I'm not sure how many miles we put on the car, but I think it was near 20 hours of driving in three days. Along the way, I was stopped by Honduras police somewhere between 8-10 times (I lost count at 7). This is not an unexpected occurrance for someone driving a black Nissan XTerra with black tineted windows. Instead of having police cars out on the road, Honduras has "checkpoints" along the roads, usually at the entrance or exit of a decently size town or village. These checkpoints are locations for the police to stop anyone they feel like stopping. If they are suspicious of your car, if they thought you were driving too fast, or if they flipped a coin and your car lost the flip, they will stop you at a whim.
The majority of the stops went something like this:
1) Police signals to me to pull over
2) I roll down my window as I am pulling off to the side of the road and they look surprised to see a Gringo (White person)
3) The police walks over and asks (in spanish, of course), "good afternoon, is everything ok."
4) I say, "good afternoon, yes sir, everything is going just fine."
5) He looks at my drivers license and car registration and says, "you're fine, have a great day."
6) I drive off thankful that I have escaped another opportunity for the police to steal my money
However, the first time I was stopped (only a few hours into our drive) did not go so pleasantly. I could tell from the start that this guy was interested in finding something I was doing wrong so that he could steal some money.
-He asked for my license and registration: Check
-He asked for my passport to verify I had not been in the country longer than 90 days: Check
-He asked for the passports of the other 4 Americans in the car: Check
-He asked to see the fire extinguisher: Check
-He asked to see the emergency triangles: Check
-He asked to see the ID's of the two Honduran students in my car: Oooooops
One of the girls did not have her ID, which somehow translated into him thinking that I was kidnapping them. So he threatened me saying that he would keep Martha (the student with no ID) in the police station and that I could continue on my way. Of course that was not an option, so I continued talking with him. We explained the situation, why she didn't have her ID, and thought he was going to let us go on our way. Then he called me over to the side and told me he would let us all go if I bought a gallon of gasoline from the police station for over $10 per gallon (more than twice of what it would cost at a gas station). I told him, "Thanks, but I am actually fine on gasonline now." He didn't appreciate that and decided (once again) that Martha would stay with him. After much conversation and back-and-forth bantering, I finally convinced him that $2 US was sufficient and we were on our way.
I was thinking about the police and their checkpoints and was thankful that most of them are just a quick pass. I was also thinking about the one bad apple who wants to take advantage of any foreigner who can spare an extra few bucks and thought, "maybe this is just one reason why Honduras is the 2nd poorest country in the western hemisphere." Not because one officer stole a few dollars from me, but because corruption and bad behavior is so tolerated in this society.
I think I will change the Honduras police force slogan to "Serve, Protect...and Steal" based on my experiences from this last week.
Oh, I also learned the hard way that driving with sandals on is also against the law in Honduras...ooops!
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