Surf El Salvador
So said the T-Shirt on Val Kilmer’s character in Real Genius (or was it surf Nicaragua? Oh well). So I decided to take him up on the idea. Getting into El Salvador was almost too easy. We walked across the border. Looking for the usual immigrations department, forms, fees, etc. On the way across we found a guardhouse, about like what you’d find back home for a gated community. Only not as nice of course. The lone guard flagged us down as we were ambling past and asked to see our passports. We had them in hand already and passed them over. He glanced at them and smiled and said “welcome to El Salvador”. Just like that. No stamps, no forms, no where are you going/what do you do/why are you here questions. Just poof, we’re in El Salvador.
Since that was too easy, I asked where we went next. He said nowhere, that was it, we’re here. So I wandered around for awhile in spite of what he said, not willing to accept that it was really that easy. Found a line I could wait in for awhile (that made me feel better) and finally come up to the front, handed over my passports dutifully and the person looked perplexed and said “well didn’t you see the guard out there?” I said, |uh, yes… ” and she said “well didn’t he look at your passports already?” I said, “uh, yes…” and so she handed my passports back and said “you’re in El Salvador. Have fun!”
Alright! That’s how a border crossing SHOULD be! That really set the tone for El Salvador in general. Nice people, no hassles, cheap prices, good- no, great food. From the border we walked a little ways in and found a money changer, who offered to change our Honduran lempira into dollars. After negotiating a rate I said no, I wanted Salvadoran money. He said dollars IS Salvadoran money. I was skeptical but took the dollars. Sure enough, every price I saw was in dollars so after an hour or two I conceded that El Salvador used the dollar. We were thankful for a reprieve from the constant recalculation of prices based on 18 to the dollar, 20 to the dollar, 550 to the dollar, and liked to just see a price and know “Oh… that IS dollars!”
So then we caught a bus to San Salvador, spent a few hours wandering through the market eating street food. Delicious street food. Something called an Empanada that was basically bananas and cream mixed up and deep fried. Two the size of half an avocado for a quarter. Basically everything in El Salvador was a quarter. And I saw more fruit for sale on buses as snack food than anywhere else in central america. Children came on board at every stop selling watermelon, mango, papaya, pinapple, all for about a half-pound for a quarter. We bought a pound and a half of small, delicious, local strawberries for a dollar. Then we discovered pupusas.
A pupusa is basically a stuffed tortilla. They take fresh cornmeal and wrap it around beans, cheese, squash, meat, whatever and fry them on a griddle. Sell them for about a quarter each - and they are the size of a pancake. Two are quite filling. Plus, they come with homemade sauerkraut called repollo, which piled on top with salsa makes a good meal for about 50 cents. They are uniquely Salvadoran although the repollo is common in Nicaragua and Honduras.
As I said in the previous post, Salvadorans are very helpful. When I made it known to the driver of the bus that I was headed to Playa Sunzal, a few minutes later half the people on the bus were telling me “Sunzal, Sunzal aqui!” and making sure I got off where I was supposed to. This happened several times.
We found a nice hotel a few hundred feet from the beach, that came with free internet, ping pong, pool table, darts, kitchen and was a very nice relaxing place to spend the weekend.
If you look at the rock on the left, from some angles it looks like an old sailor. Sunday morning I took some surfing lessons - 14$ for an hour with a board rental for the day. Unfortunately, the surf was so far away and I was so out of shape for paddling I could only catch two waves.
Equally unfortunately, because of my distance from shore and the fact that I was not the only one wearing a red shirt, Crystal repeatedly took pictures of the wrong surfer riding the waves. But here I am in this one. No, I’m not the cool one riding the wave. But if you look to the right, there is a black blob. That’s the top of my head. Hang ten, dudes!
I found someone juggling on the beach, so I juggled with them for awhile. Then that attracted a third juggler, and we set up a ball passing pattern with 3. No videos of that unfortunately, but it was a lot of fun. We found some tamales in La Libertad for 20 cents each, took 10 to go, but two each filled us up.
Next morning we were up to go to Guatemala at 5:30. We wanted to make some oatmeal in the kitchen before we left, but found it didn’t open until 6 so we waited. Then we caught the bus ride, which was remarkably uneventful except for the movie Titanic. Which is also remarkably uneventful, and would have been totally unwatchable had it not been dubbed in Spanish which made it just barely interesting - no offense to the millions of teenage girls who made this movie gross more than Star Wars.
But we finally got our passport stamped at the border to Guatemala, although it was still very easy to cross the border. From there we went to Antigua, which you will see next post…
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Posted on February 25th, 2009 by Natnee and filed under El Salvador |
