Petting Zoos, Steam Vents, and the Wheel
The Jardín de Celeste really was the best hotel in the area. We looked. 
It had cozy cabins nestled in the hillside surrounded with beautiful plants and flowers. They owned a 270 acre coffee plantation and had a small petting zoo consisting of a few ducks, some sheep, and a pair of geese. There was a wonderful restaurant there at the hotel with good food and decent prices. The only thing this place didn’t have, well two things, were a view of the valley, and a market within walking distance. Nonetheless, we did enjoy ourselves there.
The town of Ataco was about 5km away, and we went there frequently for foodstuffs. We found some exotic fruits there: binches (mamones chinos - I should note that Natnee ate roughly 1000 of these during the trip), a strawberry flavored cherimoya (anoni), and an orange cherimoya-like fruit that we don’t know the name of. We also found a place in Ataco that made whole wheat bread, so we had them make us 12 “loaves”. These turned out to be thick tortillas and not the loaves you see on grocery store shelves in America. But they were good. Left are binches, and right is an anoni.
On a couple occasions Natnee and I just wandered the streets of Ataco, seeing whatever we could see. Interestingly, when you leave the actual city, there are houses and farms right there in the “burbs”. This is not so in Mexico. There, when you leave the city, there is nothing until you get to the next city. Natnee and I received strange looks all through this town because it was not frequented by white people, and they are more suspicious of others in this town than in others we’d visited. On one promenade through town, a little girl of not more than 5 called out after us, “Gringa! Gringa!” When we turned, she smiled broadly and said, “Hello!” to our “Hola”.
Another day we checked out the market at Juayúa since we had not as yet made it there. It was highly recommended by the guidebook as being one of the largest in the area, with huge numbers of vendors on Saturdays and Sundays. So we went on a Sunday to check it out. We were disappointed. It was too Americanized and too clean to be a market suitable for our delicate tastes. Really, though, there wasn’t much there to see, so we went to the nearby town of Apaneca to check out their market. It was even more depressing, with about 5 vendors total. After this, we were depressed enough to just go back to the room for the rest of the day.
One day we decided to do a coffee tour in a nearby factory. It was all in Spanish, so Natnee had to translate all of it for us. All their machinery was American-made and old (these days, it has to be old to be American-made). The guide took us through the process from start to finish - from the washing of the beans to the packaging. It was all very interesting (even for someone who doesn’t drink coffee), and at the end there was a video in English summarizing the process.
Later on during our stay at Jardín de Celeste, we decided to go to Ahuachapán to the ausoles, or heat vents. Daddy suggested that Ahuachapán was something Mother needed to do more often. There are volcanoes there that let off steam, and 10% of the nation’s energy needs are met through using the ausoles. We took a few pictures of bubbling water and steam (of course!) and we were going to go to the top where the baths were. But, the fumes and gases made Daddy sick, and the road was one of their customary back roads - long and very bumpy. So we turned back.
By the time we got back in Ahuachapán, we were hungry, so what better place to find food in than the market? We found several food vendors in a large open area with tables and chairs so we all sat down and Natnee ordered things from different vendors. But you couldn’t take dishes from one section to another. Why? Because the dishes might get stolen. Really?!? These people are so superstitious and so distrusting, it is hard to put it into words. All their houses and stores have bars and locks on them, and there is always a security guard with a sawed-off shotgun closeby. So, we ate in one section and then moved over to the next to try a different dish. While we were eating in this second section, a beggar approached us. We gave him our leftover tortillas and soup, and since he wasn’t too proud to take that, we gave him a dollar also. Not sure if that was the right way to handle that situation, but we figured it was worthy of some reward since most people wouldn’t take your leftover food; they just want your money.
On our last day at the Jardín de Celeste, we did some exploring by car (as we are wont to do) and ended up in Tacuba. It was a fairly good sized town, the only one we’d run into the whole trip that had one-way streets (how frustrating!). The town was clean, and the people were fairly friendly, since they want revenue from tourism. It was nice, but not spectacular. If you enjoy one-way streets, you might like it.
In all our driving around and exploring, we found some interesting things to note: Cows graze along the sides of the roads, and there are cows literally EVERYWHERE. As are the people. We tried finding a few bushes to, um, “inspect”, and everytime we found a good one, there’d be some man coming up the hill with a bag of corn on his shoulders. I’m not kidding. It got to be kind of funny. Also along the sides of the roads are fields of corn, beans, sugar cane, and coffee. Right up to the road in some places. And in every spot of arable land. Some places you’d have to rappel to in order to pick the crop because the hillsides were so steep.
Here’s an enigma smothered in secret sauce. Everybody carries things on their heads or their shoulders. Women carry things on their heads, and men carry things on their shoulders. Never the other way around. That just wouldn’t be right! I find this carrying distinction cute. Irrational but cute. They carry bottles of water, bundles of sticks, and many other things that way. These are sticks they walked kilometers to gather into a bundle less than 1m across and tied with string. This is water they walked kilometers to collect from the community well. The terrain in this region isn’t exactly level. It’s very hilly. So these people walked up and down steep hills on roads not fit to drive on with these things. Now, a few of them actually began thinking about what they were doing and created the wheel. Ta dah!
Isn’t this great?!? Well, only when you’re going downhill, since they don’t have gas or pedals, only brakes. Some of them had wooden wheels, some were covered with a little rubber. People would zoom down the road in these things alongside regular traffic back to their houses or stores. Incredible. Even fewer people used a vehicle for hauling wood to and fro. I suppose they just can’t afford it, even as a group, or else they simply prefer doing things in the more primitive fashion.
All in all, the people are very friendly and very healthy and very happy. More so than in other Latino countries we’ve traveled to.
After leaving the hotel, we headed toward some Mayan ruins. Mother wanted to see them. Natnee and I had seen the ones at Copán, so it was nothing new to us, and Daddy didn’t really want to see them. After seeing that it would cost us $12 to get in, we decided not to do it, especially since there was no tour guide for that price. After all, this is a pile of rocks we’re talking about! And, we could see them through the chain-linked fence. So we left and went to our next stop - a crater lake. It was pretty, but there was no place to stay, and had we stayed, there would have been nothing to do in the area or in the lake. So off we went.
Unfortunately, we had to go through San Salvador to get to the beach again without retracing our steps. Retracing our steps is against our principles! Driving through (or rather, as much around as possible) San Salvador was hectic. Daddy nearly clipped off a guy’s elbow. He was walking along the freeway carrying a bag of oranges on his shoulders. How stupid! Anyway, the guy barely kept his elbow. We stopped at a Burger King in the heart of San Salvador to rest and recoop for a few minutes, and also to have some “real” French fries, instead of all the wanna-be’s we’d found in the markets. Anyway, we ended up for the day, and the rest of our stay, at Costa del Sol, a small town on the spit of land on the southeastern side (near La Herradura), but more about that next time.
~Crystal
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Posted on November 24th, 2009 by Natnee and filed under El Salvador |
