Up The Volcano

Twenty five years ago Layne and I and our two dogs sailed past Acajutla, El Salvador’s main port. We thought about stopping in to check it out but on this stretch of the Pacific Coast there are no indentations and the port was a simple seawall jutting out into the ocean with no real anchorage for our 34 foot sailboat. So we sailed on by in 1998 on our way to Key West. 

Finally I got there to “Akka-hoot-la” and as usual reality was a let down. The harbor is now a giant container terminal and the city is nothing special. With nothing to photograph we bought SIM cards for our iPhones and pressed on, nostalgia be damned. 

El Salvador is a funny place and I like it, not least because the roads are fabulous, smooth and properly surfaced, with cleanly painted street lines and only a very few painted speed bumps in busy areas or in front of schools. Driving here is lovely. 

Gasoline is sold by the gallon and there is no national currency: they use the US dollar including American coins much to Layne’s delight as she has been hauling around a purse full of half forgotten quarters which she can now spend. It’s not hard to figure out the price of fuel either as it is exactly $4:27 a gallon! 

I don’t know if I can adequately explain why I like El Salvador so much but I find the place friendly and bright and cheerful and that is a purely subjective observation. The country is coming out of a long history of violence after a bloody civil war and then a period of gang warfare which has ended with a get tough policy by the government that has put 70,000 people in jail in a brand new high security prison. There are fears of a dictatorial crack down but the people I talked to are happy to be secure and seem buoyed by hope for a simpler future. I’m not a journalist or an economist but El Salvador seems to be on the upswing and it feels good to be here. 

Ever since we arrived in the country Thursday afternoon Layne had been obsessed by finding pupusas, the national food of El Salvador. She has a sentimental attachment to them since they fueled her student years studying law at Hastings College in San Francisco. She haunted a Salvadoran restaurant in the mission district and the first thing she wanted on arrival was a plate of pupusas. 

Weirdly enough we had a hard time finding them at first. Finally in the market town of Metalío astride the highway from the border to Acajutla we found the fat corn tortillas filled with meat cheese or beans and crisped on a griddle.

Two plates full and one big pupusa to go with a Coke for Layne  and a coffee for me came to four dollars and they were delicious. 

It was a sidewalk brunch of champions at ten in the morning. Rusty was totally stressed. 

Layne then went nuts in the fruit market while I took Rusty for a short walk on the crowded street in the heat. He soon wanted to go back to the van and his air conditioned bed where Layne met up with us beaming over her bag of fresh fruit. 

I have to say we are going through a good patch at the moment coming to grips with an interesting new country and a new culture, the problems of Guatemala behind us and as we shall soon see a pleasant spot to camp for the weekend. 

After a satisfying meal and a short tour of Acajutla we found ourselves loaded with fuel and purified water, we had fruit and a full refrigerator mostly with Mexican food as customs never showed any interest in it, and we were ready to escape the coastal heat.  

El Salvador is known for some interesting surf breaks but its coast is not of the tourist brochure kind. The sand is either gray or black and swimming is difficult as Pacific breakers crash ashore for the country’s entire 150 mile coastline. We plan to explore more of that later but for now we sought relief from heat and humidity at altitude. 

Cerro Verde is a national park swathed in clouds 6,000 feet above the town of Sonsonate and up we went driving through the usual lush greenery watching the temperature drop from 100 degrees to 69 at our chosen campsite at Villa Cristal. 

It was busy on a Friday afternoon with some kind of private school field trip. We met a bunch of middle class university students and chatted with them about life and their computer technology studies. They certainly view their futures with optimism. 

Rusty was happy as a clam rolling in the grass and fending off the advances of the campground dogs. He had a huge dinner and passed out snoring. 

Future members of the El Salvador national soccer team (they wish!). 

There is a rather decent looking restaurant on site that we plan to visit on Saturday.  

There are no hook ups but we designed the van for this life so for $7:50 a day we are sitting pretty in a field with no bugs and no sweating. 

And the absence of a phone signal bothers us not one jot. Our Mexican Starlink promptly welcomed us to El Salvador. 

We lack for nothing: we are amazingly privileged in this troubled world. 

Guatemala To El Salvador

Friday morning and awake aboard GANNET2. The sand fleas are nipping a bit as the doors are open, I can hear sounds from the village which is starting to stir, cars and roosters mostly, but lying here in the back of our camper van I can hear birds calling and chirping mostly, starting their day under heavily cloudy rainy season skies. Why there aren’t squadrons of mosquitoes I can’t say but this is a new country to us, our first night here after a bizarre drive out of Guatemala yesterday. 

