El Salvador / Honduras Week #7: Nathaniel's POV 🇸🇻 🇭🇳

i·ro·ny

noun "the expression of one's meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous effect."

Except... It wasn't humorous.

Let me give you some backstory: We had just finished staying at a nice beach with enormous waves and had an amazing dinner from a local vendor and woken up in high spirits, Nacho (the truck, or the camper...I forget) was purring like a cat and my mom has just uttered the words: "Oh man! Everything is going perfectly!" Buh buh buh… (cue ironic foreshadowing).

Five minutes later, in a horribly unforeseen, tragic event our truck started making a noise that sounded like when you accidentally drop the TV remote in your dads meat grinder (it's happened to everyone, am I right?).

Five minutes later, we are pulled over on the road surrounded by some amazingly friendly and helpful El Salvadoran dudes who where conveniently chilling by the highway when we broke down.

Five minutes later, my dad is calling every single mechanic within a 200 mile radius to see if anyone can take us, while the rest of our family and I are roasting in the car praying that it is not a serious problem.

Five minutes later, it turns out it is serious.

That is pretty much how week #7 turned out to be a complete nightmare and gave us the biggest speed bump of our trip so far. After we finally got our car to a mechanic, Jonah, Elias, Daniell...I mean... Mom and I got driven over to a local Burger King that catered to our every need (pretty much AC, WIFI and food.) for a nice, enjoyable 4 HOURS!!! When my dad came we were all weary from countless whopper ads, terrible Spanish remakes of 2017 hits and kids screaming in the play palace. He told us the terrible news that we would have to wait a few days in a hotel until they got our truck fixed, so we should get our bags from the camper and settle in.

Our first day in "Hotel Mediteranneo" was a bit hectic; It involved plenty of calls, texts and Spanish movies. We were finally settling in, when my dad broke the biggest news of the trip: he had to fly back to Vancouver to get a part. We were all a bit nervous when he left, seeing as we were going to be alone for a week in a previously top 10 most dangerous country without anybody who spoke English, but, we made the best of it.

The week in Santa Rosa de Lima was honestly better than we expected. For starters, there was a sweet basketball court nearby that we visited every day, and one day we even got crazy haircuts from a local barber! The park that had the court was great, we met many people who were very interested in us and our trip and I even made some friends on the court! Every evening we ate fast food except for one night because in the evenings we could not afford to be staying out late for security reasons.

We were all starting to feel a bit done on day 4 though because my mom had a major stomach bug that was giving her some... er, bowel movements, which kept her in bed for 2 whole days causing us boys to go out by ourselves to buy our nightly Fast-food dinner. The hotel was also poorly run (I didn't' see anyone over the age of 20. They played hours of Candy Crush and I caught two workers kissing on the job!). Our breakfasts were the same each day but seemed to lower in quality as the week progressed, but we did have our own little dining room to ourselves which was an upside.

When my dad finally came back with the part, we all rejoiced and quickly packed up our minimal belongings. That evening, we had a celebratory dinner at an awesome restaurant ("Tingo's") which was owned by the family of one of the people we met at the park. This ended a major chapter in our so far amazing experience.

PS- My dad is going to be giving you guys the in-depth analysis on what really happened during these series of unfortunate events, because my perspective was just from the dreaded hotel room. So stay tuned for the boring stuff!!!

Oh wait! I forgot to talk about Honduras! Ok, here it goes...

We drove. The end.

Thanks for reading once again! I have been pleasantly surprised at how much this blog has taken off so thank you all for the great support!, Bye for now!

- Nathaniel Fast