pained face, gurgling and groaning. He says there's a problem -- a big, big problem. His finger bounces between two lines on the form, lines where I'd confused marca (brand) with placa (plate) in the vehicle information section, realized my mistake, carefully crossed out my plate number and wrote "GMC".

The woman at the data entry office had been able to read it -- and take my last $11 for typing the hand-printed form. But, No, said Boat Shoes, this will not do. No, no, no...this will not do at all. He hands me back my forms, stamped and payed for, says a quick something to Jerry-Curl and turns around, back to his work.

Jerry-Curl and I look at each other. Anticipation like a Western movie duel. I'm waiting for him to tell me what's next. He's waiting for me to understand what just happened and react, as he knows I will, in panic. It's me who flinches: What do I do now? Can I have a fresh form? I'm sputtering like a wind-up duck.

Yes, you can have a new form.

Relief.

But you'll have to repeat the entire process -- with the bank, the data entry office, the stamps. You'll have to pay for each again.

He smiles a wicked half-smile. He has me.

This is where the logic hurts: even if we accept this $53 extortion, in the name of sanity and our desire to reach Nicaragua, there isn't another $53 to spend. Not today. We withdrew our last $200 from our international checking account in San Miguel; we're waiting for a transfer from our second, American checking account, to go through before we could get more. That wouldn't happen for days. We'd figured $200 would be more than enough to get from San Miguel,  to Leon, with a full tank of gas and a 10-hour drive. We were wrong.

Jerry-Curl is enjoying this. I should have paid to have the form completed for me, since clearly I don't understand the language. There's nothing he can do, I simply have to pay again. It's the rules, he tells me. He's not being cruel, just professional, like Boat Shoes.

This is when I realize that this isn't going to be easy.  It's definitely not about a scratch on th form, but it might not be about money either. This is punishment, or sadism. Whatever it is, it's not a matter of smiling warmly, apologizing for my mistake.

And if Jerry-Curl refuses to let me pass, we'll have to turn Dolly around and return to San Miguel, two hours away, where we can use our credit card on an overpriced hotel room and wait for our transfer to go through. Then come back to the border and do it again.

So, with nothing left to do, I beg. I tell him we're out of money, that we're only passing through. We just need to get to Leon. He's unmoved. He has me follow him out of the office, across the street, to an unmarked building. He goes in, motioning for me to stand outside and wait for him. When he comes out a few minutes later, he shrugs. Nope, like I told you before, there's nothing we can do. He's been with the administrator.

I stand there. Blink a few times in silence, and start to cry.

It wasn't a proud moment, but the combination of overwhelming frustration coupled with some small knowledge that crying might save me, took hold. It's pathetic, I know. A humiliation I'd like not to have granted. But this is how it goes, when logic is against you, you use what you can.

Well, can I speak to the administrator? He shrugs, disgusted, and opens the door.

To be continued...

El Amatillo, Honduras

Note: To read from the beginning, click here.

 Immigration offices, care of: www.guanacosonline.org
Boat Shoes “helps me” first, giving me the multi-layered and multicolored carbon copy form required to take Dolly into the country for the three hours it’ll take us to cross through the Honduras' southern tip and into Nicaragua.

There's an office across the way can fill out the form for me. But I opt to do it by hand myself. The service, I figure, is for the illiterate. No reason I can't do it myself. He watches me pull a pen from my purse and deliberate over each line. The form, a rainbow-colored bureaucratic wonder, requires multiple stops and multiple stamps. But I don’t know that yet. All I know is that a form is a form is a form, and I have filled out plenty.

The border is open 24 hours a day, but the bank that processes the border fees is not. This logic, see, is just too much for me. I join the line standing vigil outside Banco Occidental, watching a small girl chase a cockroach along a ledge with her finger.

When the bank finally opens two guards with large barreled, pump action guns escort us into the lobby, three at a time. They use metal detecting wands and brisk hands on the men, but let us women pass without a groping.

Inside, it’s cool and shiny, somewhere I'd like to stay awhile. Instead, the teller tells me I’m in the wrong branch. This office can't process the money I need to pay for the Vehicle Certification. She points me down the street, in the direction from which I’ve just come. At the main customs building, there’s a closet-sized room with two tellers and it’s own, less vigilant security.

Again, I'm turned away. I can't pay the $42 vehicle permit fee until I’ve been to another office, where a private company enters the information on the Vehicle Certificate into “the system." I don't know what this means, but it sounds very important. She points me toward a tree, obscured by a giant truck. Over there. She waves me off, a bug in her ear.

Photo care of: www.guanacosonline.orgTim’s reading Didion’s Salvador behind the steering wheel, with the window up to keep the vendors and street kids and money changers -- the present horrors of El Salvador -- from distracting him from the horrors of twenty five years ago.

At the data entry office men wait, leaning against the window, holding folders thick with forms. They’ve been there an hour, waiting to hand over their packets of someone else’s papers. Finally, a large women, eyes and lips painted in blue and hot cherry red, slides open the glass window without a word. The men shove their arms in between metal bars, dropping their papers onto the counter. Nobody speaks. One of them, the only one wearing a pressed shirt and slacks instead of jeans and a grubby t-shirt, grabs my arm and shoves it through the crowd, depositing my papers at the top of the stack. Chivalry, even at Amatillo.

A half hour later, the data entry woman slides the window open again and my papers appear, along with her open hand: $11 US for typing the information I’d filled out and printing it on a separate, stamped piece of paper, along with a stamped receipt. I give both to the teller at Banco Occidente, along with Dolly’s rainbow-colored visitor’s permit. I only have dollars, El Salvador’s official currency since 2001. But this Honduran bank doesn’t accept and will not change dollars. She waves me off again, pointing to a fat man with a four-inch thick wad of bills, sweating on the street outside.

