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As well as being the most "off-the-beaten-track" destination in Central America (95% less backpackers here than in Guatemala, for example) El Salvador also has to go down as quite possibly the friendliest country I've ever visited. Almost from the moment I arrived (when I asked the bus driver where a certain hotel was, and he told me to stay on the bus and he´d drive the bus there for me once the other passengers had gotten off), I´ve been treated more like I´ve been a visitor in someone else´s home rather than just a traveller passing through. Sure, most people in Mexico, Belize and Guatemala were pretty nice too, but me and some of the folks I've been travelling with all agree - there´s a genunine-ness and amicableness about the way Salvadorenos treat us and interact with us that is a cut above, and we seem to be getting to know the locals we meet just that little bit more than was normal in the other countries. Also, having been here over 2.5 weeks now I can honestly say there hasn't been a SINGLE incident of anyone standing on a street corner insisting on trying to sell me some sort of
day-tour somewhere, or insisting that they know a better hotel than the one I'm going to, or trying to rip me over something else - in some parts of Guatemala learing to ignore that sort of thing was part of my daily routine but it hasn't happened a solitary time here.
My last two weeks in El Salvador have gone a little like this:
TACUBA
My first stop was Tacuba, a pretty and small town just across the border that is on the backdoor of the Parque Nacional de Imposible, one of the biggest national parks in El Salvador. The town was uber-mellow, with quite a few people gathering on the main street to snack at street food stands as the night wore on and groups of little kids would practice their english by walking up to me and saying things like ¨Hello people", before giggling and running off up the street.
Probably one of the craziest motherfuckers (in a good way) I ever met lives there, and he also happens to own a pretty cool tour company
, Imposible Tours, that organises daytrips into the Parque Nacional de Imposible. His name is Manolo, and between him and
his parents they own the coolest place to stay in Tacuba complete with a hammock garden and a groovy lookout area that looks out over the whole town and into the mountains where the national park starts. I met my friend Siena here, she was my "sister" is the homestay I stayed in at language school in Guatemala (ie. another language student) and we arranged to meet up in Tacuba, and there were a few other friendly folk hangin´at Manolo's place too. With Manolo as our "Guia Loco" (crazy guide), 4 of us were taken on an awesome tour through the park that involved following a river, taking every opportunity to leap into deep pools from various high points - the highest being over 10 meters. We also did some "rappelling" down one of the steeper waterfalls with harnesses and ropes and so on, plus had a fairly steep trek back up at the end of the day. Getting into the Parque itself was a treat, as we all stood in the back of Manolo's pickup (the road was way too bad to sit down, you'd have damaged your kidneys) and there was the odd overhanging branch from one tree
Manolo
The Crazy Guide, with his bulls testicles for dinner that he first told me was chicken in order to get me to eat oneor another that we'd have to duck away from to avoid being removed at speed from the back of the pickup!
Later that night we all ended up at the bar-cafe that Manolo and his parents own, and it was a great night of getting well-hammered which included Manolo and I trying to sing the guitar riffs of lots of rock classics from Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath. Some of Manolo's friends joined us for a while, and somehow being from New Zealand I was ascribed the nickname of Mr Frodo, to which I would usually respond by putting on an imaginary ring from underneath my t-shirt and then would hide under a table pretending I was invisible. We then concluded that the reason Mr Frodo and friends all left on boats at the end of "Return of the King" is because they were all going to drink piss in El Salvador, which explained why I was there.
The next day we walked off the hangover with a fairly gruelling 7-hour trek around the mountain tops of the national park, checking out some fairly awesome views across El Salvador, into Guatemala and out across the Pacific ocean. There
On the Waterfall Tour
L to R: Siena (Seattle), Maximo, Me, Manolo, Nicholas (Swiss) was also some quite groovy wildlife around, like armadillos, a rare breed of white vulture, and a few other interesting things like a
Coati which I´d not heard of before. It was a damn hard days walk is some fairly high temperatures, although true to form Manolo arranged for there to be large bottles of beer sitting in an ice-chest when we got to the other end.
JUAYUA (and ATACO & APANECA)
After we left Tacuba, we headed to a string of small town slightly east known as the "Ruta de las Flores", or route of the flowers - in reference to the numerous flowers grown in and around the small towns. We based ourselves out of Juayua for the 4 nights we were there, and were lucky enough to be there over a weekend when Juayua´s weekly food festival takes place. The small, artsy town (think groovy murals painted everywhere) puts on quite a show each weekend, with the small plaza and surrounding streets closed to traffic, and tables, chairs and gas stoves erected everywhere for the food festival. There was so much to choose from, and after trying some frog (a bit like chicken, tho
Juayua Street Art
Stuff like this was all over the walls in Juayua with a limper texture), and some prawns, I opted to go for the marinated BBQ pork and assorted vegies and salads. Plus two beers of course.
