Love at First Sight: Travels in El Salvador

Copyright © Mark Moxon 2024

All rights reserved

This version was compiled on 30 March 2024

This work has been released under the Creative Commons licence Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). This means you are free to distribute this work to others as long as you retain this copyright notice, do not use the work for commercial purposes and do not alter, transform or build upon this work. For more details please read the full licence.

Front cover: Looking towards Volcán Izalco from the slopes of Volcán de Santa Ana, Parque Nacional Los Volcanes

See www.moxon.net for more information

Preface

This book is a collection of writing from the road, covering a two-week trip I made to El Salvador in 2014. This was part of a larger, six-month journey that took me through Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama and Colombia during 2013 and 2014.

The travelogue for all these countries and more can be found on my personal website at www.moxon.net, where you can also find travel tips, recommended journeys and further free books for you to download.

I’ve released this book and its companions via a Creative Commons Licence, which means you are free to distribute it to everyone and anyone, as long as you distribute it on a non-commercial basis and make no changes to it. If you know someone who might like this book, please pass it on; I make no money from it, but I do enjoy the thought of people reading it and recommending it to their friends.

Finally, please be aware that this book attempts to be humorous every now and then, so there’s a slight chance that it might cause offence to those who think my sense of humour is as amusing as a puddle of mud. On top of this, some parts will be out of date – which is why each article is dated – and others will betray the naivety of a traveller who discovered his way in the world by throwing himself into it headfirst. It is, however, an honest account of how I felt as I travelled through Central America for six months, and as such, I hope you enjoy it.

Mark Moxon
June 2014

The West

Love at First Sight

Written: 2 January 2014   

We fell for El Salvador within about five minutes of arriving. We’d booked tickets on the luxury bus from Guatemala City to San Salvador, but because we didn’t fancy going from one urban sprawl straight to another, we asked them to drop us off in Santa Ana, El Salvador’s second-largest city. Here we thought we might try to climb a few volcanoes or visit a few country towns, as we’d heard good things about the western half of the country.

True to their word the Guatemalans did just that, leaving us and our backpacks at a service station in the middle of nowhere, somewhere near Santa Ana, and with absolutely no advice on what to do other than a brusque adios and a screeching of tyres as the bus disappeared in the direction of the Salvadoran capital. This wasn’t quite what we’d expected – we assumed we’d at least be dropped off at a bus station – but there we were, blinking in the hot sun, still dazed from an early morning start from Guatemala, in a completely new country... and a country with a reputation.

For El Salvador has a dark and violent past that continues to haunt the country. The civil war that raged from 1979 to 1992 is only really familiar to me as the inspiration for U2’s most politically charged song, ‘Bullet the Blue Sky’, whose lyrics criticise the USA’s intervention in the war. The Carter and Reagan administrations supported the right-wing government in their war of terror against the left-wing guerrillas, thus prolonging the war with no perceivable gain; indeed, the right-wing government issued a formal apology in January 2010 for their role in past atrocities, thus effectively proving that the USA were funding the Bad Guys. So when Bono sings:

And he’s peeling off those dollar bills
Slapping them down
One hundred!
Two hundred!
And I can see those fighter planes...

he’s talking about Ronald Reagan, while The Edge’s guitar channels the sound of a brutal civil war through distorted slide guitar that sounds for all the world like bombs smashing into the women and children of rural El Salvador. And even though the war ended more than 20 years ago, El Salvador still has the second-highest murder rate in the world, and its gang culture is among the most feared on the planet.

So I wasn’t particularly thrilled to find us stranded on a ring road somewhere in El Salvador, without a clue where we were, with six-string munitions crashing down in the back of my mind.

Lovely El Salvador

I needn’t have worried. We soon spotted a road sign that said ‘Santa Ana Centro’ and set off down the road, and when we stopped after a few minutes because it didn’t look as if this road was leading anywhere useful, a middle-aged lady came out of a nearby building and said, in perfect English, ‘Can I help you at all?’

‘Oh, yes please,’ we said, ‘We’re trying to get to Santa Ana and our bus has just dropped us off here. Which way is it?’

‘Well, you’re heading in the right direction,’ she said, ‘but it’s too far to walk. You need a bus.’

‘Can we get one here?’ we asked.

‘Yes, no problem,’ she said. ‘If you cut through that side road you come to the main road, and every bus there goes to Santa Ana, so just wave for one. I’m not sure where in Santa Ana they will drop you, but you can ask them.’

‘Thank you so much,’ we said. ‘And your English is amazing!’

‘Thank you,’ she smiled, ‘I’m glad I could help.’ And with that she waved us on our way.

A couple of minutes later we’d flagged down a bus, paid the grinning bus boy 25 US cents each – handily the Salvadoran currency is the US dollar, which is also the currency most travellers use for their emergency cash – and we were on our way to Santa Ana. Ten minutes down the road, I spotted a road number that was pretty close to the hostel we’d booked, and when I looked around to see if I could see any other signs to show me where we were, the driver caught my eye, smiled and said, ‘Where are you going, buddy?’, so I said the next stop would be good and we hopped out into the street. A short walk later we’d booked into the Casa Verde Hostel and were sitting there, sipping cold water and gently perspiring under the pure blue Salvadoran sky, while Carlos, the beaming hostel owner, told us our room would be ready in a few minutes, and we were to make ourselves at home.

El Salvador might have a dark past, but the people here smile naturally... and they smile with their eyes in a way that is instantly disarming and charming. They’re so helpful to strangers and so welcoming to visitors, and as first impressions go, it doesn’t get much better than this. I have a good feeling about this country...

Santa Ana

Written: 6 January 2014   

Santa Ana doesn’t have a lot in terms of tourist attractions, but that isn’t the point. Its main appeal for visitors is its handy location for visiting the nearby volcanoes and the Ruta de las Flores, but the city – the second largest in El Salvador with 180,000 inhabitants – does have a lot of charm.

We discovered this when wandering around the plazas and markets of the grid-based centre of the city. The biggest draw card is the lovely little main square with its bandstand, tall trees and impressive buildings, in particular the white neo-Gothic cathedral in the northeastern corner, and the ornate green-and-white Teatro de Santa Ana on the northern side of the square. The plaza is a hangout for the locals, particularly in the afternoon when Salvadorans traditionally break for coffee and cake, and their smiles makes it a pleasure to wander around. The pervading attitude is probably best summed up by the reaction of the police officer in the park when I tried to take a picture of the plaza’s Christmas tree by which he was standing. Instead of grimacing at me and waggling a finger, which is the normal reaction of authority figures in gun-toting regimes the world over, he instead grinned at Peta when she pointed at the tree, and he happily backed away so he wouldn’t get in shot. He was all smiles and waves as I clicked away; even the policemen are welcoming in El Salvador.

