Central America 2005

Yes we are in sunny, hot Nicaragua after spending two weeks traveling through El Salvador. If anyone tells you to stay away from El Salvador because it is a dangerous country, tell them it is no worse than the rest of Central America. Yes, petty crime exists as it does elsewhere, but we never felt threatened. As we expected, the people were warm and friendly and always willing to answer our questions and help us get to our intended destination. Most of the time we were the only Gringos, but we had no problems finding transportation and a place to stay.

El Salvador uses the American Dollar but prices are what I remember in Canada during the 1950s. We paid as little as $0.75 for a beer, less for a soft drink and lunch for two people was under $4.00.

Breakfast in El Salvador was similar to what is offered in other Central American countries; a Desayuno Typico is eggs scrambled with onion, green pepper and tomato, refried beans, fried plantains, a piece of Farmer's cheese with a thick cream(I skip the cheese and cream as it is too rich and salty for my taste), tortillas and coffee. That gets you through until lunch, the main meal of the day. We try to find a cheap and filling Menu del Dia or a Comedor (small restaurant) a la Vista (you choose from foods on display). There is usually a choice of chicken or a meat dish with rice, salad or other vegetable dish, plus tortillas. We have eaten so much by supper time that we are content to visit a Pupuseria where we order two or three Pupusas, but locals eat many more. Pupusas, a cornmeal mass stuffed with farmer's cheese, refried beans or sometimes spinach, are fried on an outdoor griddle. On the table is a large glass jar of homemade Curtido, a spicy, pickled coleslaw and a container of tomato salsa. You spoon Curtido and salsa onto the potato pancake-like delicacies and eat them with your fingers. Messy and good. Only in El Salvador you say? Pity.

Our route from Guatemala to El Salvador was long enough to include an overnight in Chiquimula, a forgettable town with at least a nice central plaza. The border, when we reached it the next day was clogged with transport trucks, mostly hauling containers from ships in Puerto Barrios, the only Caribbean port in Guatemala, to El Salvador and beyond. Our minibus passed at least 100 parked trucks to drop us at the border. There were so many trucks I thought maybe there was a work-to-rule strike, but I guess that is the usual occurrence. We just filled out forms and walked across with no problems.

At the bus stop on the El Salvador side, a woman who said she could speak English approached us. She said she loves to practice her English, which was about as good as my Spanish, so we chatted away, understanding about half of what was said. We ended up sharing a taxi to the town of Metapan with her, but regretfully refused a visit to her home.

Metapan was one of the most unattractive towns we have visited. It didn't have a nice central square, the streets had been torn up and garbage was everywhere. The informal market area did add character to the town. Unlike most towns that have a central market building, Metapan vendors set up shop at curbside or roamed the streets carrying their goods in their arms. Music blared from corner loud speakers to put shoppers in the buying mood. We could watch all the activity from the rooftop terrace of our hotel.

The reason we stopped in Metapan was to take a recommended bus ride eastwards over the mountains. It was an interesting three hour drive slowly up and down a dirt road, with views of the mountains all around us. We ended at the border town of El Poy where once again the trucks were lined up to cross to Guatemala.

We took another bus to the town of La Palma, a much prettier town full of artisans shops. The artist Fernando Llort settled here in 1972 and taught locals to produce colourful naif style paintings of village life and gaily decorated crosses. If you have ever seen art work sold from El Salvador, it was probably painted in La Palma. We stayed in the best hotel in town, a simple resort with a restaurant and pool. It wasn\'b4t the same standard as a North American resort, but at US$23 per night it was a good deal.

Near La Palma is the highest peak in El Salvador, El Pital 2730M. We took a bus up into the hills to the trailhead for El Pital. We walked along a dirt road for an hour past fields of green cabbages, waiting to be harvested for pickled coleslaw to go with Pupusas. It had poured rain the night before, the first real rain we had experienced in Central America, and clouds were still lingering on the top of El Pital. In fact, when we reached the top, we couldn't see a thing and the temperature had dropped dramatically. We were sweating on the way up, but it took quite a while for me to warm up on the way down.

The next bus back to town wasn't due to leave for more than an hour so Ray had lots of time to chat to Walter, an Agro-economist who retired to the area. He is a Ham radio operator and loves to chat in English. Ray found him very interesting. Walter helped us by arranging for a ride in the back of a pickup truck all the way to town.

Our next stop was Suchitoto, a colonial style town that has been compared to Antigua, before it became a tourist destination. It is a quiet, pretty town, full of potential, but still undiscovered. Friday noon, the bus to Suchitoto makes a special detour to pick up school children returning to their homes for lunch. The rest of the passengers on this already crowded bus were prepared for this detour down a bumpy, dusty road. Most closed the windows and got out handkerchiefs to put over their faces. We bumped down to one school where the children were all waiting, all 50 of them, in a nice straight line. I would never have believed they could all get on, but that was just the first school stop. Two more school-fulls crowded on, thankfully to go but a short distance.

