Salvadoran Trek, pt. 3: The Final (Long) Chapter

Well, I didn’t have any more chances to blog while I was in El Salvador, so this entry is going to take us from Monday, June 18 when I wrote my last entry in Santa Ana, the country’s Western city, up until my last day in the country, last Sunday, June 24. It’s long.

I went to Santa Ana to see the Western part of the country and to give Sarah some time alone in Suchitoto to get some work done. My plans were to visit El Parque Nacional Los Volcanes (Volcano National Park) and hopefully climb a volcano, and to visit Lago de Coatopeque, at the foot of the volcanoes, which the Peace Corps volunteers and others had told me was a lovely, relaxing spot.

The great surprise of Santa Ana was that the city itself proved to be just as fun as the natural wonders surrounding it, and I didn’t even get a good look at the city center, which others have praised, and which I now regret missing. The main reason why I enjoyed SA so much was the place where I stayed, the Casa Frolaz. Frolaz is a small hostel in the south of the city, the sort of backpacking gem that you only come across a couple times (or less) on a trip – one of the cleanest hostels I’ve ever stayed in and one of the friendliest. As Lonely Planet mentions, it is a bit far from the city center, but since the owner will probably be willing to drive you anywhere you need to go, that becomes less of a problem.

The joint was run by a true gentleman named Javier, who also knew how to have a great time. Each night he took me and the other three or four guests out to a local bar called Jam Rock. Unfortunate name, I know, but a cool place with lots of friendly people who knew how to drink. If we didn’t jump on the checks at the end of the night, Javier would cover them himself, which was simply too generous. The second night I was there the atmosphere got a little frat house-ish with some of the local guys (and one rude traveler) harassing a drunk and high local girl, but aside from that ugliness the vibes were generally mellow.

I arrived in Santa Ana on a Monday and just chilled for the rest of the day, checking e-mail, taking money out of the bank, eating Pollo Campero. The next day I set of for the volcanoes with a Dutch and an American from the hostel, Katia (hope I’m spelling that right) and Chris. We took a bus outside of the city to the top of one of the three volcanoes housed within the park, Cerro Verde, which is now long dormant, covered with lush green forests on all sides. One of the bummers of the volcano excursion was that the best view of the most dramatic volcano in the park, Izalco, is available right when you get to the top of Cerro Verde, without taking the hike. Thus, taking the hike becomes more about the experience of going up and down an active volcano, and the view from atop it, which in the end felt a little anticlimactic, but which I guess was comparatively just as stunning. The hike was a bitch, though, really intense. Definitely worth doing, but I was hurting afterwards – down Cerro Verde, up Izalco, down Izalco, up CV again. The biggest pain was that the last leg, up CV, is the toughest and the longest. The hike was led by a guide, a young Salvadoran guy who was fun to talk to, and we were trailed by two park police. These weren’t your standard park rangers, though, these guys were fucking strapped – bulletproof vests, assault rifles, etc. In one way, this was reassuring as a preventative measure, but you also didn’t want to be caught in the crossfire if you somebody did try to attack your party. Unfortunately, as mentioned in an earlier post, the crime and security situation in El Sal is still basically desperate and even in the eyes of a sympathetic visitor, its public image couldn’t help but suffer for it.

The next day I went off to Coatepeque with Katia. The lake was beautiful. Just a basic lake, I guess, but I haven’t been to many lakes and I imagine this one stacks up pretty well. It’s at the foot of the volcanoes, so it’s got that going for it, and it’s surrounded on all sides by low mountains, maybe more like hills, which makes for a fairly dramatic setting. Also, the area is relatively underdeveloped, which makes you feel like you’re enjoying something special and unique. The hostel that I stayed in there was a bit of a bummer – Katia and I were the only two guests – but we made due. The only real detractor from the lake experience though was that Salvadoran cuisine and dirty water finally caught up to me there and I got pretty sick. I’ll spare you the details, but it was definitely serious enough to distract from my enjoyment of the place.

I met with Sarah again on Thursday en route to Perquin, our next destination, in the small city of San Martin, in between Suchitoto, her Peace Corps site, and the capitol. This was a long fucking journey for me, starting at 7 a.m. and ending around 4 or 5 p.m., I think, and including at least 6 bus transfers. Strangely though, bus distances and times and the general hassle of getting around El Sal wasn’t a big bummer for me. Each bus and town has its own character and the people are so damned friendly that you hardly notice how hot, cramped, and long some of the bus rides are.

