El Salvador and the World

The land here is as beautiful as my Salvadoran neighbor said. I saw it first from the airplane, a dark brown punctuated by volcanos. (The earth has its own occasions of violence, from which mountains are made.) The dark brown earth turned dark green as we descended. It turned into uneven clumbs of leaves and unraveled into Pacific blue. Then the leaves belonged to trees, some of them with gray trunks so thick I could not have gotten my arms around them had my arms been twice as long. On the highway, two cars out of three were crumpled and beltching thick black clouds. Billboards every 100 feet announced that you could buy whatever you wanted on ebay or that the bank HSBC was ¨El Salvador and the world.¨ Shacks made of corrogated tin walled in the road. People went in and out of them and walked beside the traffic.

My first stop was in Juayua, a village in the mountains about an hour and a half from the capital. There were very few other tourists. I had the dorm at Hotel El Mirador to myself. The buildings, like most in El Salvador, were made of cinder blocks painted bright colors. The few roads seemed to lead straight into the mountains; on either side stood canopies where people sold clothes, shoes, crafts, fruit, bread. The trees in la plaza were painted white halfway up their trunks. They surrounded a fountain with a blue bottom.

Juayua holds a food fair in the afternoons on weekends. People grill exotic meats under outdoor canopies. In a basket on display at one of the canopies was a skinned frog corpse with its limbs splayed one in each direction. When I ordered rana a la plancha, the woman wordlessly picked up the frog body with tonges and threw it on the grill. The grill hissed obediently. It was good. More tender than chicken.

Besides frog, the highlight of Juayua was a trip to las cascadas, the waterfalls. They were beautiful, but not spectacular. The exciting part was getting there by mototaxi along a hilly dirt road with deep crevices. I had to brace myself to the seat to keep from hitting my head on the ceiling or my knee on the bar infront of me.

After Juayua, I went to the Barra de Cobana on the recommendation of Manuel, the manager of Hotel El Mirador. It was a tiny, dirty beach town full of Salvadoran families. The water was warm. I kept telling myself it was the Pacific. And so it was: blue liquid out to the sky. I stood in the arch of the waves and let them wash me to the sand. Fat grains stuck to my skin.

I went back to my room: heat, high white walls, and a matress. No shower. I used the bottom of a two litter soda bottle to pour water from a communal sink over my head, arms, legs, feet. Then I tried to walk through the town. But there wasn´t one. I had seen it all from the beach, just a few open-air restaurantes. I was the only tourist. Everyone else was walking arm in arm or calling to their children. I could not stay, not even one night, in Barra de Cobana. I caught the next bus to San Salvador.