In the city’s other square, a few blocks to the west of the main plaza, we were accosted by another smiling local, who introduced himself with a handshake and a cheery, ‘Hello, how are you?’ In stilted but very eager English, he introduced himself – though I won’t mention his name, because I wouldn’t want him to suffer any repercussions for what he went on to say – and he explained he was a Christian, and went on to talk about his country, expressing his love for visitors from abroad, his love for Jesus Christ, and his life as a student. He just wanted a chat, so we stood and talked for a good 15 minutes, of which a good ten minutes was spent trying to decipher each other’s sign language; but he was charming and really wanted to try out his English, so it was easy to keep on talking. And then he started getting a bit more serious.

‘But the Bad Boys, they run my country now,’ he said. ‘They do not care, they do not have faith in Jesus Christ.’

And with that his eyes welled up, and he started talking about how impossible it was to get a job, despite having graduated, and how the Salvadoran gangs were ruining the country. He kept comparing his country to the situation in Europe after the war, and we kept pointing out that time is a great healer, and Europe was a good example. He didn’t sound convinced; the Bad Boys were clearly a big problem for his country, and we found it hard to reconcile his very real assessment of the future with the lovely, smiling people all around us.

After Dark

That night, though, it all became a bit more real. When darkness falls in Santa Ana, the city totally shuts down, and it’s eerie. The streets go from bustling and friendly to utterly, utterly dead in the space of an hour, and by the time the sun has set, all the shops are shuttered up, the streets are deserted, and an eerie tension seems to settle on the city. The advice from locals and foreign governments alike is not to venture out after dark on foot, but to take taxis instead, because it’s at night that the Bad Boys roam. I did pop out one night to buy some water from the petrol station a few blocks from the hostel, as I needed a couple of bottles for our planned volcano climb, and it was totally bizarre; as I strode purposely to the shop, I heard loud kissing sounds from the prostitutes standing in the shadows of the darkened doorways, got waved at in a less than friendly way by a couple of shady characters hanging out on the street corners, and had to step over two totally comatose bodies on the pavements (at least, I assume they were comatose rather than dead; it’s hard to tell when you have no intention of stopping). It was only when I got back to the hostel with $1.20’s worth of water that I realised I’d just wandered into the backstreets of an El Salvadoran city after dark with $100 in cash in my back pocket, which I’d completely forgotten to leave in the hostel. In terms of stupidity, that’s quite high; I won’t be doing that again.

Come dawn, though, the rest of the city wakes up with a chorus of loud chicken buses and distant cockerels, and the streets spring back into life. Market stalls magically unwind from the shuttered side streets and the city breathes easy after another night, and it’s hard to remember the dark atmosphere of the night before. The Bad Boys, it seems, are nocturnal, so for the duration of our visit to El Salvador, we’ll probably be staying in a lot after dark. Luckily, in Santa Anna at least, the Casa Verde proved to be a home from home, with an interesting selection of travellers, a lovely courtyard, cold beer, a nearby supermarket, and a very friendly manager who helped us arrange our excursions to the volcanoes and local sights. I just have to remember not to be lulled into a false sense of security again, as this is clearly a pretty serious part of the world.

A Night on the Town

Despite the city shutting down at night, we thought it would be nice to go out for an evening meal on the Saturday, and Carlos kindly recommended a restaurant, the Taberna de Capitan, and said he’d drive us there and back. The streets were completely dark and devoid of life, apart from a few people gathered round the few lit doors that we saw, and the restaurant was a lot further than we’d anticipated from the map, so it was a good job we had a lift. When we arrived at the restaurant, the guard on the door wandered over with his sub-machine gun casually but firmly in place, and Carlos told him to look after us and that we’d be asking the waiters to ring him later to pick us up again. The guard smiled at both of us and ushered us in with a flick of the muzzle, and we walked in the front door and into a totally different environment.

It really does all go on behind closed doors at night. The restaurant was just like a classy seafood joint in a safe American town, and all the clientele were smartly dressed and tucking into seafood and beer with gusto. We picked a nice quiet table in the centre of the three main sections, ordered some drinks and food, and settled in to enjoy the evening as more and more smartly dressed socialites arrived. Unfortunately, as we polished off our starters, a slick-looking man with a ponytail wandered over to the corner just opposite us, where I noticed two huge Peavey loudspeaker stacks that I hadn’t spotted on the way in. He plugged in his laptop, pushed some buttons and twisted a few knobs, and the next thing you know all hell broke lost in the form of ear-twistingly loud Latin American music. Not only that, he started singing along, gently turning up the volume after each verse until it was too loud for us to hold a conversation, and he then turned on a set of disco lights that blinded everyone within shouting distance.

The other diners seemed quite happy with this – indeed, the tables in our section soon filled up with parties eager to sing along to the latest hits – but it was all a bit much for us as we’d only just finished climbing a volcano, so we retired to the bar, where they were playing their own music in competition to the singer, while the televisions dotted around the restaurant stubbornly continued to show the Brazil-France World Cup quarter final from 1986. It was all a bit of a shock after the eerie silence of the streets outside, so we paid up and Carlos came to pick us up and take us back to the comparative tranquillity of the hostel.

Perhaps El Salvador isn’t going to be so quiet at night after all...

Parque Nacional Los Volcanes

Written: 4 January 2014   

El Salvador’s tallest peak, Volcán de Santa Ana, is not far from the city of the same name, and you can climb it as a day trip from Santa Ana. I really love climbing volcanoes – I got a taste for it in New Zealand and cemented our relationship in Indonesia – and although the jaunt up the Indian’s Nose in Guatemala was pleasant, it wasn’t a proper volcano climb, as it only scaled a wide crater rim rather than a volcanic peak. With a summit of 2381m above sea level, Volcán de Santa Ana, which is known in the local dialect as Ilamatepec, is the real deal, and it isn’t alone.

Santa Ana is just one of the three peaks in the Parque Nacional Los Volcanes, the others being Cerro Verde (2030m) and Volcán Izalco (1910m). Cerro Verde is extinct and last erupted 2500 years ago, and its summit is home to the park’s visitor centre, from where you can see the smoking cinder cone of Izalco, the youngest volcano of the three. It appeared in 1770, which is very recent history in volcanic terms, and erupted pretty much constantly until 1967, since which is has been relatively quiet. Santa Ana, meanwhile, is by far the largest of the three, with four craters and an eruption history that goes right up to 2005, when the volcano spat rocks the size of cars a distance of 1.5km from the cone.