Our sleep at a Guatemalan gas station yesterday was fragmented by a lot of noisy trucks all night. Then at three in the morning I heard beeping from the front of the van and I asked Layne who sleeps inside me (nearer the toilet) to see if the electrical system had a fault. The idea is to switch off the inverter and reset it if necessary. Our roadside stop Thursday night in central Guatemala:

“Michael!” she said, her voice full of urgency so unnatural I snapped awake suddenly and equally unnaturally. “There’s a man in the van!” I tumbled out of bed and grabbed not my glasses but my metal walking stick, left over from my 2018 motorcycle wreck. Layne checked the cockpit for any missing items but he took nothing, it turned out. Rusty wondered what the commotion was from his bed. 

He was a curious drunk truck driver fortunately who kept apologizing for getting caught and wanted to be my friend.  I pushed him away. There is a central locking device in the van dashboard which we usually press when we settle in for the night when parked in an unsecured location locking ourselves in. Well, this one night we forgot we had stepped out to check on a vehicle parking nearby and failed to reset the door locks. The one night an idiot got too curious about our home! Luckily this wasn’t the United States and he wasn’t armed.

We got back on CA2, Central America Highway 2 at 6:30 in the morning with 63 miles to drive to the Salvadoran border. We arrived there at noon so you can imagine the stop and go traffic, and the hours spent idling in jams and the nudging forward through swarms of motorcycles as locals rushed to work. 

It wasn’t political protest but it is a vigorous program of bridge building along the Pan (“All”) American Highway in Guatemala. They build the new bridge over the old instead of alongside so the highway is closed or reduced to one lane or has stop and go traffic control for miles. It’s a mess. And this has nothing to do with the general strike which is currently on pause, or at least was as we drove through. 

Traffic eased on the last two hours to the border as we drove through gorgeous green landscapes full of huge spreading trees and vast fields of brightest green. It was so lush and verdant the countryside reminded me of  Spring in England (!) but with volcanoes. 

Layne bought cooked pork meat called carnitas, above for dinner and it stayed secure in our fridge uninspected at the Salvadoran border. We don’t empty our fridge at borders anymore unless we are returning to the US when they have strict rules and we are expected to follow them. Down here it seems a waste to worry as no one seems to care about fridge.  Rusty enjoyed grazing the thick grass under the sign that read “Fruit Tree Nursery.”  

In the fullness of time we reached the border, a small village after miles of empty countryside. We dropped off two Spanish hitchhikers we picked up on the way to the border and let them cross by themselves. Associating yourself with strangers at a police inspection is never a good idea! 

To exit Guatemala you get your passport stamped and you get your vehicle’s temporary import permit “suspended” so you can drive back easily if you want to, otherwise if you cancel it the car can’t come back for ninety days. Simple, no?

 It took a couple of hours of waiting and cheerful chatter with the officials to get the stamps done. Sigh. I met a German couple in a VW Eurovan who spent five hours at the border with Nicaragua to get the job done. Something to look forward to. This was easy friendly and slow. 

As you leave the frontier post a man with a clipboard checks the VIN of the vehicle and the exit stamp and smiles you on your way…

And then we joined the surge of trucks trying to get to the bridge across the river that forms the boundary between these two countries. I haven’t seen the interior of El Salvador since I was here during the civil war in 1986 and we’ve heard only good things about how much modernizing has been underway, public works projects arresting gang members and so forth. A country finally at peace. 

But to get there wasn’t going to be so quick and easy!  One final jam leaving Guatemala! The general strike has left the country without supplies so as soon as the roads opened trucks poured in and out getting commerce going again and the infrastructure can’t handle. We knew this might happen but we had to get going anyway so we sat out huge traffic hairballs all the way to this point and here we were at the end of the road itself and stuck once again. Double sigh. I couldn’t wait to enter El Salvador. 

The soldiers monitoring our exit from their country intervened and moved non commercial car traffic to the left shoulder. This seemed an improvement after an hour idling in 100 degrees waiting for something to happen. It turned out to be the scariest drive so far and I was a limp rag after a mile of pothole dodging on that shoulder, and I’m not exaggerating. 