We got off the bus in Suchitoto trying to find our way on unmarked streets to a hotel listed in our guidebook. A young French girl, working as a volunteer in Suchitoto, offered to help. She mentioned that her landlady, Senora Rubia Ebolo, had a spare room, so we ended up staying there too. It wasn't the plushest accommodations but it had laundry facilities and a relaxing courtyard.

Suchitoto was the hottest we had experienced yet, so we did a lot of relaxing. We did walk one Km down to a reservoir lake, Embalse Cerron Grande, to have a look. A new tourist center on the edge of the lake, still awaiting tourists, has been built with the help of Belgium. Tour boats sat waiting to take customers on a tour of the lake. At US$10 each, we were content just to enjoy the view from our side.

Saturday night is movie night in Suchitoto. Movies are projected on a sheet set against a wall on the town square and using a television DVD player, movies are shown to the assembled families. The French government must have sponsored the show that night for the audience suffered through a documentary of technology in France before the main offering. We gave up and wandered to another park where everyone sat in lawn chairs watching a classic Charlie Chaplin silent movie. That was much better. Our entertainment for the night didn't end there as a very good group was playing at a local hostal/bar, 2 Gardenias. We had a beer and listened to their repertoire of traditional Spanish songs and latinized Beatles and American classics.

We had planned to visit the town of Santa Ana, but the bus from Suchitoto went past a lake, Lago de Coatepeque, which sounded more inviting. Many wealthy San Salvadoreans maintain vacation properties on the lake. We detoured to the lake and booked into a simple hostal, Amacuilco, on the lake. We got the best room in the house, a simple wood cabin with a balcony overlooking the lake. At the end of a rather rickety wooden walkway was a terrace with tables and chairs. A ladder led down to the cooling lake waters, just what we needed after a hot bus ride.

We were not the only Gringos at Amacuilco. A group of young backpackers were staying there as well. We had a nice chat with them in the afternoon, but that night we wished they were not there. After many beers, a Portuguese fellow decided to have an all night bongo drum marathon on the lakeside terrace. Sound carries very well at the lake and by 2:30 AM Ray had had enough. He stomped down to the terrace and asked him to quit. The drum player told him he could play as long as he wished, so Ray and another couple who wanted to sleep enlisted the help of Sandra, the manager, to put an end to the noise. The bongo player wasn't even very good!

Early the next day we took the bus to Cerro Verde National Park on the other side of the lake, to do a day hike of a volcano. We had a great day. We joined four young ladies travelling and volunteering in Central America for a guided hike to the top of the volcano. There are two active volcanos you can climb, the barren Volcan Izalco, which erupted continuously until 1957, and Volcan Santa Ana. We opted for Santa Ana. For US$1 each we had the services of a young girl as guide and an escort of two policemen. As was the case in Guatemala, incidents had occurred on the trails in the past so a police escort is now provided. It was about 1 hour of hot uphill climbing until we passed hillsides of Yucca and reached the barren slopes of the volcano. In another 20 minutes we were on the top. One side fell away more than a hundred meters to a smoking, sulphorous crater lake. The other side gave a spectacular view of Lago de Coatepeque, even farther below us. We had a snack at the top and reluctantly retraced our steps back down the volcano.

Back at the hostal we learned that Sandra had evicted the crowd of rowdies, but not without some trouble. The bongo player took exception to being asked to leave and had a temper tantrum. No wonder some establishments count backpackers a mixed blessing.

We continued farther west the next day, to the town of Juayua, a pretty small town in the middle of hills and coffee plantations. Juayua and two other neighbouring towns were the center of indigenous uprising which led to a revolutionary movement in 1932 that was brutally crushed by government forces, backed by the coffee owners. The military retaliated by killing anyone that looked vaguely indigenous. Most of those surviving fled to Honduras and Guatemala. Juayua is now a quiet town with tree lined streets.

The Lonely Planet recommended hiring a guide for hikes in the area, so we arranged for Lara, a local man, to lead us. He was most pleasant and once he realized we old fogies were quite fit, took us on a good exploration of the countryside. We walked to Los Chorros de Calera, a series of waterfalls forming large pools in the middle of a jungle. They are actually dikes used to generate hydroelectric power for Juayua. We visited the rather primitive hydro plant, built in the 1960s, and continued on through a coffee plantation. The coffee owners have built a public park with a swimming hole and a series of wash tubs. A school group was just leaving the park when we arrived and some boys were swimming and bathing in the water but the tub area looked unused. Perhaps it was too far from town to be useful.