How could I possibly resist climbing that?

On the Buses

We were joined on our excursion by three other incumbents at the Casa Verde – a young and energetic Swiss man called Chris, and a lovely couple from Italy called Pamela and Matteo – with whom we’d also team up to visit the Ruta de las Flores. This made life a lot easier, as all three of them spoke fluent Spanish, though to be honest the Salvadorans are so helpful that even we seem to be able to cope with the confusion brought about by our lame Spanish. We walked down to the bus station, bought tickets for 70 cents each, and hopped on the 248 chicken bus that goes from Santa Ana all the way to the national park (El Salvador’s buses all have route numbers on them, as well as the start and end points in garish lettering on the front and back, so once you know the number or the route you want, it’s surprisingly easy to find your bus).

Compared to the bus up the Indian’s Nose, this chicken bus was positively spacious, and two hours of bone-rattling later, past lovely views of distant volcanoes and the blue waters of Lago de Coatepeque, we pulled into the car park on top of Cerro Verde, grabbed a coffee, and signed up for the trek to the summit. As it was a Saturday, there were quite a few local tourists joining us on the trek, and the team that set off to conquer Santa Ana was about 30 strong, while another equally large team set off to tackle Izalco. You can’t trek on these volcanoes independently because there are bandits around these parts; instead you have to join one of the 11am guided walks, which come complete with gun-toting policemen to deter the thieves. Since they started sending guns up with the tourists there have been no attacks, so it’s quite safe to do the trek, but there’s a certain added frisson to walking up an active volcano with policemen carrying guns.

All this comes cheaply, too. We paid US$3 a head to get into the park, then US$1 for the guide, then US$1 to cross the private estate of Casa Cristal in the saddle between Cerro Verde and Santa Ana, and US$6 for the police escort... so that’s a total of US$11 per head for a four-hour walk to the top of the world. It’s worth every cent.

To the Top

I’ve climbed quite a few volcanoes in my time, and Santa Ana is definitely one of the good ones. The route goes from the car park and up to the forested peak of Cero Verde, before descending down 1300 steps to Casa Cristal on the saddle between Cerro Verde and Santa Ana. Then the ascent up Santa Ana begins, initially through pretty forest along a relatively gentle rise, before the forest peters out soon after you pass a viewpoint. Here the greenery gives way to the most amazing landscape of rocks, scrubland and maguey plants (or Agave americana). These plants are astonishing, with luscious, cactus-like leaves that are covered in sharp spines, and huge flower stalks that rise up to 8m from the plant, topped with lovely yellow flowers; there’s an added poignancy to the flowers, as the maguey only flowers once, at the end of its life, so every flower stalk represents the last gasp of this strange-looking plant.

Eventually even the maguey plants disappear as you reach the crater rim, and pow! The path reaches the edge of the crater, and this huge expanse suddenly opens up before you, the sheer crater walls dropping down to a crater lake of astonishing turquoise. Evil steam bubbles from the cauldron and drifts across the sulphurous surface of the lake, which is 300m deep; as soon as I saw it, it reminded me of the amazing blue lake at Keli Mutu in Indonesia, and when I got the photos back I was impressed by how similar they look:

But Santa Ana scores over Keli Mutu because the views from the peak are stunning. The volcanoes of El Salvador spread out to the west on the other side of Lago de Coatepeque, while the Pacific Ocean gleams to the south and the perfect cone of Izalco fumes gently next to Cerro Verde. You can look back on the route of the whole two-hour walk while staring out at travels yet to come, and all the time the crater lake bubbles away in the background, inducing vertigo and awe in equal amounts. As a place for munching on lunch at the top of the world, it’s hard to beat.

The only drawback is that after the descent back down to the saddle, you have to climb back up those 1300 steps to get to the car park and the two-hour chicken bus ride back to Santa Ana. At this point I should give a big shout out to Peta, who managed the entire four-hour walk with only a few pauses for breath, unlike a couple of other members of the group who found to their cost that gravity tends to win when you’re obese. They fell back through the line of walkers as we started the ascent up Santa Ana, and eventually had to turn back with one of the policemen before we reached the scrubland; on our descent we found them scoffing ice creams by the police hut, which probably says a lot more about modern life than I care to venture.

They certainly missed out. Climbing Santa Ana has arguably become the first major highlight of our trip so far; I thought I’d be saying that far earlier than two months in, but this trip has clearly taken a while to get going. Now, though, I think it’s getting into its stride, and all it took were smiling locals, amazing landscapes and the odd volcanic peak. Not much to ask, really...

Ruta de las Flores

Written: 5 January 2014   

The Ruta de las Flores is a road in eastern El Salvador that’s home to pretty towns and villages, coffee plantations, volcanic scenery, lots of greenery, and some of the weirdest food that I’ve ever eaten. It’s a delightful part of the world.

We’d wondered how we were going to tackle the Ruta, because it isn’t a single destination and seems tailor-made for visitors with cars. Luckily, it turns out that there’s a chicken bus, number 284, that goes up and down the Ruta every ten minutes or so, so all you need to do is get onto the Ruta somehow, and the rest is easy. Carlos, the proprietor at the Casa Verde Hostel in Santa Ana, set us on our way, and the five of us – Peta and I plus Pamela, Matteo and Chris – wandered down to the main bus station in Santa Ana to catch the 9.30am bus to Juayúa (pronounced ‘Wha-yoo-wah’), our first destination on the Ruta. The only problem with the main bus station in Santa Ana is that it’s in the middle of the market zone, so when the bus eventually left the station at 9.45am, it took a good half an hour to get through the busy stalls and onto the main road, but after some entertaining rattling and bouncing to the ubiquitous 1980s soundtrack, we arrived in Juayúa at 11am, ready for the famous weekend food fair.

Juayúa

Juayúa is a lovely little town with a pretty main plaza and a busy market tucked away in the streets behind the church. The food fair is strung along one side of the plaza and consists of lots of different stalls selling all sorts of enticing food, from steaks and corn on the cob to more exotic fare like whole frogs, though when we asked one man about where we could buy iguana, one of the more infamous foods available at the food fair, he told us that it was no longer available as it’s a protected species; they did sell fox, though, which presumably isn’t.

The people were very friendly, smiling back at us at every turn, and even the local bare-chested nutter was entertaining and told us he didn’t want any money from us, though that was the only part of his bonkers Spanish that we understood. Strangely enough, when we popped into the public toilets off the main plaza, there were two young men in there changing into women’s clothing, but with all the smiling going on it all just seemed like the fun of the fair.

