El Salvador

---

El Tunco

On the bus from Santa Rosa to San Salvador, a skinny old lady got on, with something wrapped up in her hands, and I saw a flash of claws. She had put a chicken in a plastic bag, pretty much folded it in half and was going to hold it on her lap the 4 hours. I dont know if it was her next meal or just her little mate. And this was not a chicken bus, it had AC, nice reclining seats and didnt have any funky smell. She sat right across from us and I had visions of it going mental and scratching someone´s eyes out, but the conductor came around to collect for tickets, and he was having none of the chicken. He grabbed it from her, went into the front drivers compartment, which was behind a shut door, the bus stopped, and I can only assume he chucked the thing out the door...not sure he wouldve taken it outta the bag and set it on the ground. And the old lady just laughed.

Once we arrived in San Salvador we got mobbed by cabbies trying to give us a $40 US cab ride to El Tunco which is where we would be staying and a 45 minute cab drive. While trying to haggle down the price a uni student walked by and told us the bus station was around the corner and it only cost a $1 to El Tunco. The cabbies weren´t to happy when we walked off with the kid, they where telling us the kid was "LOCO" and not to go with him, so i guess he saved us $38 bucks. We stayed in this two storey house which had 5 rooms and was a block from the surf, so once we unpacked we hit the waves cause it had been nearly a month since our last surf in Barra Mexico. The wave we surfed was super localised even mick couldn´t get any waves, there was a big brick wall that ran along the beach and it had spray painted on it in massive letters LOCALS ONLY. So after 2 waves in an hour we paddled in.

I wanted to go surf this wave called km59 whiched I surfed last time I was here, which is a bit further out of town and not that crowded. When we got there, there was like 5 guys in the water which was good compared to everywhere else and the waves look pretty good. On the paddle out this ginger hair guy who looked like my friend sam from back home caught a wave but pulled off it not far from where i was paddling out and started abusing me in spanish and giving me all these death stares, so i spoke back to him and told him to speak to me in english and whats his problem, but he just keep going off in spanish so i told him to get f$%!?(MISSING)ked and kept paddling. Once we got out the back we was stilling rambling on so i asked him again what his problem was and he finally spoke back to me in english and told me he was sick of Brazilians coming out here, i told him i was no brazo and i was from australia and everything was cool. The guy ends up living right in front of the beach in this sweet house that looks over the wave but the funny thing is he invites me and carrie up to his house shows us his property offers us beers and something to eat and then drops us back to El Tunco. The guy was from San Diego and he does alot of work with Pearl Jam, U2 and jack johnson and that house was his holiday house.

We had to go to La Libertad to get food to cook, and you just get a bus there. Someone must be driving a lot of school buses down from America and they do them up, all graffitied with loud ass music and tvs that they only show super violent movies on. Really good for the kids. We had got our food and just jumped on the back of the bus, we were about halfway back, and the driver turned around. We went back to La Libertad and he had the conductor run and get his cake he´d forgotten in the shop. Then we were good to go.

The last day we were in El Tunco, we paddled out, it was small and fat. I was out the back, only about 20 minutes in, and duckdove a wave and somehow my board hit me smack on the head and pushed my neck down so when I came up I couldnt move or breath. Kook! Michael hadda come over and he towed me in on his leg rope...we had all these people where we were staying learning to surf and I´m the one who kooks it. We got picked up the next morning at 4am for our flight to Panama City. Not happy jan.

Pics

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=77461&l=91dfc&id=609417068

---