The pavement had a six inch edge and the pothole ahead resembled a swimming pool. I knew we’d get stuck if we fell in. Layne got out to her eternal credit and stopped the trucks eager to enter Guatemala. They stopped for her and I nudged between the front of the truck and the edge of the immensely deep hole with my mirrors folded. The rear wheel slipped momentarily as though sliding into the hole but we were fine. Till the next one. 

The holes were deeper than I imagined and I struggled to get around them flashing my lights to stop oncoming trucks. Some stopped others rushed at me. In my mirror I could see a full sized coach coming up behind. I asked the driver when we were at the Salvadoran border how he managed. He shrugged and smiled as only a Guatemalan could when asked to drive such crap roads. I was spent. 

Think we’re going to fit between the rock and the truck? Barely and I had to gun the engine to get the car wheel over it. How we didn’t lurch into the truck I’ll never know. 

I know our photography isn’t the best at this point but Layne was sweating bullets just like me. The pick up is leaning at an angle we might hit the light pole. Was it better to stay flat with no room or put two wheels on the asphalt and risk it? 

These guys we discovered later are road construction workers for the Salvadoran government’s Department of Public Works and what they were doing in Guatemala I don’t know but I followed them very closely.  

Eventually the Salvadorans stopped oncoming trucks and non commercial traffic crossed the bridge in the left lane. Ironic considering El Salvador doesn’t allow right hand drive cars, ones that are driven on the left as in England…

Out of Guatemala at last. Next time I hope they will be traveling a smoother road, more for them than for us. I admired the determination of the protestors to hold their vote accountable and not to give in to claiming vote fraud without proof. Going without in a country with so little to start with was a measure of their determination. I know people in the US think the 2020 election was stolen but no evidence ever emerged to support that and the extent to which it bothered the voters were snarky comments on Facebook. Not putting their well being on the line for a patently false claim. 

The Salvadoran immigration officials were smiling and cheerful. “Welcome to El Salvador!” She said grinning broadly after checking the tricycle passenger’s passport. “Unfortunately,” she added and my heart sank, “we have to ask you for twelve dollars to process each passport.” Oh okay then and I handed over a twenty dollar bill. “They’ll need two,” my wife the mathematician gently reminded me. It had been a long day already. 

Five minutes later another official came out, handed us our change (to Layne for safe keeping obviously) and gave us our passports duly stamped with an official receipt coyly poking out. “Welcome to El Salvador!” Big smiles hand shakes all round and off we went to customs. That took a little longer hand filling forms and a quick external tour of the vehicle. No money changed hands and we got our import for 60 days and nothing required for Rusty. “Enjoy El Salvador!” Three people waved us out of our inspection parking spot and we drove away. 

We also noticed the inevitable dogs hanging around the offices were all in great shape and there were overflowing food and water bowls for them. Unbelievable. 

Guatemala

We got half way across Guatemala on Wednesday in our frantic drive to cross the country before the blockades go back up. 

Half way sounds epic until you measure the distance along CA2 (Central America Highway Two) and discover that from Mexico to El Salvador is about 180 miles. It’s a ridiculous way to visit a country but happily we saw some good bits this Spring but right now after two weeks of total road closure the political parties are talking and the general strike has been suspended, for how long no one knows. We hope to be in El Salvador by lunch time Thursday and are looking forward to some time on a beach away from the mountains of the interior.

Highway 200 to Tapachula a lovely tree lined drive through Chiapas: 

Our day started at sunrise in the supermarket parking lot where we spent the night. I walked Rusty while Layne cleared the cabin for the road and we were off by 6:30 when it was full daylight. We drove a couple of hours on Highway 200 to the Mexican border town of Tapachula and in the way we passed more Venezuelan refugees photographed by Layne:

These people are walking and pushing baby strollers to the US to look for work. I asked a Guatemalan border official what they thought they would find. “Oh,” he said shaking his head sadly, “they expect an open door and to find dollars hanging on trees.” 

We had Rusty’s health certificate from Oaxaca and all we needed was to fill up with purified water and buy gas in case of difficulty in Guatemala (where we have plentiful supplies of both). Layne spotted a water truck and he sold us 15 gallons by the side of the road. 

He brought me the jugs and I siphoned them into our tank while Rusty watched from the shade. 

As if to reward my labor a pastry seller came by selling cream filled danishes made by his daughter. A dollar each? Give me five! Layne held me down to one but she doesn’t like them. Helping the local economy, that’s me. 