As it was a bit early for lunch we settled for a delicious iced coffee, and we sat and watched the fun in the main plaza as people milled around trying out the food and generally having fun. It was a good start to our trip down the Ruta de las Flores, but the best was yet to come.

Ataco

The real deal was further down the road in Ataco, which Carlos had recommended we spend time in as it’s a more typical Salvadoran experience than the fairly touristy Juayúa. He was absolutely spot on, and it was well worth the effort of the 40-minute chicken bus ride, via the quiet town of Apaneca and past yet more coffee plantations, volcanoes and fincas.

Ataco is clearly yet to be discovered by western tourism, as we were the only white faces in the whole town. People literally stopped and waved at us, from small children to old women on the backs of trucks, and we were made to feel so welcome it was unreal. The food fair in the main plaza felt a lot bigger, too, though this was perhaps because it was all in one lump, rather than being tucked away down the thinner streets of Juayúa.

We managed to get a table in the busy throng and ordered a plate of typical Salvadoran food from one of the stalls, which consisted of round ball-like sausages, chicken wings, a beef skewer, avocado, rice, tomato salsa and some fairly forgettable tortillas that were like thick, dry pancakes. This was all delicious, but the coup de grâce was when Peta spotted the stand selling frogs and iguanas, so we bought a whole grilled frog and two iguana eggs, while Matteo went for the iguana meat, which he shared around.

Frog is, well, frog, and it tastes a bit like gamey chicken, though this didn’t come as much of a surprise, as we live next door to France, where frog’s legs are a delicacy. However, I’d never tried frog torso until Ataco; the meat is the same as on the legs, but there’s hardly any of it, so it’s no surprise that the French stick to the legs.

The iguana eggs, though, were a surprise, as they’re delicious; the egg shell is rubbery, like a thin but tough balloon, so you bite a hole in one end and squash the contents into your mouth. The egg itself tastes a bit like the yolk of a duck’s egg, and there’s no white; if you hard-boiled a duck egg, removed the white, mashed up the yolk with a fork and squished it into a small balloon, then that’s pretty much what iguana eggs are like. They’re surprisingly good.

As for the iguana meat, it was served in such a strong-tasting green sauce that it was pretty difficult to determine what the meat actually tasted like, but after sucking the sauce off, it turned out to taste... well, a bit meaty, really. The ribs are tiny and like fish bones, and there isn’t a lot of meat to be had, but it wasn’t at all unpleasant. And luckily, it turns out that iguanas aren’t a protected species; it is, in fact, a booming export market in Mexico, El Salvador and Puerto Rico, and in the latter it’s being used as a way of controlling the reptile’s exploding population. So there’s no reason not to get stuck in... and I definitely recommend the eggs.

It was well worth the effort of the long and crowded double chicken bus journey from Ataco to Ahuachapán and on to Santa Ana, where we collapsed into a very welcome rest day at the Casa Verde. Now where else can I get hold of some of those iguana eggs? I wonder...

The East

Suchitoto

Written: 10 January 2014   

If you’re looking for a poster child for the progress that El Salvador has made since the end of the civil war, then Suchitoto is a pretty good choice. The town has long been regarded as the country’s cultural capital, and even today its influence is felt far and wide. In recent times, the town’s recycling system has spread across the country, so you now see separate bins for plastic, aluminium and organic material everywhere; and Suchitoto’s women’s groups are helping to nudge the country along the long road to equality, as can be seen in the stencils sprayed on many of the town’s buildings that declare, ‘In this house we want a life free from violence against women.’

Perhaps this strong cultural identity is one of the reasons that Suchitoto manages to take the legendary Salvadoran friendliness to new levels, because unlike Santa Ana, the town doesn’t shut down at night. Instead children play in the streets after dark and locals sit outside their houses, barbecuing meat and soaking up the still, night air. As you walk around town, everyone says hello, from the family next door to the gun-toting security guards, and you get the feeling that they’re genuinely pleased to see you. Comparatively few visitors make it to this part of northern El Salvador, so the town doesn’t suffer from tourist fatigue, but even so the locals go out of their way to be welcoming, and it’s such a delight.

Suchitoto is lovely from an architectural viewpoint, too. The town is laid out in the familiar colonial style, with a pretty main plaza, Parque Centenario, that’s surrounded by shady colonnades and an impressive white church dominating the eastern edge (though the church itself dates from after independence, so it’s in the colonial style, rather than actually being colonial). Unlike a lot of squares we’ve seen, the park in the middle of the square is fairly open plan and you can see across from one side to the other, so it’s a perfect spot for people-watching.

This is particularly true when the pupuseria on the southern edge of the plaza starts up for the day. Pupusas are a peculiarly Salvadoran delicacy, and I’m astonished they haven’t caught on across the continent, as they’re absolutely delicious. They’re a bit like thick tortillas that are made from either rice or maize – we much prefer the rice version – and they’re stuffed with a generous helping of beans (frijoles), cheese (queso), pork (chicharrón) or a combination of all three (revuelta), before being grilled on a hotplate that’s lightly brushed in lard. As a hearty breakfast or a late afternoon snack, they’re hard to beat, and the pupusas on the main plaza in Suchitoto were the best we tasted anywhere in El Salvador... and that’s saying something, as they’re a consistently good snack wherever you go in the country.

Cerron Grande Reservoir

To get to Suchitoto from Santa Ana, we teamed up with Pamela and Matteo, with whom we’d climbed Volcán de Santa Ana and explored the Ruta de las Flores. As Italians they could speak excellent Spanish – the languages are so similar that it’s easy to pick up one if you already know the other – so not only did we have some excellent company for our visit, but we also had translators in tow, and that always makes life easier. The journey wasn’t that straightforward, as we had to take a bus from Suchitoto to the west terminal in San Salvador, then another bus across the capital to the east terminal, and then another from the east terminal to Suchitoto; but even with our very basic Spanish, it wouldn’t have been difficult to do on our own, as the people in the bus stations are so helpful and only too happy to guide you to the correct bus. But it certainly made the whole thing far less stressful, knowing that we were travelling with people who could communicate with the locals in their own language if things got too confusing; in all, it was a delight to be travelling with our Italian friends.

It also helped that the proprietor of our hostel in Suchitoto was a friendly American who was only too happy to tell us about the local attractions. For us, two options stood out: first, there was the hike into the hills around town to visit sites from the civil war; and second, there was the boat trip on the huge man-made Cerron Grande Reservoir that’s about 1km from town. We figured we’d wander down to the reservoir to see what the fuss was all about, as it was too late in the day to book a civil war walk.

