Our disco park place also happened to be where the local buses spent the night so we were rudely awakened at 6am by the sound and smell of diesel engines. We found ourselves driving at dawn towards Playa El Cuco. Arriving just as the fisherman were landing their boats, we were immediately surrounded by kids asking us if we were here to surf and no doubt expecting some kind of expert demonstration. Our reputations as wicked surfers stayed intact as our boards were still broken from the Peten jungle in Guatemala. After a swim and a lunch of the mornings fresh fish, we drove back to San Salvador in search of Saturday night fun. Disasterous choices of disco didn't make for a good night and we found ourselves sisterless for the third time.

On Sunday we admired the views from Puerto del Diablo before driving north towards the nature reserve in the mountains of Montecristo. It was dark before we got anywhere near the mountains so we slept behind a Texaco station beside reservoir Cerron Grande. A quick visit to Chalatenango for elevenses before heading into the mountains via steep inclines on single track dirt roads led us to the gates of the nature reserve at 4pm. Apparently we were both an hour late and lacking in a vital permission from San Salvador. The guards were vehement in their refusal to allow us entry and we gave up.

Home for the night was beside the cemetary of a tiny mountain village. The locals were friendly enough, chatting to us as we had breakfast. One guy came by with a coil of rope, he was a cowboy for want of a better description, on his way to round up a cow or two. Then a woman came by with her daughter and was carrying a mean looking machete. She came back a few minutes later with a pile of firewood. Normal life in the villages of central america.

After more extremely dusty kilometers we reached the border with Honduras at El Poy. It was to take us 4 hours to get through here. Things went smoothly at first but then the Hondurans disappeared for lunch, then had to wait to use the only typewriter in the building for the clerk to then wrongly type that the car was from the USA. When T questioned this and pointed out that the landy is English she said "yeah, part of the USA" which is, sadly, an assumption a great many people over here make. The time waiting for corrections was spent chatting to some soldiers. The eldest was very enthusiastic about his M16 and told us how he likes the smell of hot gunpowder after firing it - only to kill snakes because they are dangerous to people, he informed us. After more shuffling of paperwork and copies thereof, we finally made it into Honduras.