Getting across the border was actually bloody difficult. At our first attempt we accidentally found the truck and commercial vehicle crossing. We drove toward the coast along the river that divides Mexico from Guatemala until we came to the town of Ciudad Hidalgo and we poked around looking for the border. 

It was absurd! We couldn’t find Guatemala! An entire country had vanished and not a word in the news. How was this possible? 

There was a bridge but it was hardly signposted at all but I knew there had to be a way across the river somewhere in this confusing town.  

We checked out of Mexico presenting immigration our tourist cards and our receipt of purchase from Laredo. If you don’t have the receipt they make you pay again, $35 each.  I don’t what the story is but exiting to the United States they never stop you to ask for the tourist cards (FMM) back. In the south they always do and I was ready. GANNET2 has a ten year import permit so that was ours to keep. 

Then we paid a buck to cross the bridge to Guatemala and I had a twinge as we left Mexico. 

First the rather feeble disinfectant spray. That was five Quetzales (65 cents) and luckily we had some Guatemalan money from our last visit, about 800 Quetzales or $100US. 

The agriculture guy ran us down and was very grumpy until I produced Rusty’s passport with his rabies vaccine and his health certificate and I even had a copy of Dr Edie’s travel vaccine paperwork from the Keys. Why he wanted a copy of that in know not. I had to pay $13:50 in Quetzales at the bank for Rusty. He’s worth it. 

Then we went to see immigration and he gave us 90 days and a free stamp in our passports. The. We went across the courtyard to Aduana -Customs- for vehicle paperwork. Title registration passport and drivers license and one copy of each. We were ready! Oops. Immigration forgot to give me a receipt with a number. Back across the courtyard to get that. Ooops! We need to see Rusty’s permit. Back out into the 90 degree sun to get that. 

A quick VIN verification and a vehicle check followed which consisted in seeing our bed and then I showed our sink faucet to the inspector to show her how it doubles as a shower. No check of the fridge or food thank you. 

After two and a half hours of running around we paid the bank $20 (in Quetzales) for a Temporary Import Permit for GANNET2 and with our blue Guatemalan registration sticker on the windshield we were good to go. The security guard checked our papers in the way out. Much more formal than Mexico. 

Immediately on entering  Guatemala you can see you are in a poorer country, more crowded and more chaotic than Mexico. 

More motorcycles, more beggars and street performers and less order than in Mexico. Which probably sounds odd if you think Mexico is chaotic. The motorcycles here are aggressive and insane. 

Fortunately these grotesque formal potholes didn’t last long. CA2 is a mostly smooth highway properly surfaced and with very few random

speed bumps. In Mexico they call speed bumps “topes” (toe-pays) but in Guatemala they are “tumulos.” Whatever the name, they are a pain in the ass, literally if you hit them at speed. 

The only road food we found was these weird red things. At first I thought they were tubers or roots but the seller said “Pan!” And I was in. Bread it was too but not normal. They were crusty aerated bread balls covered in sweet icing. Never seen anything like them but they were really good unless you are Webb Chiles with no sweet tooth. 

If you need privacy with your mistress the highway is littered with love hotels. However don’t bring a van as it won’t fit in the narrow low hidden parking garages…

We hoped to get as close as possible to El Salvador in one day but the traffic was miserable. It was one jam after another all afternoon long. We were lucky to make 90 miles.  

The bus driver got out with a jug of water to sluice off his muddy and rain spattered windshield. In Mexico it’s very rare to see old school buses working public transit these days. Another measure of Guatemala’s relative poverty. 

The weather went from sunny to rainy to overcast. In the evening we got drowned in a massive downpour. We were already looking for a place to sleep when suddenly the sky went black, the clouds opened up and darkness fell. Peachy!  

I followed a tanker truck at thirty miles an hour and its as well I did as he spotted and dodged not one but two unlit tricycles on the highway. By myself I could easily have killed them in the rainy darkness. Thats why we try never to drive at night. 

I think the motorcycles had cardboard on the seats to make them as fully paid up in the private parking lot. It’s not always clear how things get done in these cultures. 

In the end we found a gas station and they let us spend the night. It was bliss as Layne cooked sausages and mash for dinner and Starlink provided the entertainment and we turned on the air conditioning to cool down our box and inside we all three were snug in our home. Rusty polished off his tuna and kibbles and eventually we turned in with open windows and a fan as the night had cooled off. 

The employees also got a tour of our mobile home, their first view ever. 















Pushing Coke Zero: