Feb.11, 2001
Tela, Honduras
Faye and I left Guatemala a couple weeks ago and headed for El Salvador. El Salvador has a reputation for being dangerous or dull (or perhaps both.) During the civil war of the 80s travelers avoided it for obvious reasons. After the government and the insurgent forces of the FMLN reached an accommodation in ’92 armed robberies increased sharply. There were lots of unemployed ex-soldiers who still had their guns. However in the past couple of years things have settled down and the country seems to be about as safe as most countries in this area (and probably safer than L.A. or New York.)
That still leaves its reputation for being dull. Travellers are rare in El Salvador; it is a very small country, about 130 miles across the long way, and it is easy to avoid. Most would rather spend their time going places with more promising reputations. One of our considerations when we were thinking about passing through the country was the recent earthquakes. There was pretty big one on Jan. 13, as well as numerous smaller ones since. More are predicted. But to our minds that just offset the chances of it being dull.
One of the things El Salvador is known for is it’s beaches, which run the full length of it’s southern border. Getting to a beach sounded good to me. Faye is not as keen about beaches, but she wanted to see the capital, San Salvador. Evidently some years ago she was in Salvador, Brazil. She met someone there whose luggage ended up in San Salvador. That seemed like as good a reason as any to go to San Salvador (though now, having seen it, not quite good enough).
On the whole El Salvador was a pleasant surprise. It certainly doesn’t have the Mayan color and culture that Guatemala has. There are only a handful of indigenous people in the country. But for the most part El Salvador seems cleaner and more progressive than Guatemala, certainly more westernized. Since the beginning of the year the U.S. dollar has been legal tender, alongside the Colón. There are those that don’t think this is the kind of progress El Salvador needs, but it seems to be a trend. Panama has used U.S. currency for years. Ecuador recently legalized the use of dollars, and Guatemala will begin accepting dollars in April. I won’t go into the pros and cons of “dollarization,” but among other things it seems to be a pragmatic recognition of the power and influence of the U.S. in this part of the world. Another major factor was the number of Salvadorans working in the U.S. and sending money back to their family in El Salvador.
Crossing the border from Guatemala we had to work our way around a caravan of 30 Airstreams on their way to Panama. That was a sight! We caught a ride down the coast with a guy who was driving to the other end of the country. The first evidence we saw of the earthquakes was a boulder the size of a Volkswagen which had fallen down the mountain and covered one side of the road. The next day in the paper we saw two pictures of the boulder on the front page- before and after shots, or rather before and during. The army came after we had passed and blew it to pieces with dynamite. I’m not sure I would have wanted to be the photographer who photographed the explosion. The picture looked like he was pretty close.
We spent a couple of days at a secluded beach. We were looking for a place to stay I knew about which had a pool and a lawn. But because of my bad sense of direction we ended up someplace else. We got a room with a family who lived next to the beach. It was pretty basic, but we had fun playing with the kids. Something else that was pretty entertaining were the pigs. Domestic pigs seem to be a pervasive element along the Central American coast. It is a very strange thing. There were about a dozen 2-week-old piglets scampering around like hyper-active puppies, as well as a parrot and a white rabbit which hid in our room, escaping the pigs and the dogs. It sounds like a zoo, but really it was pretty relaxing. We all spent most of the day lying around in the shade. In this tropical climate it is easy to see why not much gets done.
From there we went up into the mountains, to a town named Juayua. (Don’t ask me how to pronounce it- we never did get it right.) We didn’t realize it until we got there but it was one of the areas hardest hit by the Jan. 13 earthquake. There were collapsed buildings all over town. All of those we saw, however, were of adobe. Some were a hundred years old. It doesn’t take much to shake down an old adobe building. The newer places made of concrete seemed undamaged. We spent one night there and felt another small quake about three in the morning.
We left Juayua planning to spend the night in San Salvador. But we saw enough of it from the bus window on the way to the terminal. It didn’t look quite as wretched as Guatemala City, but we felt certain that if we kept going we’ed find someplace we liked better. We caught a bus headed out of town towards the mountains in the northeastern part of the country. We spent the night in San Miguel, the major city of the area. It had sort of an odd “New/Old West” feel to it. The banks all had signs saying “Please leave your guns and cell phones with the guard at the door.” We had the opportunity to visit quite a few banks, looking for a place to cash a traveller’s check. Most acted like they had never heard of traveller’s checks. It was further evidence of how few travellers come to El Salvador.
After resolving the cash problem we pushed on up into the mountains to the small town of San Francisco Gotera. Our guidebook dismissed it as hot, humid, impoverished and unfriendly. We found none of those things to be true. It was a quiet, clean little town, with a good public market. The people were quite friendly, though a little surprised to see us. We spent several nights there, using it as a base to explore the area around it. We visited the town of Cacaopera, which is one of the small pockets where there is a concentration of indigenous people. The Kakawira, as they are known, never had the complex organization and strength of their Mayan relatives in Guatemala. They continue to struggle to retain their heritage and ethnic identity. In Cacaopera we met a Peace Corps volunteer who gave us a great tour of the town. He took us down to the Torolo River which was famous during the war as the demarcation between the territories controlled by the FMLN guerrillas and the army.
That evening in Gotera we were invited for tea at the convent, run by two nuns, one Irish and the other Welsh. The Welsh one has been in El Salvador for 27 years and had some incredible stories about the war. Gotera was the frontier of the army forces and there was a large barracks beside the convent. Nearly every night the FMLN would attack it. She said no one went out at night. The army did its best to cut off all food and supplies to the territory controlled by the FMLN and a flood of people poured into Gotera. The nuns did their best to feed nearly 15,000 refugees, sometimes in spite of army attempts to stop them.
After Gotera we headed farther north, to Perquin, which was the heart of the FMLN territory. Today it is a tranquil little town, but it is clear they still consider the FMLN heroes and martyrs. There is a museum with an interesting collection of weapons and crude bombs, hand-drawn maps showing plans of attack, and numerous photos and histories of the fighters. Many of the guerrilla soldiers and even officers were women. The war lasted twelve years. Considering what they had to work with, and against, it is amazing that the insurgents got as far as they did. Today the FMLN is a legitimate political party with representation throughout the government.
Perquin was our last stop in El Salvador. The border crossing into Honduras looked pretty close on our sketchy map. But it took an hour and a half up a rough dirt road into the mountains, first in the back of a cargo truck, then a pickup. Where are those tourist jitneys when you need one? It took another hour and a half to reach the first town in Honduras, Marcala. That was a couple days ago. We are now on the Caribbean Coast of Honduras.