Layne has been working hard finding locations to visit and I have been happy to let her explore the maps. I enjoy driving El Salvador’s roads which only have a few strategically placed speed bumps in front of schools and I can’t argue with that as they brightly painted. So she maps our route and I follow the Blue Line on Google maps.
As you can see El Salvador is not a large country and Webb told me this a very good idea to compare it in size to Massachusetts so silly me.
Somehow we turned a 42 mile journey into an all day affair even though the direct route clearly is not fast if it takes 90 minutes to drive!
Out in the boonies we saw a bunch of light poles painted in the colors of the Farabundo Martà National Liberation Front. They were the rebels in the 70s and 80s who fought to overthrow the government which depending on your point of view was oppressing people or defending capitalism or both. They came close to succeeding until the US intervened and the country settled down to a long bloody civil war which killed at least 75,000 people officially counted.
In 1986 the weary combatants tried to organize a peace agreement brokered by the Catholic Church and I turned up with my tape recorder to report what was going on for public broadcasting. Murder was going on I soon discovered seeing corpses in the street and dozens of one legged soldiers relaxing outside the military hospital. Even in those days the rebels used what we now call improvised explosive devices; they just called them mines back then but they still blew young men’s legs to smithereens.
I was only in El Salvador for a few weeks before I decided I absolutely wanted nothing to do with war. The death squads were everywhere and they tortured and killed as they liked. I was reasonably safe as killing an American was no smart thing but were I to cross some invisible line I could easily put myself at risk of ending up at El Playon.
Nowadays they call it “Joyos Negros” (black jewels) and celebrate the lava field as a minor tourist attraction by the side of the four lane Pan American Highway. Forty years ago I had my driver take me out here where the bodies were tossed and left to rot. Families were often scared to find and claim them as they had no idea if they might face irrational retaliation. They were most unhappy times and my experience of violence and being shot at had a profound effect on me.
I think even more profound for me is how quickly all this has been forgotten. Even at the time I felt reporting on the war didn’t do much good as no one paid enough attention to our reports of murder in an insignificant country. I felt at the time we reporters liked to fool ourselves into pretending we were doing good, but the professional war reporters were I felt simply feeding their need for adrenaline. At this point looking back when the cruelty of the civil war has been completely overshadowed in public memory by the brutality of the gang take over of civil life in El Salvador, I cannot help but feel certain that what we reported did no good at all. The gangs that came after the war were made up of veterans from both sides twisted by their fighting experiences and they were truly messed up people. I was messed up enough by what I saw. Better I suppose to see only a tourist panoramic platform to view lava.
I wanted to return to El Playon to remember the dead but I came away I fear with a sense of bitterness at the betrayal of their memory. It’s not my business and it seems El Salvador wants to collectively forget its past so I suppose I need to try to do the same. Onward.
Our detour to the killing fields had very cleverly put us in the flow of traffic going into and coming out of the capital. And Salvadoran traffic is nothing if not aggressive in the chaos that is the capital.
Google maps has its work cut out as street signs are tiny and one way arrows are rare and not terribly visible and directions are only given to the largest and most obvious destinations.
Traffic jams in the countryside are rare as there aren’t many vehicles.
In and around the capital progress is measured in inches and the cut and thrust of impatient commuters is a wonder to behold.
We saw lines of vehicles stopped for no apparent reason at random just about anywhere.
And then we got back out into the mountains climbing to 3,000 feet where the clouds descend like mist and temperatures are in the mid 70s.
All roads are paved even though out here the pavement is a bit of a patchwork and even suffers occasional potholes.
But it was easy driving to Layne’s next destination for us on a coffee farm with no coffee.
Finca (farm) Macedonia five kilometers ahead (3 miles):
They made us welcome on their lovely green grass explaining it’s not yet coffee season and they had none to sell. You wouldn’t find a US place operating like that but around here you shrug and accept things as they are!
It was a pleasant spot with a pupusa for dinner and a solid nights sleep under a massive rainstorm.
Which turned a corner of the overnight parking area into mud soup and we made it worse by churning it up in the morning.
The farm’s little Ford Ranger pick up wasn’t up to the task but they call in the heavy vehicle, a 1980 Mercedes truck.
Rusty is smart enough to know when to stay on the sidelines.
Laughter and handshakes all round and within the hour we were on our way. Latin America is not a tow truck oriented society as a whole. Neighbors help each other and liability lawsuits are not the thing.
We have received a very little news from Panama a country critical to our journey.
It seems a Canadian mining corporation has entered into a mining contract for open face mining of assorted precious metals and it has come to be seen as an atrocious giveaway of the country’s resources. So there is a general strike underway. News is hard to come by oddly but roads are closed and protestors are in the streets and we are hoping things will be sorted in a month as we have to be ready to load GANNET2 in a container at the beginning of December.
Overland travel involves some decidedly odd and unexpected setbacks from time to time.