The place we stayed,
Hotel Anahuac , was awesome. An old Salvadorean home with a big grassy internal courtyard with lots of hammocks and chill space thats been converted into a backpackers. Its the kind of place that sucks people in, I met one swiss guy who went to go there for a couple of nights and ending up staying there 9! The had a big TV and DVD player there, and I finally got to see the latest, greatest cinema to come out of El Salvador, called
Innocent Voices - a dramatisation about child soldiers during El Salvador's fairly nasty civil war through the 1980s. Its a cool film, and gets a big recommendation from me. The people that run the hotel were mellow and useful to talk to about whatever we wanted to do, and when I checked out I accidentally left a fairly worthless $3 casio digital watch in the room, and the lovely dude that owned the place found it and walked a few blocks across the town to the bus-stop where
he thought we'd be so that I wouldn't leave without it! I was pleasantly surpised that he bothered, I'm sure most hoteliers wouldn't have...
From Juayua, we also made a daytrip to a couple of other Ruta de las Flores towns, namely Ataco and Apaneca. Ataco was a fairly cool spanish colonial town, a little like Antigua that I wrote about in my last blog but although not quite as grand, but also with 99.9%!l(MISSING)ess tourists too. Apaneca is known for a bit of an arts scene, and we ended up going to the house of one this amazing local artist to hang out for a bit, and he fell over himself trying to be nice to us, making us coffee, offering ice-cream, and just hanging out with us for ages, then to top it off he drove us back to Juayua, took us to one of his favourite budget restaurants and insisted on picking up the bill for all of us at the end! What a nice guy!
The restaurant mainly served
Pupusas which I've become very fond of in El Salvador - its basically 2 tortilla breads stuck together and stuffed with any combination you
Cesar
Laid-back dude who owned the Hotel in Juayua. You can kinda make the groovy garden and hammocks behind him. like of cheese, beans, shredded meat, vegetables and vine flowers. At one more deluxe Pupuseria (as pupusa restaurants get called) I even had one with shrimps, garlic and cheese. Pupusas are generally served with a spicy tomato salsa and a pickled cabbage relish that tastes a lot better than it looks. In fact most travellers I've met here have developed a Pupusa addiction as well.
EL ZONTE
After taking longer than we initially thought to get out of Juayua, Siena and I headed down to the surfers beach of Playa El Zonte, and the groovy lodgings of
Esencia Nativa complete with lots of hammocks again and even a kidney-shaped swimming pool. We soon learnt that surfing isn't something you learn in a day or two, though we both made some progress at least in being able to stand up. I've decided that to have a better stab at it, when I get to Nicaragua I'm going to find one of the main surf beaches and stay there for a whole week to see if I can make more progress.
The general vibe of El Salvador treating me more like I was guest in someone's home continued at
In The Kitchen
Me, Alex (the owner of the beach place) and an english girl getting the BBQ ready in his kitchen El Zonte, when Alex (the owner of Esencia Native) decided that rather than each of us buy dinner out of his adjoining restaurant one night, instead he'd drive us to the nearest city and we could all just pitch in and buy stuff to make a BBQ, plus we got a couple of bottles of vodka so that we didn't have to buy drinks from his bar! Very generous again, as there was absolutely nothing to be gained by him in the arrangement, apart from making for a fun night for all of us of course. It ended up with a few of us making a mess in his kitchen, as I marinaded all the meat in an olive oil, lime juice and honey concoction while Alex made his own hummous for the vegies and everyone else pitched in with other jobs which they performed in between regular dips in the afore-mentioned pool (it was a hot night - luckily the pool was right next to the kitchen). It was a very groovy night, which ended up with a group of inebriated people charging off down the beach about midnight for a swim amongst the flurouescent plankton.
SUCHITOTO
After the beach we headed up the "Arts Capital" of El Salvador, Suchitoto where we met up again with Jenn, a Canadian from London, Ontario (they apparently have a London in Canado too, it seems). Suchitoto is another pleasant spanish colonial mountain town, with lots of cobbled streets and lots of brightly painted homes lining the streets. There was lot of funky art around the place, and the whole vibe of the town was just very pleasant and mellow, I have simple but fond memories of sitting in the main plaza on our final night eating an ice-cream and watching the locals just chilling out and enjoying a Saturday night.
The area around Suchitoto was also caught up fiercely in the
El Salvador Civil War through the 1980s. We spent a day with a local guide, who was a supporter of the
guerillas during the civil war who explained some of the history and took us on a trek through the forest on the slopes of a volano which fighting so heavy that the government army eventually evicted everybody that lived there. He showed us old trenches, hiding places, old campsites used as hospitals which included having to perform emergency amputations
without anaesthetic, and some fairly groovy murals painted in support of the rebels too.
And thats about where this blog ends. Since then, Jenn and Siena have left for Nicaragua while I spend another week or 2 nosing about El Salvador. I´ve been in the capital San Salvador, and then to beautiful mountain village called Alegria where I am now and in the morning I'm heading to another beach, but more about all of this in my next blog.
Hope all is well whereever you are, send me news soon!
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Angel
non-member comment
I have to agree with you
Very nice article. I have to agree with you about Salvadoran people. They're very hospitable and simply authentic! By the way, "La cerveza de verdad" translates to The true beer; not beer of truth. I've tried and it's not bad, especially with seafood, mainly raw oyster (and I mean real oysters, not "Mountain Osyters", like the ones Manolo had).