I went to Honduras... I think

At the beginning of the trip, we had 40 days to travel and 7 countries to visit, so as a rule of thumb, we should have been spending slightly under a week in each country. We awoke in Granda on Sunday, May 11, 2014 having already spent the first 15 days in just Costa Rica and Nicaragua. We needed to keep moving, so we decided to head directly to Honduras, even though we would have liked to have seen Leon before leaving Nicaragua. But where should we go in Honduras? We wanted to stay on the Pacific side of Honduras so that we could easily make our way to El Salvador afterwards. Upon consulting a map, there didn't seem to be much in the southern part of Honduras aside from its capital, Tegucigalpa. I had been warned that Tegucigalpa has one of the highest, if not the highest, crime rate of any city in the world, so we wanted to stay away from that city. Instead, we decided to just skip Honduras for now with the intent of visiting Utila, a dive town in the Bay Islands on Honduras' Caribbean coast later in the trip. We bought Tica bus tickets from Managua, Nicaragua to San Salvador, El Salvador for $50 USD each, and prepared ourselves for a long 10 hour bus ride spanning 3 countries. 

Three of the ten hours were in Honduras. These were the only three hours I spent in Honduras so while I got a Honduran stamp in my passport, my memories of Honduras consist mostly of sleeping on an air conditioned bus. I later learned that a police officer had come aboard the bus shortly after the border to check our bags. Since I was fast asleep and he didn't want to disturb my sleep to ask me to unlock my bag for him, he just assumed I wasn't carrying anything illegal and let me sleep. At the second border of the trip, I had to actually wake up and get off of the bus for the security check. At this border, the bus, now emptied of passengers was put through a giant scanner. We were told this "scanner" was scanning the bus for drugs. How did the scanner work? It appeared to be using some sort of electromagnetic radiation, but I have a very hard time believing that it could have any chance of being able to pick out any drugs from a bus. The border guards claimed that it could detect any drugs, but different drugs have different chemical structures which interact with electromagnetic radiation differently, so it would be very difficult (I'm tempted to say impossible) to distinguish the organic compounds found in drugs from similar non-psychoactive organic compounds found in various items on the bus, such as food and fabrics, especially since it wasn't just looking for one specific drug. But then again, I'm just a chemist and a chemical engineer, so I should probably leave the drug detection technology to the experts, the border guards.