When I’d looked at the weather forecast for Suchitoto the day before, I’d noticed the little orange warning flag in my phone’s weather forecast, but to be honest, I didn’t really take it in. So when we hopped on the minibus that runs down to the lake and wandered through the small tourist complex to the lake shore, it was a bit of a surprise to be battered by gusts of wind that blew foam from the crashing waves right into our faces. This was clearly not boating weather, though the boatman who was still optimistically selling boat tours promised that it would be better tomorrow. Still, we figured we’d seen enough for one day, and after waiting for the return bus for more than an hour, we retired for a pupusa and to plan the next day.

Luckily the boatman turned out to be right, and after spending the morning booking a civil war trek for the next day, we headed down to the lake shore once more to see what we could find. There are two options for exploring the lake: the first, and most expensive, is to hire a boat for a few hours, which takes you to the various attractions round the lake from islands and waterfalls to the dam itself; and the second is to hop on the car ferry to San Francisco Lempa, which costs just one dollar. The water was still a little choppy, so we went for the car ferry, as the thought of a whole afternoon on a pitching boat wasn’t that appealing.

We chose well, as the car ferry is a delightful way to cross the reservoir, with its amazing views of distant volcanoes, a nice sedate pace – it takes about half an hour for the crossing – and the added bonus of 1980s music pumping out of the speakers as you drift across to the eastern shore of the lake. And San Francisco Lempa proved to be a beautiful little village, with an attractive square at the top of a steep hill, more friendly locals and some great views east towards Volcán Santa Ana.

It was baking hot, though, so after exploring the village centre, we stopped in the shade of the main square’s colonnades for an ice cream, and as we sat there slurping our exotic fruit lollies – I still have no idea what flavour mine was, though it was certainly tasty – the church bells tolled slowly and in a strangely sad manner, and after a few minutes a funeral procession walked past, with the coffin in the back of a black, gleaming hearse that led a group of mourners into the square. The mourners all took shelter in one corner of the square as the hearse drove slowly round the edge of the plaza, before it headed off downhill at walking pace, with the hearse driver waving at us with an enthusiastic grin that looked slightly out of place among the rather more sedate throng following the coffin.

On the way back, we took a private launch back to Suchitoto, as with four passengers it costs practically the same as the ferry but can do the journey in just a few minutes. That night, those pupusas tasted even better than usual...

Cerro de Guazapa

Written: 9 January 2014   

We really enjoyed teaming up with Pamela and Matteo for our visit to Suchitoto. They were great company and easy travelling companions, and for us, they opened up whole new doors of exploration, because Pamela really wanted to go on a civil war hike in the hills around town, and unlike us, she had the Spanish skills to make it happen. I’m not sure we’d have persevered quite so hard on our own, but thanks to our Italian friends, we were lucky enough to enjoy one of the highlights of our trip to El Salvador.

The reason is that, if you’re an English speaker, it isn’t that easy to book a civil war trip in Suchitoto, and it’s even harder to understand the trip once you’re on it. Happily undeterred by the language barrier, Pamela and Matteo started with the tourist information office on the main plaza, where we stood in the background while the man told them in fluid Spanish that there were three companies offering tours, though only one of them, the Asociacíon Cooperativa El Pacayal, had an office in town, and that was a good 30-minute walk south from the centre. The man recommended that we visit them in person to tailor our tours, and no, they couldn’t ring on our behalf; hell, they didn’t seem to be able to do anything on our behalf, so we decided we might as well walk to the cooperative, as we didn’t have anything better to do that morning.

It was a bit of a slog through the hot mid-morning streets of Suchitoto to the cooperative office, where we met a moustachioed man in a hair net who was busy cooking in the kitchen. He said yes, he could offer us a tour in the hills, from a couple of hours to six hours, depending on how much we wanted to see and how many questions we asked. As the tour would only be in Spanish, Pamela offered to translate for us, which was extremely kind of her, so we eagerly signed up for a four-hour walk the following morning, leaving the main plaza at 7am.

The Civil War

That evening, I sat down in our hotel and read up about the civil war in El Salvador. I already knew that it had been a serious humanitarian crisis and an utterly terrible war, but I wasn’t prepared for the scale of the war’s brutality and the sheer senselessness of the whole thing. There has been plenty written on the subject of the war and I’m not going to try to add to it, but it helps to have a little bit of context when you’re talking about what happened in the hills around Suchitoto.

The civil war officially lasted from 1979 to 1992, though the violence started at least a year earlier in Suchitoto. Like most civil wars in this part of the world, it was sparked off by a massive inequality between the minority rich, who owned most of the land and took all the profits, and the majority poor, who worked the land and lived in terrible poverty; this is a common setup in ex-colonies, and Central America is no exception. A peasant uprising in 1932 was brutally crushed by the military dictatorship of the time, and from that point on a series of military coups ensured that the army controlled the country with an iron fist, keeping the rich elite in power while crushing any resistance from the people.

In 1979, yet another military coup gave power to a junta that promised far-reaching reforms, but when these failed to appear, it led to five opposition parties uniting and forming a military wing, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), which was named after the martyred leader of the 1932 uprising. In March 1980, Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was an outspoken critic of the government, was gunned down while saying mass, and this escalated the existing struggle between the FMLN and the right-wing government into full-blown civil war. The government’s approach was to attack its own people, as it believed that the enemy were guerrillas who were hiding out among the general population; as a result they started systematically massacring their own citizens, most notably in El Mozote in 1981, where government troops killed more than 700 men, women and children.

All this activity didn’t go unnoticed by the US government, who had watched with mounting concern as the corrupt right-wing government of neighbouring Nicaragua fell to the socialist Sandinista revolution of 1979. Worried that communism was spreading through the region, the Reagan administration pumped millions of dollars into the El Salvador military, training them up in counter-insurgency and arming them to the teeth. When the Salvadoran government took that training and started slaughtering their own civilians, the Americans initially denied that these massacres were happening, and then started urging the Salvadoran government to rein things back.

In response, the government created death squads who would roam the country and murder suspected leftists, but as they did all this in civilian clothes, the government simply denied that they were behind it. The death squads would even warn their potential victims, by sending them invitations to their own funerals or overtly threatening them, and eventually yet another victim would simply disappear, sometimes turning up mutilated on the street corner, but often never to be seen again. In the first five years of the war alone, 40,000 civilians were killed by the government; by the end of the war, casualties were estimated at 75,000, with some one million of the five million population being driven from their homes by the violence, and by the government’s scorched-earth policy of destroying entire communities with fire.

