Juyua & Suchitoto

An unexpected three day weekend in early November allowed us to venture out of the city to explore some of the Spanish colonial towns near San Salvador. On the United States scale, everything is near San Salvador, but with the terrain and traffic, a short 30 mile trip could take close to 2 hours in El Salvador. We decided to take 2 day-trips so that Mr. Football (?) wouldn’t have to miss Saturday night football at the boss’s house.

On Saturday we set out with two friends, Erin and Adam, for the Juyua Gastronomical Festival. Some of you might be thinking the same thing I was …”tempting”. It sounded more like a first class ticket to zipro-ville to me. Nonetheless, we all piled into their Subaru and drove up into the mountains to the west of the city. The city was very quaint, central park, a large mercado of crap made in Guatemala and China and a very professional looking array of food booths. Chris jumped in with his eyes shut, no tiene miedo with no aftereffects suffered, figures. I wimped out and ate fresh cashews and an orange I brought just in case. Maybe next time...

After lunch we hiked down to a few waterfalls and pools on the mountain side. To speed up the trip to the trail we accepted the assistance of a few friendly locals who agreed to drive us down to the trail. We rode in a mode of transport called a Tuk Tuk, because of the sound the engine makes when struggling to haul 4 gringos up a 3 degree incline.

Before departing the town we stopped in at a pharmacy to buy some aspirin for my pounding head. You can imagine my surprise when they charged me 4.5 cents for two pills. Don’t they know how much it costs to develop those drugs? They could be selling them for at least 5 times as much and make a 500% profit.

On Monday we set off on our second day-drip to Suchitoto. Suchitoto is another Spanish colonial town to the north of San Salvador. It endured very heavy fighting throughout their civil war. The buildings still have bullet holes and large murals of FLMN & Communist leaders. After the civil war the revolutionaries/guerrillas went legit and formed a political party. I’m not an expert, actually I’m barely informed, but I compare the FLMN to the Democrats and the Arena Party to the Republicans. This is a bit of a stretch since many FLMN activists identify with the ideals of Hugo Chaves and Fidel Castro but it simplifies the situation for me. My general view of world politics in skewed and sometimes inaccurate.

We traveled up with four other couples, actually Chris invited us to go with them and they accepted. They are all involved with regional security so we felt very safe blindly following them thru the countryside. After lunch and walking around the standard city central: park, church, hotels, shops…we decided to take a boat trip recommended in the travel book. Eleven bodies climbed into a sketchy looking boat that proceeded to drop at least one foot into the water until there was less than 12 inches of play between boat floating and boat sinking. And that wasn’t the concern; the concern was whether or not we could plow thru the plants that grow near the land. As the plants were overtaking the boat I just kept thinking snakes are more afraid of you than you are of them.

The boat captain succeeded without any snake incidents, and guided our craft over to an island that contained an ancient cave. On arrival to the island we all shook our heads in a “fool me twice, shame on me” fashion as we inspected the 4 by 2 foot cave. Back to the boat, back to the city… enough exploring for one weekend.