Skip to navigation

Mark Moxon's Travel Writing

El Salvador: Playa Esteron

Looking west along Playa Esteron
Looking west along Playa Esteron

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.

A fishing boat on Playa Esteron
A fishing boat on Playa Esteron
A lonely shell
A lonely shell
Playa El Cuco is much busier
Playa El Cuco is much busier
The turtle who visited us one night
The turtle who visited us one night
Sam the one-winged pelican
Sam the one-winged pelican

The Madcap Laughs

Looking east along the beach towards Nicaragua
Looking east along the beach towards Nicaragua

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.

The moon rising over Playa Esteron
The moon rising over Playa Esteron
A dead ray on Playa El Cuco
A dead ray on Playa El Cuco