Still, this was a particularly tiring ride, but worth it. Perquin was probably my favorite spot on this Salvadoran journey. The town itself was a rebel stronghold during El Salvador’s painful civil war from 1980 to 1992, and it is nearby the site of that war’s worst atrocity, the El Mozote genocide, in which “an estimated 900 people” (according to Wikipedia, I’ve heard varying numbers) were brutally tortured, raped, and executed by government sponsored, U.S. trained troops. Also, it houses the museum of the Salvadoran revolution, which was modest and not much different from similar museums that I’ve seen in Cuba and Vietnam, but was still worth a visit, in particular since it is staffed by friendly and informative former guerrillas themselves.

Besides these ghosts and this history, though, Perquin is a damned pretty place as well, mountainous, and cooler than the rest of El Salvador. It pissed rain while Sarah and I were there, but that was actually a nice respite during a scorching hot week and good for Salvadoran agriculture, too. On our second day there, Sarah’s friend, Riley, came down from his Peace Corps site nearby to take us on a hike, which was lower impact than my trek up and down the volcanoes, but with at least comparable payoffs. He took us through forests, a dry, almost desert-like river bed, up and down some modest mountains, all with the ultimate goal of reaching a set of waterfalls hidden on the mountainside. The falls included three natural swimming pools that allowed for a refreshingly cool dip, and the three trekkers also included some snacks for lunch. The ride back to town was fun, too, on or in three separate pick-ups, drinking Pilsener beers (Salvador’s national brand), sweating our balls and other private things off.

My trip in El Salvador closed with a final party down the Salvadoran shore on a beach called Tunco. El Salvador is known for its kick-ass waves and I had really wanted to catch some while I was down there – first I was going to have to learn to surf – but there just wasn’t enough time. Nor was the beach really suitable for either swimming or taking the sun. Instead, the drinking began early and often when Sarah and I ran into two of her fellow Peace Corps volunteers around 4 p.m., a half an hour or so after we got there. Admittedly, I got a little wrecked that night. Ended up playing my guitar a lot, which I hope was entertaining and not totally obnoxious, but I fear for the worst. I woke up the next day with a bit of a foggy memory and some bad-ass cuts and calluses on my hands. I feel a little bad that this was how I spent my last night in such a great place, but I guess this is what one does when he is sad (about leaving, that is) and down the shore, and alas, this is what I did.

Long story short, I loved the trip even more than I ever expected I would. There was a hell of a lot more to do in El Salvador than I had originally imagined. It wasn’t as dangerous as its skeptics have made it sound, at least not for me that is. The people were incredibly friendly. Their dignity in the face of poverty, social turmoil, and a history of conflict was really actually quite inspiring. I left wishing I’d known more before I got there, wanting to learn more soon, anxious to return and anxious to visit other countries in the region. Maybe next year if my plans for a trip to China don’t materialize.

Salvadoran Trek, pt. 2: San Salvador

So, San Salvador, the capitol of El Salvador has a pretty shitty reputation, one of the worst (if not the worst) homicide rate in the world, sprawling, not a hell of a lot to see or do.  Still, I wanted to check the place out, because a city is a city, there always has to be something worth doing, something worth being discovered.  I spent two afternoons and an evening in San Sal earlier this week.

I was pleasantly surprised.  Aesthetically, the city is lacking.  There isn´t much great architecture (at least not that I saw) and the sprawl was intimidating, especially in the downtown area. It was chaotic, but attractive in spite of that.  Of course, I did look at the centro from bus windows, I was stuck in a lot of traffic, but I wouldn´t have had many other reasons to be there anyway (besides shopping).

I visited three museums in the capitol, Anthropology, Modern Art, and the Centro Romero.  All three were interesting in their own way, if limited.  Each one could be explored in an hour or two, but I´m glad that I visited them all. El Centro Romero is a theological center and museum dedicated to the martyrs of the Salvadoran Civil War, in particular Archbishop Romero and the six priests that were brutally murdered by a government death squad on the Centro Romero site.  It is located on the campus of the Universitad Centro-Americana (UCA), which was also nice for a stroll in itself.  The museum contained some very gruesome photographic records of the massacre on the Centro Romero site, which made the horror of the war here much more palpable. 

The Anthro and Modern Art museums were about what you would expect. Anthro focused very specifically on the society and culture of El Salvador, which made for an experience slightly different from every other anthro museum that I´ve visited.  Modern Art was a little repetitive and definitely small, but it was also cold as hell due to air conditioning, a rare pleasure in this hot-ass country, so that was nice.

