The Nowhere To Go and All Day To Get There Tour aka The Blame It On Ellwood Tour: El Salvador/Honduras/Nicaragua

Last post we were in El Salvador wanting to hole up for another day before the hectic process of border crossings. The next thing we knew we were at the Honduran border and it was 1:00 in the afternoon. All of the other borders have been pretty easy but the Honduran borders are supposedly the worst with corrupt officials, so we figured we would use a "helper" at this one. The whole process took until 3:30 and the officials were fine. The "helper" on the other hand was a different story. Lesson learned as we won't be doing that again. So, now we were in Honduras with the intention of riding straight through because rumor also has it that the Hondurans don't like Americans. Anyway we decided to get a hotel and unwind from the border ordeal and found the people here to be friendly and happy we were visiting their country just like people in all of the other countries we have been to. The next day we headed to El Espino for the border crossing into Nicaragua. This was a nice ride through the mountains and there were very few people at the border so it was fairly smooth and relatively quick to check out of Honduras and into Nicaragua. After that we headed for Leon, the second biggest city after Managua. We've been here for two days now resting and killing some time. It's pretty laid back here and a bit touristy but not a concrete jungle of a city. The cathedral is a world heritage site so we hope to take a tour if time allows. We went to a museum today dedicated to the heroes that liberated Latin America. Mostly it was for the Sandinistas and the civil war of the 70's and 80's, the history of the leaders as well as the war against the government. The Sandinistas overthrew the Samoza family dictatorship and brought about great changes to the people and country. The US didn't like the style of governing so the CIA started to train ex Samoza national guard members as counter revolutionaries-CONTRAS under Ronald Reagan. When funding was cut for these activities the Iran-Contra scandal funded the training. Arms being sold to Iran for their war against Iraq, that money being used to train the Contras. Oliver North was the fall guy for that mess. Other Latin American heroes were also honored such as Fidel Castro, Che Guevarra as well as Hugo Chavez. This museum was the Sandinistas presidential palace in Leon at the time. We then took a rooftop photo session overlooking the central park of Leon and the cathedral. Even though the tour was in Spanish we still picked up on a lot of it through the pictures and newspaper articles on display. Included are couple of other scenes from around town I thought you might get a kick out of.