In 1989 the violence escalated to the capital, San Salvador, and things kept getting worse until the UN finally managed to broker a peace deal in January 1992, which has held firm ever since. The FMLN is now a mainstream political party, it won the last election in 2009, and it’s currently campaigning to win the election that is slated for February 2014; the right-wing government, for their part, has apologised for its abuse of power during the civil war, and the Salvadoran economy is now one of the strongest in Central America, with the highest minimum wage in the region. It seems that after such a brutal and harrowing civil war, nobody wants to go back to the old days, even if the country is politically still split between right and left. These days the fight is a purely political one, and the war is becoming an ever more distant memory.

Cerro de Guazapa

Back in Suchitoto, the man from the cooperative turned up at the main plaza the following morning and introduced himself as Nelson, and we were soon bouncing along in the back of his rusty, bald-tyred car, heading out of town towards the dry hills to the west. We pulled into a dirt track and walked past fields to an abandoned building in the middle of millet and maize fields, and that’s when the tour really started, because on closer inspection it turned out that the building’s roof was missing and there were bullet holes sprayed liberally over the outside plasterwork.

It turned out that this house had once belonged to the President of El Salvador, and was a popular summer retreat because of its sweeping views over the surrounding terrain. Because of these views it was occupied by the FMLN during the war, but government troops stationed on the nearby hills would keep an eye out for smoke or signs of activity, and would radio in their positions so the fighter planes could swoop in and drop their bombs and incendiary devices. Eventually the government took out the building, and its remains still stand today, mouldering in the sun.

From there we hopped back in the car and drove to Nelson’s house, where his eight-year-old son, also called Nelson but known to everyone as Nelsito, joined us. A budding guide in his own right, Nelsito was full of smiles and eight-year-old innocence, and his presence would make our walk up the hill even more poignant, though we didn’t realise it yet.

From Nelson’s place we drove to the base of Cerro de Guazapa, the extinct and wooded volcano that we would be exploring for the rest of the day. It started out with a gentle climb through fields of sugar cane, which Nelson cut for us to taste, before we ducked into the forested slopes and passed a bomb crater and the ruins of houses, almost entirely reclaimed by the forest. We stopped for a rest by the shattered remains of a church that the government had bombed in the war, and where four women and two children had been killed; two small wooden crosses stood nearby in remembrance. ‘I lost my parents in the war,’ said Nelson, and the woods suddenly felt a little quieter.

Just up the hill, Nelson showed us what looked like three rabbit holes, one after the other in the side of the road. In fact, these tiny hollowed-out holes in the earth were bomb shelters, and when the planes started to come in, the people would hide underground, five people crammed into each small, coffin-shaped cave. If the bombs hit, it wouldn’t save you, but it might help if the target was some way off.

This was getting interesting, but it was when we reached the ruins of a school that things took an unexpected turn. Just downhill from the foundations of the school buildings, Nelson pointed to the remains of a trench, and explained that this trench went round the top of the whole hill, and that this was the front line against the government troops; the men patrolled the line, he said, and behind the line were all the women and children. To cross the line meant certain death: nobody came in, and nobody left, and it was like this for 13 years.

‘And this was my school,’ said Nelson, and the penny suddenly dropped. That meant that Nelson himself was trapped on this hill for the duration of the civil war, unable to leave because he would have been shot on sight by the government troops surrounding Guazapa. He hadn’t mentioned it until this point, but our guide was a genuine survivor of the civil war; his gentle voice and the way he played with his son seemed out of place with the stories he would tell us, but that made it feel all the more real.

Further up the hill we came across an old washbasin in the middle of a small clearing, next to some low foundations that Nelson sat down on. Nelsito picked up a stick and started poking a dead frog in the washbasin while we perched around on old blocks of concrete, and that’s when Nelson dropped the bombshell.

‘This was my house,’ he said. ‘This is where I lived with my family for the 13 years of the civil war.’

And so the stories started to come out. Nelson was nine when the war started, just one year older than Nelsito, who by this point had started snoring gently against the side of the washbasin; he was 20 when the war finished, and he spent the whole war trapped on Cerro de Guazapa, surrounded by government troops who would kill anyone they saw leaving the hill. There were about 2000 people living on the hill before the siege started; nobody lives on the hill any more, as the memories are too painful.

It had all started when the local landowner and chief of the right-wing Nationalist Democratic Organization (ORDEN), Fabian Ventura, started killing farmers on his land. He would drive around in his car, order his driver to stop when he saw a local farmer walking along the road, and he’d say to the farmer, ‘Quick! Run! Or we will shoot you.’ And so the farmer would run, and Ventura would shoot him in the back. If it was a woman, they would rape her first, before making her run and shooting her too. He killed more than 600 people this way.

All the time, Ventura told the government that he had a problem with communist guerrillas in the area, and that he needed money to defend his land. So the government sent money, which Ventura used to buy arms to kill even more farmers. He simply stole what little the farmers had and abused his position, and all the time he got more money from the government.

This behaviour forced the farmers to defend themselves. There was a small number of leftist guerrillas in the Guazapa area, perhaps 15 or 20 among the population of 2000, but Ventura decided that the whole hill was teeming with communists, so he surrounded the area and killed anyone who went in or came out. The farmers were, at first, completely helpless, but they soon learned guerrilla skills from the small number of activists among them, and so the unrest started in Guazapa, which acted as the spark in the tinder box that led to the 12-year civil war.

‘One man, just one man,’ said Nelson, shaking his head.

‘And what happened to him?’ asked Peta.

‘They got him and killed him in 1980,’ said Nelson. ‘They pulled his body out of the house where he died and put him on display so everyone knew he was dead. But by then it was too late.’

With that, we stood up and hiked a short distance to a waterfall, which is where the women and children sheltered every day, while the men defended their territory. It was dark and damp and no place for children to grow up, but it was relatively safe, and it was where Nelson spent his formative years. Nelsito seemed unconcerned and was more interested in taking photos of the tour with his Blackberry; time is a great healer, it seems.

For the rest of the walk we left the site of the siege, and simply enjoyed trekking through the forest, stopping to admire coffee trees, waterholes, the hole in the ground that functioned as the settlement’s sole drop toilet, and finally a long and painfully cobbled road that took us back down to the car. We’d managed about five hours on the hill, and we were exhausted; I found it impossible to imagine spending 13 years there, surrounded by an enemy who at any point might shoot you or rape your wife.

That night, the warm smiles and kind eyes of Suchitoto seemed a particularly long way away from the brutality of Cerro de Guzapa, and yet it’s only a few miles and 20 years ago. Welcome to El Salvador, where the memories of a typical eight-year-old have changed from the brutality of Nelson’s era to the carefree childhood of Nelsito. That’s progress; long may it continue.

