Bahia del Sol, El Salvador
A three-day tour of El Salvador...
We left Bahia del Sol on Saturday morning, riding in a mini-van with another two couples, a guide and a driver.
Our first stop was only about 2 hours away (would have been a lot quicker except for road construction around the city of San Salvador), at the archaeological site of Joya De Ceren. This is a unique look at how the early Mayan people lived, preserved by layers of ash laid down by a series of volcanic eruptions, very similar to what happened to Pompeii in Italy. What makes this different from other Mayan ruins is the fact that this is not some center for government or religious ceremonies or palaces for the rulers - just a town for regular folk leading their ordinary humdrum lives. It is a world heritage site as a result.
Moving on a few miles we came to the aforementioned more typical pyramid structures found at the site of San Andreas. This site is quite extensive but only about 5% has been excavated to date. Interesting by nothing so impressive as Chichen Itza or Palenque in Mexico.
We made another stop in the afternoon at the volcano complex at Cerro Verde where we were given a tour of an orchid garden and took in the views of one of the nearby volcanos. This time of year it is often cloudy and views are sort of hit and miss - we are told that the rainy season is the time to visit as the air is much clearer (sounds wrong to me but what do I know).
After a quick visit to the city of Santa Ana (nice cathedral and such), we travelled to the small town of Ataco, where we spent the night.
Susanne and I got up early Sunday morning to take a short hike up to the viewpoint at the cross overlooking the town, then found someone to sell us a cup of coffee. The town was very quiet until about 9AM when people started to set up for a local food festival - this takes place every weekend in this town and the nearby larger town of Juayua, which was to be our next stop.
When everybody was finally awake and ready to go, we were driven to the town of Juayua where we had lunch at the Gastronomic Parade - they have everything from fried chicken to fried iguanas and it was an extremely busy place by noon. We did the typical tourist thing and rode on a little train through the streets of the town, complete with accompanying commentary, in Spanish of course. It is interesting to note that while these towns are very touristy, there are virtually no non-Salvadoran tourists about.
El Pital is reportedly the highest point in El Salvador, reaching a height of over 2400 meters. We stayed in a rustic log cabin pretty much right at the top (the very steep road up the mountain required a change of vehicles to something a little more robust). It was much cooler at altitude and we were all very happy to get some relief from the heat and humidity of the coast - at night is was actually "jacket" weather. In a lot of ways it reminded us of spring in the Rocky mountains in Alberta. Some of our fellow travellers wanted to stay longer here but in the end they decided they could come back another time on their own.
On our last day, we started out with a hike down a steep mountain road for about 8 kms to the shores of the Sumpul river. Along the way we visited a couple of flower farms - flowers are grown for resale in the city. There was also a lot of other agriculture on these mountain slopes - lots of cabbage and avocados.
There is a park at the river which for some reason was closed, so we were forced to pay a guy who had some land next door, to let us use his path down to the river itself. As this is still the dry season, the river was quite small, with a lot of big rocks to walk across. This river represents the border between El Salvador and Honduras.
On the way back to the hotel for lunch, our mini-van did not show up and we had to hop in the back of a passing pickup truck to make the uphill trek - an adventure in itself.After lunch, we had a long drive back to Bahia del Sol, passing through rush-hour traffic in San Salvador along the way. We were back on the boat around 8PM on Monday evening.
Tuesday was another of the group activity days organized for the rally. We took our dinghies up the estuary about a mile to another hotel, where we had food and drinks and pool competitions. Sue and I won a night's stay in a hotel in San Salvador!Yesterday, Sue and some of the other cruiser women took a taxi to San Salvador where they spent the day fabric shopping. Somehow Susanne managed to get one of her ATM cards "retained" at the bank machine and eventually had to pay $17 to get it back - I thought those cards were supposed to let us take money out of the bank, not the other way around. Just to add insult to injury, the bank in question was Scotiabank!
{GMST}14|19.97|N|89|9.12|W|El Pital, El Salvador|El Pital, El Salvador{GEND}
{GMST}13|52.0|N|89|51.09|W|Ataco, El Salvador|Ataco, El Salvador{GEND}
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