Other than all this stuff, I wandered around the city a bit, got loaded with some peace corps volunteers, and had my first taste of Pollo Campero, a fast food restaurant that is a central part of the Salvadoran experience (and probably the rest of Central America as well — there are even some in the States — I think there was one on my neighborhood in Chicago, anyway. . .)

Now I´m in Santa Ana, ES´s second city.  Tomorrow I´m going climb a volcano. Hopefully, it doesn´t erupt.

Salvadoran Trek, pt. I

So I´m in El Salvador.  Been here since Sunday.  Flew into San Salvador, the capitol.  The flight was uneventful, but they did have non-stop free drinks going on a 9:30 a.m. flight, which was great. Fly TACA!

I´m visiting my friend Sarah Edelman who is a Peace Corps volunteer in the town of Suchitoto.  It´s a laidback place, kind of artsy, kind of bohemian; an old colonial town, it attracts more tourists than most of the country.  So far, I´ve met some of Sarah´s friends –other volunteers, a few townies, some other interested parties–all good people.  Last night was especially fun partying with some French volunteers at their pad. 

On Monday Sarah and I travelled to her first volunteer site in a place called Isla de Mendez.  It was definitely rustic–a mainly agricultural community.  Not much to see, but the place did have a generally interesting atmosphere and it sits on a bay that was fairly picturesque, although polluted by a lot of litter, an unfortunate result of disposable consumer products ending up in a community with nowhere to dispose them.

The next day we headed back to Suchi with a stopover in San Vicente, where Sarah had her original Peace Corps training.  It was a nice small town at the foot of a volcano.  Around the other side of the mountain, Sarah´s first host family in El Sal lives.  Like her host family in Suchi, they were very pleasant people, good natured, and extremely generous.  On the way back to San Vicente to catch the bus we stopped to snap some pictures of the mountain and the valley below, a stunning view. 

Tonight I´m in San Salvador, the capitol of El Sal, by myself so that Sarah can get some work done back in Suchi.  It´s infamously dangerous here, so I´m probably not going to get too wild, but I am going to check out an Irish bar nearby after I finish this blog entry.  And I´ll probably have to eat at some point.  I´ll post on San Sal during the next go-round.  I did do some interesting stuff today.

Also, in case you were wondering, we did feel the earthquake in Guatemala yesterday — pretty wild — my first earthquake! But nothing bad happened.  Read all about it here.

Half Nelson

Since school has been over, and LOST and American Idol ended their seasons, and now that The Office is in re-runs, I’ve had a helluva lot of time for DVD watching. Might try to write about a few this week.

Half Nelson came pretty well recommended from a trustworthy handful of friends. I just watched it this afternoon. After hearing about it, I marvelled at how the creators would pull it off — a teacher by day, a crack addict by night. I worried that it would slip into Dangerous Minds bathos. At best, I thought that it might achieve a sort of edgy sentimentality a la You Can Count on Me. It definitely fell hard into the latter category, and was in many ways kind of unrelenting.

The film seemed willing to accept the fact that the lead character’s drug and personal problems could have stemmed from the real, core problem of having to live in a racist, warmaking United States with few avenues for self-expression, compassion, or caregiving. I think this point of view is accurate, and since it is too often made a joke of in other culture and casual conversation, it was surprising and refreshing to see it on-screen.

A strong counterargument to this sort of thinking, though, and one that I think is at least in part right, is that the willingness to destroy oneself because of one’s social conditions results equally from one’s own sensitivities. There are many people sincerely disturbed by the state of the world and the state of the United States, but they don’t all smoke crack. (The fact that that last phrase almost sounded like a cynical joke is telling. It wasn’t meant to be.)

Ultimately, I am still unsure whether or not to read the film as an allegory or slice of life social realism. I guess it can be both, but it’s a difficult combination. I think that the film got the lead character’s descent into drug abuse and depression fairly right, but its depiction of the school where he worked and the life of its adolescent characters was a little strange, if not just downright wrong. The public service announcement history reports, filmed in a head-on Godard or Spike Lee style, offered by the students on events like Allende in Chile and Attica, etc. might have been interesting if you didn’t already know something about their subjects, but for me, they screwed up the pacing of the movie. The voice of social justice was dilluted. And this made the ending, too, for me, and for at least one of the people I watched the film with, unappealing, flat, and kind of empty. Another of our number dug it though.

Probably a film that I will watch again and one that I can definitely recommend with my usual caveats about the basic dissipation of the independent cinema.