On the Coast

Playa El Tunco

Written: 14 January 2014   

There’s nothing particularly wrong with Playa El Tunco, the surfing beach on El Salvador’s western Pacific Coast. The beach is pretty enough and has an interesting rock formation just off the shore that gives a certain balance to the millions of photos that you can’t help snapping as the sun sets off the beach; it isn’t terribly big, so it’s easy to wander around on foot; there’s hardly any traffic and a ticketed entry system is enforced at the weekends to keep things manageable; and most of the time there are more Salvadoran tourists than western travellers pounding the streets, so it doesn’t feel too overrun with devotees of the Lonely Planet.

But there is one thing that sets El Tunco apart from everywhere else that we’ve visited in El Salvador, and that’s the strange effect that it has on the locals. For some reason, the locals in El Tunco aren’t the beaming and delightful bunch that we’ve enjoyed meeting in the likes of Santa Ana and Suchitoto; instead, the locals of El Tunco appear slightly wary of visitors. It’s most unnerving.

Happily, if you put in the time and go out of your way to smile and say buenas dias to them, most of them revert to type pretty quickly. But their initial reaction with foreigners is much more aloof and, at times, bordering on the surly, and while we got used to the Guatemalans reacting in this way, it’s a shock to see the Salvadorans doing it. I worry that here, in El Tunco, we’re witnessing the thin end of the tourist wedge starting to puncture El Salvador’s charm; if so, it’s a real shame.

Surfin’ USA

That said, El Tunco has its moments. It’s pleasant to enjoy a cold beer on the beach as the sun sets, though the food is a lot better further back, away from the beach; it’s fun to watch the surfers trying out the breaks, though as a lot of them are surfing for the first time, you end up watching more wipeouts than runs; and it’s fascinating to see so many fat people, which is something you don’t see so much in the poorer countryside. El Tunco is where the local rich go for a break, and they clearly eat a lot more than the poorer farmers.

There’s also a stream of travellers who are pounding the Gringo Trail, as El Tunco is arguably the main stop-off for the trail in El Salvador (the other being Santa Ana, though there are plenty of travellers for whom El Tunco is the only Salvadoran experience they have). As a result there are a few surly hawkers around who try to sell you necklaces and textiles, and there’s a lady who walks around in the morning and evening, tooting an irritating clown-horn as she tries to sell you banana cake. It doesn’t really help you fall for the place.

But we did meet some nice Americans who were over here on holiday, and we did enjoy relaxing after pounding the hills round Suchitoto, so it wasn’t all bad. And a short chicken bus ride away is the port town of La Libertad, which has a great fish market strung out along a pier, enough life to make it a worthwhile day trip, and a secret stash of Salvadoran smiles that they hand out for free. As an antidote to the slightly tarnished locals of El Tunco, it does the trick nicely.

Playa Esteron

Written: 19 January 2014   

Playa Esteron, on the eastern coast of El Salvador near the border with Nicaragua, is everything we’d hoped Playa El Tunco would be but wasn’t. The beach is an absolute gem, stretching out into the distance like a salt flat while gentle surf breaks into long lines of speckled foam. The sand, while still slightly grey, is a lot more golden than the black sand further west, and every photograph you take along the beach is an exercise in perspective and vanishing points. It’s utterly charming.

And not only is it charming, but it’s almost completely deserted. The nearest settlement, El Cuco, is about 3km west along the beach, and apart from a few houses and restaurants in the dunes behind the beach, Esteron is quiet, sleepy and generally ignored by the younger backpacker set, who tend to skip eastern El Salvador in favour of getting into Nicaragua in one long shuttle journey from El Tunco to León. After the slightly irritating beer crowds of El Tunco, this was a major blessing, and we easily fell under its spell, spending long days lazing in the sun, walking along the soft sandy beach, reading holiday novels in swaying hammocks, trying out surfing for the first time, and drinking piña coladas under perfect blue skies. For a few days, we did nothing but live the easy life.

This was made even easier by the hotel we stayed in, which consisted of a beachside collection of huts and rooms, a small bar, a restaurant, and an emphasis on wildlife conservation. La Tortuga Verde (‘The Green Turtle’) is run by an American ex-surfer called Tom Pollak, who has started making a name for himself as a turtle conservationist. The problem with El Salvador, as with many countries where turtles nest, is that the locals just love eating turtle eggs, so they prowl the beaches at night, looking for turtles dragging themselves up the beach to lay eggs. When they find one, they wait for her to dig a hole and finish laying, and then they pick the turtle up, move her to one side, and simply pluck the whole clutch of eggs, one by one, from the elbow-deep hole. Meanwhile, the turtle, who goes into a bit of a trance while laying, starts to flick sand backwards over what she thinks is her brood, and when she thinks it’s covered, she heads back to the sea, completely unaware that her offspring is now top of the menu.

It’s a mammoth task to stop a tradition that’s an embedded part of a country’s culture, so in an attempt to stop the turtles becoming extinct, Tom offers to buy the eggs from anyone who collects them, and then plants them in a hole in the hotel grounds. When they hatch, happy residents get to release them into the sea, so it’s a win-win situation; the locals make money from harvesting eggs, the turtles get to hatch, and the residents of Tom’s hotel get to be involved in turtle conservation.

January is not the season for turtles laying eggs, but we lucked out. One night, when we were sitting out by the beach enjoying a late night beer, Tom ran out, shouting that there was a turtle on the beach, and when we looked, there she was, right in front of the hotel and just a few yards from where we’d been drinking. As our small group of tourists arrived with our torches and cameras, the turtle was flicking sand pointlessly while the hotel’s nightwatchman pulled eggs from a large hole in the beach. I assumed that the nightwatchman had spotted the turtle and was doing a good deed before the poachers came along, but no; it turned out that the nightwatchman was stealing the eggs and had been trying to keep the whole process hidden from Tom, but when he didn’t come when called, Tom got suspicious and spotted him digging out the eggs. So Tom had to negotiate a deal to buy the eggs from his own member of staff, as otherwise they’d have disappeared into the pot. It just goes to show, when even the turtle man’s staff are happier to eat the eggs than preserve them, you’ve got a real uphill battle on your hands.

Tom also saved a pelican while we were there. He took a boat out to the gulf islands off the coast where El Salvador and Nicaragua meet, fully expecting to find a pelican somewhere out there with broken wings, as this is a common problem with these birds; they crash into the sea to catch fish, and it’s not unknown for them to damage themselves in the process. A pelican with a broken wing is a pelican who will slowly starve to death, so periodically Tom goes out to look for damaged birds, and brings them back to the hotel to feed them and nurse them back to health. The pelican he brought back was actually missing half a wing, so it couldn’t ever return to the wild, so the hotel now has a permanent resident in the form of Sam, the one-winged pelican.

