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Mark Moxon's Travel Writing

Nicaragua: Playa Esteron to León

The port of La Unión
The port of La Unión

There are quite a few ways to get from El Salvador to Nicaragua. The cheapest, and the slowest, is to take multiple chicken buses, first to the border of El Salvador and Honduras, then across the southern tip of Honduras to the border with Nicaragua, and then from the Nicaraguan border to your destination. You do meet people who have done this, and it's... well, it's an experience. We even met someone who witnessed one of the Nicaragua-bound chicken buses roll off the road, as it had so much luggage on the roof that it couldn't cope with the way the driver was throwing it around the road. Miraculously nobody died, but we chose not to go by chicken bus.

On the boat to Nicaragua
On the boat to Nicaragua
Looking back towards El Salvador
Looking back towards El Salvador

Across the Great Divide

On the way we were joined by a friendly dolphin
On the way we were joined by a friendly dolphin

Frankly, I'm surprised that this isn't the most popular way of getting into Nicaragua, though I suspect that it's because the Lonely Planet implies that it's a relatively unreliable route and isn't the cheapest method. True, your plans can be scuppered by bad weather, but it's not that expensive for what you get; La Tortuga Verde in Playa Esteron provides a complete service from the hotel to the launch, and the more people there are, the cheaper it gets. There were four other people who were interested in taking the boat – Neil and Bronwyn, a friendly couple from Australia whose company we'd very much enjoyed at the hotel, and a couple of quiet Scottish girls – so the price dropped to US$65 per person, which we thought compared pretty favourably with the US$45 per person price of the tourist shuttle. This would get us all the way to Potosí, from where we'd probably have to take a couple of chicken buses to get to León, our destination for the day.

A fishing boat in the calm waters off Honduras
A fishing boat in the calm waters off Honduras
Looking north towards Honduras
Looking north towards Honduras
Nicaragua's Volcán San Cristóbal is just visible through the spray
Nicaragua's Volcán San Cristóbal is just visible through the spray
The pier at Potosí
The pier at Potosí
Peta disembarking from the boat
Peta disembarking from the boat
Our trusty transport, pulled up on the beach at Potosí
Our trusty transport, pulled up on the beach at Potosí