We walked about two Km back to town, through a very poor looking subdivision, typical of the outskirts of the towns. The homes were little more than shacks, although most were relatively neat. Water was provided from common taps and carried to the homes in big plastic jugs. Large piles of firewood were piled beside the houses for sale to townspeople.

We hired Lara again for a second hike in the neighbouring town of Apaneca, at 1450 M the highest town in San Salvador, and therefore one of the coolest spots. Juayua has established a popular food festival on the weekends and Apaneca is trying to become an artisan center although we didn't see much evidence of it when we were there. We walked to one of two crater lakes, Laguna de las Ninfas, north of town. We passed a gated community of vacation homes and then climbed up and down a dirt road to reach the shallow lake. Reeds, used to weave baskets, grow at the shore. We walked around the small lake, through a coffee plantation, and then up a hill to look down on a former crater lake. Lara led us on paths along a ridge, but to regain the main road back to town, we had to cut through a farmer's house, with permission. It was a simple mud-floored hut, one of many in the area, but we were welcome to walk through.

Back in Apaneca, we had lunch in a Comedore (restaurant) complex across from the town plaza and the site of the town church. The 400-year old Iglesia San Andres Apostle was one of the oldest in El Salvador but it was completely destroyed in a January 2001 earthquake. It is now behind a metal fence, in the process of reconstruction.

Juayua has a large church on the side of the town plaza. It has a unique to El Salvador set of bells that toll the hour plus play tunes for the 6 PM service. Chairs were set up under a large canopy in front of the church one evening and a service was transmitted by loudspeaker to the town. We couldn't figure out why the service would continue all night long. It didn't bother me but Ray used his earplugs. In the morning our hostess, Clara, told us it was a wake for a lady, a dedicated member of the congregation. It still seemed unusual to us.

El Salvador had a long and bloody past. The 'conflict' lasted from the 1970s to 1992. Perquin was the headquarters of the FMLN, the left-wing opposition to the government. This tiny town, perched in the mountains close to the Honduras border, now has a small museum as a memorial to the atrocities that occurred during this time. We were told it would give more insight into El Salvador's history and it was a pretty location, so how could we resist.

We stopped overnight on the way in San Miguel, a large commercial town with a good, modern hotel with a small pool across from the bus station. That was a bonus at US$26, the upper end of our price range.

In Perquin we stayed just out of town as the lone guests in a converted lumber mill. It was clean and comfortable. We visited the museum with its pictures of the assassinated leaders of the FMLN, including many women, and display of armaments. Behind the building are the remains of a downed helicopter that killed the hated Colonel Monterrosa, blamed for the 1981 massacre of 1000 townspeople in the nearby town of El Mozote.

Across the street from the museum is Cerro Perquin. A path to the top passes by the former guerrilla camp, bomb craters, trenches and a tunnel used by the FMLN. The view from the top looks over green mountains stretching to Honduras not far to the north.

That was our last stop in El Salvador. The next day we started early for a long trip to Nicaragua. We took one truck, four buses, one minibus, one taxi, and crossed the border from El Salvador to Honduras, then crossed from Honduras to Nicaragua, finally arriving in Leon at 6 PM. Our connections were so good that we never had time to stop for lunch.

The biggest rest break was at the El Salvador-Honduras border. The extremely inefficient system had us lining up to fill out forms and get stamped out of El Salvador, then lining up again at an adjacent wicket to pay US$3 each and get our passports stamped to enter Honduras. They staple the entrance fee to the filled in form so they didn't even have change when we tried to pay with a $10 bill. It didn't help that there was a bus load of El Salvadorean kids going to a basketball tournament trying to get through this process too. It took an hour before we were on our way again.

The Honduras-Nicaragua border was easy in comparison. We got off the bus to be besieged by cyclo drivers all vying for our business to ride us to the immigration office and then to the bus. We elected to walk to the immigration office, which was almost deserted and took just a short time to be processed. One driver, Alexander (the Great, he told us) spoke good English and convinced us we needed his services to get to the bus station in time to make the 3 PM bus. He was right. He worked hard for his money, riding 2 KM over a bridge and up another incline to the bus. We got on just before it departed.

I am sure the Nicaragua roads will be good in another year or two but they are currently being rebuilt for the first 50 Km from the border. After mostly good El Salvador roads, the bumpy ride was slow and dusty. We were glad to finally reach Leon, find a hostal, have a shower and finally have supper.

We were too tired to care that our accommodations were less than acceptable, so we changed hostals the next morning. Leon is pleasant, but very hot, so we are using the opportunity to relax, walk about town a bit and write this latest episode. Tomorrow we head to a beach area 20 Km from town to try out the Pacific surf for a few days.

I guess those of you who ski are glad of the new snow that has fallen in March, but the rest of you have probably had enough. We are staying near fans to keep cool. What a contrast.