Yes, Esteron really is a paradise; it has a perfect beach, endless sunshine and a feel-good environmental angle, and when you take the 45-minute walk up to El Cuco, where the locals come to party at the weekend, the crowds and litter are a bit of a shock. Long may Esteron retain its remote and charming character.

The Madcap Laughs

Unfortunately, I’m not sure it will for much longer. Tom, who sounds utterly amazing on paper, is what you might euphemistically call a ‘character’. He has what he calls a TV show on an El Salvador cable channel, for which he films the turtle eggs being planted into his turtle sanctuary, as well as the releasing of the babies into the ocean. For this he dons a strange, green, mad-hatter’s hat, grabs a fuzzy microphone, and launches into the campest and most bizarre showbiz cameo role that I’ve ever seen performed on a tropical beach. His Spanish comes out with an utterly American accent, and his exuberance is... well, you know what American-style TV is like. I guess that publicity is publicity, even if it is just a home-made, hand-held-camera show for a tiny cable channel, but if I was trying to persuade the locals not to eat turtle eggs, I’m not sure I’d go for the ‘insane foreigner’ approach. Even the hotel’s residents, whom he ropes into each filming session, getting them to announce their names and countries into the camera, look utterly bewildered by it all. If you want to see what I mean, take a look at a typical show on YouTube.

But then Tom is a ‘character’. When you first meet him, he comes across as utterly camp, but one of the residents at the hotel when we were there was a young Russian girl, half his age, who used to be his girlfriend, so one assumes he just sounds that way; his public persona, though, is a strange hybrid of drag queen meets spoilt child. Within five minutes of meeting you, he makes the point (sometimes more than once) that the hotel is not run for profit – apart from the rooms and the restaurant, he adds quietly – and that he owns lots of property in downtown New York and is utterly loaded; he also boasts about having bought property all along the shore at Esteron, and is proud to take you on a tour round the Tortuga Verde, where there’s quite a lot of building work going on as he adds more rooms and facilities. And although he insists that the whole operation simply exists to give jobs to the locals – and he says he pays his employees more than they would otherwise get, which is great – it’s a bit hard to reconcile these landed-gentry boasts with the eco-friendly hippie image that he likes to portray. You can’t help feeling that you’re stuck in the middle of a rich kid’s vanity project, and that didn’t help us warm to our gregarious host, whatever his eco-credentials.

So despite this being paradise, it can be a bit odd at times, and talking to the other guests, we weren’t the only ones feeling a bit weirded out by it all. Luckily, all you have to do is park yourself on the edge of the beach, crack open another bottle of Golden beer and drink in the astonishing sunset view, and all of a sudden the day-glo tinge of turtle madness evaporates in the face of nature at its most beautiful. And hey, if the self-indulgence helps to save the wildlife while providing well-paid jobs for the locals, then fair enough. There are far worse crimes than being odd.

Thoughts on Leaving

Written: 20 January 2014   

We loved El Salvador, no doubt about it. It’s hard not to love a country where the people are so charming, the history so astonishing, and the landscape so beguiling, and after our rather damp experiences in Guatemala and Mexico, we lapped it up.

The food is better, too. We loved papusas in the same way that we loved fry jacks in Belize, and like fry jacks, they’re unique to just one country, astonishingly. We also drooled at the luscious produce in the supermarkets in places like Santa Ana and La Libertad, which were as well stocked and clean and bright as supermarkets back home. Food is an important part of the travelling experience, and after weeks and weeks of tortillas, beans, cheese and constipation, El Salvador provided sweet relief in more ways than one.

But the main thing we loved about El Salvador was the people. They are utterly delightful and their ready smiles make any language barrier irrelevant. Old women on the buses would take great delight in Peta’s abilities with her backpack, which she can now don in the middle of a crowded chicken bus as it screeches round crazy corners and slams on the brakes. Adults and children would wave at us with genuine warmth as we walked through their villages, and even those people whose lives were carved out in the horror of civil war have gentle souls and an astonishing lack of bitterness. The soul of El Salvador is alive and well, and as long as it can handle the inevitable rise of tourism that you can see in the busier beach resorts, it feels as if the future is very bright.

I originally planned a couple of weeks here, expecting us to shoot through in ten days or so. In the end we spent just under three weeks and found it hard to leave. What a delightful country.

Further Reading

This story is continued in another of my books, Poverty and Paradise: Travels in Nicaragua (also available for free from www.moxon.net/ebooks). If you enjoyed this book, you might like to know that there’s a whole series of free books like this available from the same source, covering 25 countries and six continents:

The Back of Beyond: Travels in Australia

Into the Deep Blue Sea: Travels in Belize

A Town Full of Nothing to Do: Travels in Burkina Faso

In Search of the Lost City: Travels in Colombia

Tainted by Tourism: Travels in Costa Rica

A Funny Sort of Socialism: Travels in Cuba

Snow on the Sun Loungers: Travels in Cyprus

Love at First Sight: Travels in El Salvador

Paradise Has Teeth: Travels in French Polynesia

A Million Mosquitoes Can’t Be Wrong: Travels in the Gambia

The Road to Jesus: Travels in Ghana

Stuck on the Gringo Trail: Travels in Guatemala

Many Ways to Change Your Mind: Travels in India

Hello Paul, What’s Your Name? Travels in Indonesia

The Muddy Confluence: Travels in Malaysia

The Lapping of the Dunes: Travels in Mali

A World-Class Dive: Travels in Mexico

Snaking Patterns of Sand: Travels in Morocco

Roof of the World: Travels in Nepal

God’s Own Country: Travels in New Zealand

Poverty and Paradise: Travels in Nicaragua

Alone on Two-Palm Island: Travels in Panama

The Head and the Heart: Travels in Senegal

Serious Fun: Travels in Singapore

Melted Meccano: Travels in Thailand

If you know someone who might like any of my books, please pass them on; I make no money from this, but I do enjoy the thought of people reading my books and recommending them to their friends. If you’ve enjoyed reading my writing (or even if you haven’t) I’d be delighted if you could sign my Guestbook at www.moxon.net/guestbook – after all, it’s the feedback that makes it all worthwhile. Happy travels!

THE END

Table of Contents

Preface

Love at First Sight

Santa Ana

Parque Nacional Los Volcanes

Ruta de las Flores

Suchitoto

Cerro de Guazapa

Playa El Tunco

Playa Esteron

Thoughts on Leaving

Further Reading