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Published: October 6th 2010
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Juayua
Thursday 26th August
Juayua is a small town in the coffee growing area in the hills of Northern
El Salvador. It's a single bus ride from
Santa Ana that shouldn't take too long. But, as is becoming the pattern for this trip, we have transport problems as the pick-up taking us the short distance from our hotel to the bus station gets stuck on top of a speed hump! The longest part of the bus ride from
Santa Ana to
Juayua is actually the start of the journey as the bus tries to negotiate its way through the obstacle course that is Santa Ana market while belching thick black diesel fumes over any fresh produce for sale and we are raided by boarding parties of market traders. I've previously described the joys of shopping on a chicken bus in my blog entry
101 Things To Buy On A Chicken Bus .
The town of
Juayua is quite a small place but one which seems to receive quite a few visitors and has a definite "artsy" feel to it. Alot of the buildings are decorated with murals and, like
Suchitoto, the bars and restaurants are decorated with local art work. As at Suchitoto the horrific civil war
seems to have been a source of inspiration to many of the artists. Up in the hills and at an altitude where coffee can be grown, it is on the colourful
Ruta de las Flores. We are there on a Thursday but at weekends there are more people in town who come for the food festival. The town is also well known for it's statue of the "Black Christ" in the local church.
We make our way to the
Hotel Juayua where we meet
Alberto who owns the hotel and a coffee plantation and is to be our guide during our stay here {
He also tells us he was at Woodstock!}. This hotel is another one with "character". In our room the bare floor has been covered with pine needles, we have a safe that looks like it's straight from a "cowboys rob a bank" film and the headboard from one of the beds looks like it's come from Sequoia National Park.
A short drive along the
Ruta de las Flores takes us to
Ataco. This is another colourful town where many of the buildings are decorated with murals and you can see demonstrations of weaving on some
quite antiquated machinery.
After a quick look around town and some lunch we are taken to the local coffee mill where the coffee from local plantations is processed. The attraction here for me is not just seeing the processes involved but the fact that most of the machinery seems to be the original machinary used when the mill was first opened in the 1930s and that it is still in use.
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