Rio Dulce to Santa Ana, El Salvador

---

Places Visited - Santa Ana.

After our relaxing time in Rio Dulce we had another border crossing to cope with to El Salvador. On paper this looked a lot of hassle and mither! We would have to get a total of 4 buses to get to where we wanted to go, Santa Ana a large city in the North of El Salvador. Luckily as we were going for the bus we bumped into the guy who recommended the Tortuga and he told us that there is a direct first class bus. We haggled the price and it worked out double of what we were going to pay for the 4 buses but was worth paying just to avoid the hassle! When I said double the price it still only worked out to be about 7 pound each for 5 hour bus journey! A funny storey for why we were waiting for the bus. A bus pulled up and about 20 people got off carrying brand new DVD players and some of them with upto 5 and then you could see some of them trying to sell them on! A strange site and I couldn’t help thinking of Dell boy and Only Fools and Horses, I think there might have been a truck somewhere in Guatemala a bit lighter that morning!!

There was no hassle at the border the Immigration officer got on the bus looked at the passport and that was it. No stamp needed as we had a stamp from Guatemala so it was also valid in San Salvador. Santa Ana did not live up to our expectations. Firstly the area we were staying was supposed to be nice but it was dodgy, very scruffy and lots of pissed up blokes and homeless people. The 3 hotels we tried charged rooms by the hour, so in other words brothels! We didn’t have much choice as it was getting dark, so we picked the nicest one, next to a Cathedral as for some reason that made us feel slightly better! The room was nice enough and one of the nice touches was the speakers coming out of the ceiling with communal music, which I can only presume was to drown out the noise coming from your room. Some lovely cliental came and went… literally!! When we went out to get some food, the place looked even worse in the dark and it is the first time we both felt unsafe since traveling. We decided to get a takeaway pizza and headed back to the brothel! Originally we were planning to stay a few nights to explore the local area but decided to get up early and go to Lago Coatepeque.

---

Photos

The original Atari!
An old Atari so had to take a picture. This brought back lots of happy memories and the thousands of hours playing Pac man and Asteroids!! Will have to get onne on ebay when I get home!