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El Salvador: the safest most dangerous place tourists shouldn't but really should go
Perquin, El Salvador
Our entry into El Salvador was uneventful and thankfully very smooth and easy. We arrived in El Sunzal - and by arrived, I mean our shuttle stopped on the main road at a small track leading downhill and we were told to get off and walk. Thankfully only 100m later, we were in El Sunzal - 3 hostels, and a large expanse of open grassy area. 100m further was the sea.
We'd come here to surf. El Sunzal is next to El Tunco, a famous surfing hotspot for travelers, but we were told with inferior waves and more of a party atmosphere. El Sunzal is much quieter, mostly because there are no houses. Or shops. Or anything, actually. But after a busy, eventful 3 weeks in Guatemala, the absolute peace and quiet of Sunzal was perfect.
We rented surfboards and proved how inadequate we were at surfing. I say we, but actually Mike looked like a pro, paddling out to the big boys and catching waves that were as tall as me (no short people jokes, please). I stuck to the whitewash, battled against a ferocious riptide, pretended no creatures lived in the sea except turtles, and got generally battered and beaten by surfboard and waves and sometimes both at the same time.
It was slightly discouraging and unnerving that the only other guest at the hostel we were in hadn't been able to surf for the past week because of a severe concussion and hole in his head. A war wound from a particularly vicious wipe out, he told us, as we headed out with our surfboards.
The El Tunco area is nice, if a little too pushy about having a fun party time. At slow season, though, it had just the right vibe of sociability and relaxing, so Mike and I didn't feel like the old fogies we were beginning to consider ourselves. We befriended one of the owners of a hostel who ran an all-beer bar, with over 300 different beers from all over the world, and a wife who cooked the best steak in Central America (admittedly, not a difficult claim to fame, but they were good). After dark we were warned to not walk the beach, due to a few recent muggings, so we added to the old fogey image by eating dinner early and walking the mile back to our room before the sun had properly set. Party people, we were not, although the sunsets were spectacular.
After a few days of surfing (I still hadn't quite managed to stay upright on my board for more than a second…) and chilling on the black sand beaches, we headed back north to Juayua, a town famous for its weekend food festivals and beautiful mountain scenery. Guess which one made us decide to head there.
To get to Juayua you have to go along the Ruta de Flores, a gorgeous road framed by amazing flowers and verdant landscapes. Juayua itself in smack in the middle of a valley, surrounded by volcanoes and hills. It's a tiny 8-by-8 block town with cobbled roads and a huge ornate church in the centre.
Before we'd come to El Salvador, we'd met a lot of prejudice against the country, mostly due to its notorious gang-related violence. More often than not we were warned by other travelers to skip El Salvador entirely and go through Honduras instead, because it was safer. And none of these people had even been to El Salvador! Despite the opportunistic after-dark muggings in El Tunco, however, we hadn't felt the least bit threatened. The locals were lovely, the bus conductors were honest, and we had people stop their cars on the highway while we waited for buses so that they could offer us a ride somewhere (without, I assume, any intention to kidnap and kill us, but you never know) or at the very least tell us which buses to get and which stations to change at.
Juayua was another example of El Salvador's unjustified reputation as a purely malevolent country for tourism. Because of the recent civil war and its overwhelming atrocities, particularly in the rural areas of the country, small towns such as Juayua and Perquin, which we visited afterwards, are working hard on rebuilding their town as well as their community, meaning that the people we met and spoke with were enthusiastic, helpful and welcoming to tourists. They were always keen to tell us the history of their community, and recommend other good places to visit. When we asked about safety and crime, they shrugged, the same way I would if someone asked me if London was a safe place, or if there was much crime in Europe - of course there's crime, of course there's danger, we're not living in Utopia after all (not the hostel Mike and I stayed in in Guatemala).
So we hung around Juayua for longer than planned. We walked the 7 waterfalls in the area, running wildly from a minor landslide and canyoning down some waterfalls with an unconvincing harness-and-rope combination (the rope threaded through the harness was simply attached to your hand and the guide's). The food festival was a little disappointing - we learnt that a month earlier they'd tamed the festival down, so instead of serving exotic food like iguana, guinea pig and other animals I never thought of barbequeing, it was a few stalls that sold Salvadorean BBQ. Don't get me wrong, though - the food was delicious, the portions huge, and we definitely tried some food we would never have eaten otherwise. Pork ribs in a spicy-sweet marinade, shrimp skewers, chicken roulades, steak, corn soups, weird doughy rolls filled with cheese or Mayan chocolate, and so much more. Add into that $1 beers, and we had a great weekend.
I should mention that there is one particular piece of Salvadorean cuisine that we had been looking forward to ever since we'd heard about it: the pupusa. Despite my avid dislike of maize tortillas, pupusas are magical. 2 tortillas squashed together with cheese, cheese and pork, or cheese and chicken inside, fried on a grill, then covered in vinegary coleslaw with a side of hot sauce. Great for snacks, breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Next, we crossed the whole country in a day to get to Perquin. 5 buses, 1 pickup, $5, and 6 hours later, we were there. Perquin is famous for its role in the civil war as the revolutionary headquarters, fighting against the American-backed government troops as they literally bombarded the town. Nearby is an even smaller village called El Mozote, where the entire population were tortured and massacred in an anti-guerilla campaign by the Salvadorean army, despite promises made to the Mayor of their ensured safety. The Revolutionary Museum in Perquin memorializes and explains the atrocities of the civil war and the victories of the FMLN against the government. It's a dimly lit 4-room bungalow filled with newspaper clippings, propaganda posters from all over the world, and brief biographies for some of the local guerilla fighters who were killed. We were shown around by an ex-guerilla whose super-fast Spanish war vocabulary was a bit too much for me and Mike to muddle through. But the humility of the whole set up, and the unabashed pride of our guide for his town's pivotal involvement in the revolution, made the trip to Perquin more than worthwhile to us, as we learned exactly why the Salvadoreans we had met approached life and tourism with such a strong sense of pura vida.
Due to emergency passport limitations, I was not allowed to pass through Honduras at all. Which would have been fine if El Salvador and Nicaragua bordered like we thought they did. Turns out, there's a little bit of Honduras that makes this impossible. So we had to get a boat to Nicaragua, which wasn't as easy as we thought, nor as cheap. After several failed attempts to book our passage through the various tour operators we'd found, we simply turned up at the harbor immigration department and asked how we could get a boat to Nicaragua. The officer inside pointed to the man she had been talking to and said, "He'll take you." So for half the price of the official tours, and with a lot less hassle, we jumped in a boat and set off for Potosi, Nicaragua.
And for what it's worth, not once were we approached by drug dealers, nor stolen from, nor involved in a gang shootout.
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