We left Costa Rica in a ’76 Land Rover with a dream. We scored some waves on our journey to Los Angeles, and (of course) hit a few speed bumps along the way. Photo: Wyatt Fowler
Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of five stories by Sam Evans and Wyatt Fowler about their travels from Costa Rica to Los Angeles via 1976 Land Rover. Check out the first story here, and look out for the next installment soon.
If there were no sense of risk, Central America wouldn’t be so exotic or mysterious. Mexico especially has been romanticized as a lawless country. However, what Wyatt and I mostly found were friendly people who would bend over backwards to help wayward gringos, especially if they knew a little Spanish and had some time to chat and share a laugh.
Guatemalan mechanics let us sleep in their garage while we waited for our car to be fixed. Gas station attendants helped us patch up our gas tank in Mexico. Countless others gave us rides, food, places to stay and indispensable advice.
Yet even the locals espoused the dangers of other Central American countries, just not their own. When we left Costa Rica, we were told that we would be robbed in Nicaragua. In El Salvador, it was Guatemala that was truly the dangerous country, and in Guatemala they couldn’t believe we had made it out of El Salvador unscathed and warned us against continuing on to Mexico. Precautionary tales were so commonplace that we eventually learned to brush them off. The appearance of guns multiplied as soon as we left Costa Rica, but most were in the possession of the military, or guards. Honduras turned out to be the only country that lived up to its outlaw reputation.
At that stage in our journey we had picked up a third crewman. We were giving Ben, a New Hampshirite and fellow coworker from Costa, a ride to meet his friends in El Salvador. We spent the night in Northern Nicaragua and prepared to leave in the morning. The drive from Chinindega, Nicaragua to El Zonte, El Salvador was a fifteen hour, three country tour. We rose before the first signs of dawn and set out for the Nicaragua/ Honduras border.
The Western side of Honduras is really only used by travelers as an additional frontier buffering Nicaragua from El Salvador. Stories of bus robberies and highway holdups are abundant on this lonely stretch of highway.
The road itself was decaying. It looked as if grenades had been scattered across its entirety, creating large, seemingly bottomless divots and potholes. Children wearing scraps of clothes would shovel dirt into the holes and hold their hands up for change. Vendors selling dead iguanas on a stick would hassle passersby. Police checkpoints were set up every 20 miles or so. We found it easier to pretend not to know Spanish because the police would soon become frustrated and let us pass. One tried to solicit a bribe, but soon gave up, exasperated that he had not gotten through to us.
We were only a couple miles from the Honduras/ El Salvador border. Everyone was focused on spotting potholes when we saw a line of people form a human barricade across the road about a hundred feet ahead.
There were no other cars in sight. As we approached them we could see they wore masks and wielded sticks and machetes. We didn’t slow down as we neared, but stayed the course at our top speed of 55 mph. Ben was telling Wyatt not to stop, and it didn’t seem like he had any intention to. The rule of thumb we had learned from other travelers was that if you couldn’t see guns, don’t stop.
Wyatt’s illustration of the sequence of events.
At the last moment Wy swerved the car off the road into an adjacent dirt ditch. He maintained as much speed as he could as one of the masked men took a running dive to avoid the aluminum torpedo bearing down on him. It was a narrow miss. We rumbled through the ditch and then back onto the pockmarked pavement. Looking back through the cloud of dust, we could see the men staring at us through the dust cloud we had created in our wake, wondering what loot had just slipped through their fingers. We were still coming down from the adrenaline high of our low speed getaway when we reached the El Salvadorian border.
With waves like this waiting in El Zonte, El Salvador, sometimes the sketch factor is worth it.
