The Saviour

All we really knew about El Salvador before we entered was that there used to be a civil war, a fairly nasty one at that, its a little richer that its neighbours, and very few tourists bother to go there.

Within a few bus rides of entering the country we had big smiles on our faces; the avocados and mangoes were dirt cheap, the people were so friendly - bemused and inquisitive about us, and reggaeton was on the stereo everywhere.

The general reactions from local people in previous countries was not always over warm, and conversations were often started as a pretext for begging. It was always clear that many westerners had been there before us, setting bad examples with their ignorance and rudeness, and obviously flashing money around. This wasn't so much the case in El Salvador, especially in the eastern part where we started off. Not a huge amount of tourism had passed before us to give them the impression that we were rude, rich, and easily exploited.

First Encounters.

Our first interesting encounter with the locals was a family on a bus, they were returning from a market where they had been selling grapes. It turns out they were from Guatemala, staying down in El Salvador to sell their produce. Our conversation seemed to be a little more pained than usual, something didn't quite fit - we seemed to be teaching them Spanish words. But then it dawned on us; these were Mayan people, an indigenous group still existing in great numbers in Guatemala. Apparently they have still maintained a lot of their indigenous culture and most importantly their language; Spanish comes a very distance second for them. They were incredibly friendly and warm and seemed delighted and fascinated when we showed them a world map, and I showed them some photos of Cornwall. Though the huge gap in culture and education was highlighted when they asked me if the street in the photo was the Pan American highway.

Alegría

The first few days in El Salvador were spent in a charming little mountain town; Alegría. We stayed in a strange kind of hostel/house - the lady running the place only worked there during the day and went back to her own house in the afternoon. So essentially it was like our own house, with bedrooms, a kitchen, dinning room and back garden. Rest assured we made full use of the kitchen by cooking up a storm of a vegetable and been soup one night, and omelets for breakfast.

Casa Alegre - Our happy house

During out time there, we paid a visit to a local Volcano crater lake - as you do when there is one in the area. The journey there again brought us into contact with the hospitality of the locals, as we hitched a lift in the back of a truck to get there.

The crater lake wasn' t quite as draw droppingly beautiful or spectacular as we had imagined, but interesting none the less. The lake was half empty, with the exposed land being a kind of sulphur mud, providing the now familiar smell of rotten eggs in the air. There was a group of school kids playing football on an area of grass by the side of the lake. We approached them and struck up a conversation with their refereeing school teacher. The children were all from families living on the slopes of the (dormant volcano); all were poor subsistence living communities. The school itself was situated in the crater - how many kids in the world can say they go to school in a volcanic crater?!

The crater lake, Alegría

On our way back out of the crater back to Alegría, we spotted a woman walking up a path off to the right with a huge load balanced on her head, and a small child walking beside her, also carrying bags. In a 'why not, what else have we got to do today' moment, we decided to follow her and see where she was heading (which was apparently into the middle of nowhere).


We caught up with her and her son, and helped them carry their bags - full of food from the local stores. They were on their once weekly 3 hour round trip walking to the local town and back for supplies (and their bags were really heavy). The path we were following led down the outer slopes of the crater which were covered in tall cultivated vegetation such as banana and coffee plants. It turned out that there was a whole community living on the side of the volcano, living in mud huts hidden by the vegetation.

Mud hut house, near Laguna de Alegría

These are the communities that the school in the crater served. This was a whole world that you just couldn't see from just looking a the volcano's slope from afar.

Juayua and Santa Ana

Moving on from Alegría we arrived in another quaint mountain town (again avoiding the horrible heat of the Pacific coast), Juayua - which yes, was difficult to pronounce correctly at first. The attraction of this town was it had a weekly food market, where stalls were set up by people from surrounding towns serving allegedly good food. Note - the average Salvadoran dish is equally as poor as anything else we'd found in Central America. The food in this market was OK, nothing more, apart from a little expensive. Our hostel had a kitchen though, with an oven (!), so we didn't care. Other trips around the area included trips to some wonderfully clear waterfalls, the huge ancient crater lake of Coatapeque, and climbing the youngest volcano in the world; Volcan Izalco.

Me in the crater of Volcan Izalco

All these trips with the exception of Volcan Izalco were tarnished with the ever present abundance of rubbish everywhere and polluted rivers, sadly a theme running throughout Central America so far.

So all in all, we spent maybe 2 weeks in El Salvador, we could have spent more time - there is always more to see, more people to meet. But there are more beautiful countries in the world (Norway for example - damn that passport expiry date!); El Salvador is the most densely populated country in Central America, only 2% of the native forests are left, and a huge part of it is dominated by the dry, ugly pacific heat. Most travellers over look it due to some false rumours that its dangerous because of the past civil war, and its a little more expensive - both are complete rubbish. The people were probably the highlight of the country - oh, and the coconut ice cream on the corner of the plaza in Juayua.