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Published: January 7th 2009
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Tim Version:
* Traveled to Cacaopera along a bumpy as hell bus ride after a struggle with bus times in San Miguel.
* Stayed at the Mayan Medicine Man´s place, swam in a beautiful pristine river, and found Eve to be truly loved by nature.
The version that almost had to sleep in the streets of Cacaopera:
Leaving San Miguel, we had a real struggle at the bus station. Everyone was pretty wasted from the night before, and asking bus times we kept getting wrong directions, wrong bus times, and nonexistent buses! It took us nearly 3 hours to catch a bus in the direction we wanted, a real struggle! It also revealed yet again the strange mentality here (Central America in general) about distances and times...
There are tonnes of people working hard manual labor, with ladies carrying huge quantities of food in baskets on their heads over large distances, kids and men alike lugging wood on their backs all over the country. The oddity in all this is that if you ask about distances and directions when awlking, a walk that may take 30 minutes is "imposible!" and you apparently definitely need a taxi!
A 30 minute walk tends to end up as 5 minutes, and impossible destinations mean you need to change bus more than once. The amount that these people spend on more expencive food rather than walking 5 minutes to the market, and the amount they spend on taxis traveling what are to me very short distances is incredible! Habits like that will keep you poor in any country.
From there we headed to a town called San Francisco Gotera where we changed bus to another to continue onward to Cacaopera. That second bus ride was awesome, bumpy as hell, averaging a snail´s pace and really no need for seats as your ass was never in them! Beautiful scenery as always, though more arid that before, and the villages were totally indigenous with Spanish taking a distant second in terms of language.
There are no hostels in Cacaopera and no hotels either, and staying with the local Mayan Medicine guy is your only option - sadly for us when we arrived, it appeared like we were screwed as he wasn´t around and nobody had any idea where he was! Various people very kindly helping us search for him turned
up nothing until a kid said that he was down by the river. By this point we had already resigned ourselves to sleeping in the free open air college type thing next door, but the news was welcome. Thinking the river was close we thought that meant soon.. not the case, its a freakin long walk! The gyu´s nickname is "Milla Maya", nicknamed for the fact that he teaches the mayan history and community centre mayan language classes, not to mention the fact that he is also the practising traditional Mayan doctor. Miguel is his real name and he is one highly educated dude. Softly spoken with a kid around 10, his house was mud brick and fairly large with lots of things for his mayan rituals such as animal skulls, stone idles, corn, wood carved into snake shapes, creepy looking voodoo large candle holder setups, and various other things... no photos allowed so you will have to use your imagination.
We dined on som seriously tasty pupusas for dinner, followed by a bottle of the only wine in town, a Lambrusco, and settled into our seriously comfortable room for the night, on a bed with a thatched net
bottom rather than a mattress which I´ve now fallen in love with as its damn comfortable! Eve had a good takl to the guy but I mostly chilled out in the room.
The next morning was beautiful and crisp fresh with the altitude jump from San Miguel. Miguel left very early at 6am leaving his son home who just played and watched TV for most of the morning. Again, like the kids in San Miguel, he was easy and clear to talk to, proving my kid point yet again! We walked to the river, finding it to actually be quite a hike downhill, and after crossing roads and fields and farms we got to take a dip in one of the cleanest most beautiful rivers I´ve seen yet! Passing the locals in this kind of town really made me feel truly alien, as rather than ever trying to be sold anything they rather looked scared of us, though really just me as Eve is 100% El Salvadorian genetically so looks much like them anyway. Its the taller white fella thats the scary one! The river isn´t deep but is wide, with a current thats enough to make it fun
to swim in but perfectly safe for a dip. We swam around for ages, with Eve having a dragonfly land on her hand at one point, incredible... well, it didn´t end there. Next there were 2 on her, then 3, then various bigger and tougher ones jostling for positions, fighting for a spot on Eve. Meanwhile I tried in vain to get a single one to land on me =( We spent a good chunk of time down there just relaxing and soaking up nature in the beautiful tranquility that with loud pupusa ladies and pickups with loud speaker system advertising things isn´t always easy to find. The walk back up the hill, not so easy, and left us sweaty again after our nice refreshing swim, but we were both floating on clouds due to the beauty of the place so none of that mattered. Opposite the church in the town, people were playing soccer and sitting around chatting, and we found that upstairs is the place to be for food so we made a b-line and found that to be totally true! With a few ladies setup, we feasted on chicken and ride and vegies.
Thats about all
there is to do in Cacaopera so our next target was Perquin, which meant doubling back to Gotera, so we hopped another bumpy ass bus back and started reading up on history, as that is what Perquin is meant to be all about (guerilla war history that is).
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