Children sing a rap song in the pot-holed street, piles of rubbish on each corner.
Even close to the cities and highways, roads soon peter out into pot-holed dirt tracks.
It is a single-lane, pot-holed highway winding perilously around peaks up to 5, 000 metres (16, 000 feet) high.
Several years ago, it was as dirty, pot-holed and crime-infested as much of the rest of the metropolis.
The battered infrastructure and pot-holed roads were a defiant counter-point to the blatant and often stifling affluence of western Germany.
Travel the pot-holed roads of Nicaragua's backlands, and it would be easy to believe that this is indeed a polarising election.
Eventually a 24-year-old man named Ahmed Jabril pointed at the pot-holed roads and told me the new authorities were not doing enough.
Such behaviour carries a cost: while the city's debt is rising, its steep streets are increasingly pot-holed, its parks unwatered, its street-lighting patchier.
From somewhere in Belgium the convoy had bumped along pot-holed dirt roads and some paved ones also in bad shape, hour after hour with frequent delays.
Thanks to the new bus route, the journey is now half as long for those passengers who don't mind the hassle of changing buses in Dhaka and the inconvenience of Bangladesh's notoriously overcrowded and pot-holed roads.
Barely two hours drive outside the city, pot-holed dirt-roads are the only access to the numerous villages where the option for youngsters is to follow the family tradition of subsistence farming, or try their luck by heading illegally to the US - where more than a million Salvadorans already live.
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