La Puerta Del Diablo (The Devils Door)

decided to leave Antigua in Guatemala for my next country El Salvador because I wanted to feel like a gringo or extranero again because there are way to many tourists in the city in guatemala and it is very hard to practice the old spanish here. i caught a bus early in the day on what is boxing day in england and headed off at 4am for the capital of El Salvador which is easily remembered San salvador. Managed to track down a nice place to stay away from the notorious smelly and dangerous downtown market area. I decided to check out the town in the daytime and apart from a couple of nice churches and cathedrals there is not much to see in the central part of this capital city but the outskirts of town are amazing which I found out when i took another old american schoolbus for the hills that overlook the whole city and apparently it is easy to see the coast and the Volcan San salvador. Even the guy who gave me the directions to the bus i took was telling me to err on the side of caution around this neighbourhood in daylight but it didnt feel too bad to me personally and not too many street people approach you.

The afternoon trip to the devils door was great and I happened to meet another traveller from italy who was going up to guatemala in a week or so. She was being shown the cities sites by a local ice cream man called Mario who was a very proud salvatruchan or catracho as they are apparently referred to here. so, he offered me a lift to town which was handy and i also got to see a great little pueblo or village up in the Hills called Panchetlan which was cool. I decided to change rooms the follwing day because they mentioned in the morning they were going to visit the pacific coast in el salvador which I have never seen so far cos I have always been on the carribean side in all of my visits over this way.

anyway, hope you like the fotos and remember that during the bitter war torn history of this country often the guerillas would use this place to execute people supposedly because the bodies were extremely easy to dispose of by throwing them off the side of the mountain into any direction towards the valeys and rocks. well thankfully the tourist police were at the bottom of the devils puerta this day to make sure no rascals made their way up to cause any serious mischief.

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