Guatemala to El Salvador to Honduras and finally in Nicarugua

Quick recap and more later:

 

We bused from Xela to Guatemala City last Saturday. Stayed in Guatemala City for one night and bused to San Salvador on Tica Bus (the first class service that takes care of your border crossings and all that). We stayed in San Salvador for two nights, making a day trip to the town of Suchitoto, small quaint town with a magnificent view of its lake. San Salvador was more developed that we expected, may have something to do with them being on the US dollar. Lots of mega malls, cinemas, fast foods. Then we local bused to San Miguel in El Salvador, by far the hottest city we´ve been to so far, but had the most intricate labyrinth-like market with everything anyone could possibly want. The next day, we local bused to the border and walked through the El Salvador border into Honduras. We caught local buses (had to switch a few times of course), we were trying to get to a town called Esteli in Nicaragua, but since it was getting dark, we stayed in the Honduras border town of San Marcos (at the Nicaragua border). We´re so glad we ended up staying too. San Marcos is a charming little town, all the folks are really friendly and it´s super safe. Most of the cities we´re in, we´re cautious if we´re walking around at night, which isn´t very often, but in San Marcos, kids were walking around, riding bicycles, people were lounging on steps outside, it was just a very laid back, chill town. This morning, we left San Marcos and walked through the Honduran border into Nicaragua. At the border we passed the Tica bus, which is what normal  travellers take, but not us of course. Where´s the excitement and adventure in that? :) After a taxi ride and a bus ride, we arrived in Esteli this afternoon. This town lost a lot of revolutionaries during the Sadinista times and the mothers of the fallen heroes run a gallery and museum that we will check out tomorrow. There´s also many Spanish schools here that started for the internationalists that had come to help out after the revolution. There´s a waterfall nearby that we plan to swim in tomorrow and then we will bus over to Managua and meet Sonali and her b-school friends.