I pay my $42 dollars in Honduran Lempiras and the teller stamps the many layers of multi-colored forms -- then hands me another form for good measure. Back across the street, Boat Shoes is working hard to get his computer to accept an illegitimate password.

He enters it again and again. After half an hour of entering digits, with careful pecking but no luck, he gets a cell call and leaves. I pray it’s tech support, but upon his return, he resumes the half-hearted pecking -- typing starred digits, hitting Enter, then entering them again.

Finally, he makes the call--the call that will save me from murdering this man with the rimless glasses. Or so I hope.

To be continued...

El Amatillo, Honduras

I. Part One

El Amatillo border station, El Salvador-Honduras, care of: kariandadam.comThey say that beauty comes in all shapes and sizes. The same, it seems, is true of extortion. There are small extortions, like being over-changed a few dollars on a multi-course meal, and large extortions, like those perpetrated by presidents. In between, there’s a room with peeling beige paint, a dysfunctional computer that operates in a DOS-like language and a pigeon that flies in through the open windows -- in between is the El Salvador-Honduras border crossing at El Amatillo.

It’s hard to see what the pigeon might want with this place, where the air is hot and stagnant and the company foul. The men who make their living filing customs and migration papers for those who can afford not to are hustlers. Aggressive and swarming as this country’s biting ants, border “guides” lurk outside the aduana office, waiting for their client’s papers to be done, making faces at me through the open doorway. Why they’re outside and I’m inside, I don’t really know, but it seems to be part of the logic of this place. Gringos, who know nothing and pay more, get to sit inside the stifling beige building, with the tapping keys, peeling paint and pigeons.

We pay more, I imagine, because the logic of this place is too convoluted for our feeble First World minds to make sense of. We’re animals who’ve lost our instincts, schooling fish that don’t know how to school. The ebbs and flows of the border might make sense to someone better at seeing and following the patterns of people, but to me nothing is obvious except that I’m lost, alone in the open water. One thing is for sure: the other fish are laughing at me.

It’s not politically correct to say you hate a country. Oh, sure, you “didn’t have the best experience there.” Or maybe you "had the worst luck.” But to say a place is wretched and you never want to return is unacceptable. Of course it’s unacceptable for good reason: that bit about luck is true. If the world’s out to get you, any place can be hell -- and maybe tomorrow I’ll have the perspective to see Honduras as the absurd, large-scale case of bad luck and coincidence it was. But right now, I’m pretty sure I hate Honduras.

The customs men -- in white polos and khaki pants -- bounce their legs as they shuffle papers. The younger one is cool and professional, with a thick middle, rimless glasses and leather boat shoes; the other is older with acne scars, a jerry-curl and a bitter bureaucrats way of avoiding eye contact and questions he doesn’t want to answer. I imagine that, when he was younger, Jerry-Curl was the better of the two, but if there’s an equivalent to going postal at Amatilla, he’s it. He’s had it -- and he’s taking me with him.

To be continued...

Tonight, we shared a seven dollar filet mignon “a la Paris,” sitting in the bell tower of La Villa Balanza. Overlooking Lago Suchitlán, with the bugs buzzing but not biting, it was especially delicious.

But we’re heading South, so no lingering.

Time to drive.

Javier wasn’t around when we arrived at Frolaz on Sunday, where we greeted coolly by Irma and given our old room with shared bath. He was, however, out of jail. A free man, minus driving privileges, Javier was finally released the day Tim and I left for California. A bit embarrassed by his ordeal, his story wasn’t so much a story as a shrug of the shoulders and a denial: He’d never owned a gun, never even threatened the kid who’d accused him. The whole thing was fabricated, he said. But -- you know -- they take these things seriously down here.

We gave him the large bottle of “artesian” American beer we’d brought as a thank you gift for housing Dolly while we were away, but he stuck to his large cans of Pilsener 100 and bottles of Regia. Jail hadn’t so much tempered his thirst -- showed him the error of his ways -- as given him cause to make up for lost time.

*   *   *

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
It took us over 30 hours to get from Mendocino, CA to Santa Ana, El Salvador, including the nausea-inducing car ride from Cleone to San Francisco in Uncle Mike’s “Merc”, the four hours we spent at Pier 39 as my cousin Alina competed with 29 less-talented others for the chance to sing the National Anthem at a 49ers game (she was, in my opinion, robbed of the honor),  the BART ride from downtown San Fran to SFO, the wait at the airport for our delayed United flight, the three hour layover in LA, which we spent having a sushi tailgate party with Tim’s parents overlooking the runway lights at LAX, the six-hour flight to Guatemala City and the six-hour bus ride across the border to Santa Ana.

We arrived so exhausted we could barely feed and hydrate ourselves before collapsing in our shared twin bed at 6pm. The entire next day at Javier’s was lost to recovery.

*   *   *

Tuesday, we repacked the van and headed to Lago Coatepeque with Solly -- a Brazilian-American-Israeli detouring from a round-the-world adventure to visit family in Brazil -- and Katie, an English girl from Norfolk, traveling solo before grad school.

When Tim and I were here last, the lake was deserted of its weekend hoards of San Salvadorans. It was quiet and clear -- stunning -- save for the afternoon thunderstorm that moved in as we were leaving. This time, the Amacuilco Guest House had been occupied by a crew of Peace Corps volunteers and their visiting friends. All had begun drinking at 9am and by the time we got there, they were well into the next morning's hangover, but still going strong. The Peace Corp: saving the world, one cerveza at a time.

Solly and Katie ordered a round, which turned into several more. The swimming was good, the sun hot, the company totally amusing. Quite a send-off. So long, El Salvador.

 Below: Trust me, it's us, not the photo, that's blurry.