It seemed like a good idea at the time.

The bathroom in Esperanza. Hopefully this gives you some context to the kind of facilities we were dealing with.
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So to get from Lago Yojoa to El Salvador isn't that easy.  You can go south to Tegucigalpa, and then on from there to a main border.  You can go north to San Pedro Sula, Honduras' second city, and then go south from there.  Neither are short, or practical.  But there's supposed to be a 3rd crossing near the center of the country.  We asked around, and everyone said "go to Esperanza.  You can get a bus from there."  So we did.  And everyone in Esperanza said "what the crap do you mean El Salvador?"  Apparently it's not a normal maneuver.  Then one guy told us that a bus was leaving a town called Colomoncagua the next morning for Ecuador.  It'd leave at 5:30 AM.  We could catch a bus there that night.  It was our only option, so we said ok.

The road to Colomoncagua
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We spent the next 4.5 hours riding a bus on a dirt road into the mountains.  How confident did we feel?  Well, not very, but everyone said that we were doing the right thing and we'd go through a normal checkpoint on our way into El Salvador.

That night, we stayed in a very rudimentary hotel in a surprisingly large town--paved roads, electricity, and running water.  But we still had no idea where we were--the lonely planet didn't even mention our town or this bording crossing existed--and were just trusting in a bus to get us out of nowhere.

Our bus.
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The next morning, after a corous of barn animals started screaming at 3 AM, we woke up at 4:30 AM to catch a bus at 5:15.  It was yet another school bus, and we started rolling to with..techno.  Techno blasting out at 5:15 or 5:30 in the morning as we rolled over mountains on a dirt road and literally forded a river in our bus.

The best part was when, a couple hours in, we asked which country we're in, and the response was "El Salvador."  Yep.  There was absolutely no border control to get into El Salvador along that route.  And apparently its kind of legal.  El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Guatemala are all part of this thing called the C4 region.  It's like a mini EU that's way less organized.  Technically, since we got our entrance papers in Nicaragua, we're here legally.  We just skipped that whole passport control thing.  Oh well.

More of the crazy road in.
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Next stop: Playa Yojoa on the El Salvadorian coast.  It's a pretty chill place...

-Justin