Friday, 1 November 2024: A long, slow ride to El Salvador

Antigua, Guatemala is only a few hours by highway from El Salvador.  I thought of making the trip 10 years ago when I was in Antigua for an erosion control conference but quickly dismissed the idea because of reports that the country was overrun with gang violence.  That all started to change with the 2019 election of Nayib Bukele as President.  In 2022, he initiated a nationwide crackdown on gangs which resulted in the arrest of more than 83,000 people with suspected gang affiliations.  Bukele has been accused of human rights abuses (apparently innocent people have been caught up in the gang arrests), but the country’s homicide rate has plunged.  It is now the second lowest in the Americas after Canada.   Bukele is very popular and won reelection in a landslide in 2024.

With that in mind, it seemed like a good time to make the trip.  The 3-day All-Saints/All Souls Days holiday weekend presented the opportunity.  I went back to the same travel agent who had set up the Lake Atitlan trip the previous weekend.  For $90 round trip, I got rides in a tourist van that picked me up where I’m staying in Antigua and delivered me to the door of a modest Booking.com accommodation in El Zonte, the closest Salvadoran Pacific beach resort on the van’s itinerary.  I would have preferred to travel to a volcano at a national park just over the border but there was no direct way to get there.

 

Google Maps said the trip from Antigua to El Zonte would take less than 5 hours (hahahaha).

 

The trip there turned out to be a grueling 9+ hour journey (by comparison, the return only took 4 hours).  The van was scheduled to pick me up at 10:00 AM on Friday and actually arrived 5 minutes early.  I was the first passenger and quickly claimed the front passenger’s seat.  There were seven other people to pick up in Antigua and the driver, apparently unfamiliar with all the city’s narrow one-way streets, had trouble finding some of the addresses.  The van had El Salvador plates and I assumed the driver was Salvadoran.  It took an hour to collect everyone and get on to the highway leading south.  Since he was now running late, the driver drove like a wild man passing every truck, car, and motorcycle in his way.  We followed the curvy 2-lane highway which dropped out of the highlands and on to the coastal plain.  40 kilometers (25 miles) later, we arrived in the small city of Escuintla.  To my surprise, the driver turned off the main highway and headed into a parking lot next to a Domino’s Pizza (yes, they’re even in Guatemala) and pulled up next to another van.  Some of us were directed to the other van, and most people from the other van got into the one we came in from Antigua.  Again, I quickly nabbed the front passenger seat.  People using the john in the shopping center and buying food took a while, but the big timewaster was the new driver having to load people’s big packs, surfboards, etc. onto the roof rack, covering them with a tarp, and tying everything down.

The van that took us from Escuintla, Guatemala to El Salvador.  Note all the luggage perched precariously on the roof.

Finally, we headed east on CA-2, the main Pacific coast highway in Central America.  It was 4-lanes for the first few kilometers but quickly narrowed to two.  Unlike the first driver, this one took it slow and easy, presumably because of all the stuff on the roof.  After about 20km, he pulled into a hardware store and bought a bigger tarp (rain was threatening) and had to tie the whole mess down all over again.  “Oh shit,” I thought to myself.  “I hope Salvadoran customs doesn’t make him unload everything for inspection at the border.”

At 12:40 PM as we were heading southeast, I noted that it was, cloudy, humid, and warm.  The car stereo was playing, “Que locura enamorada de ti”  (“What craziness is being in love with you”).  Yeah, I was in that situation more than once when I was younger and stupid.  I liked the driver’s choice of music – lots of horns, congas, male vocals, and a Latin beat.  

Violeta, the owner of the accommodation where I’m staying in Antigua had packed me some kind of empanada – a large bread bun filled with cooked spinach, onions, and a cheesy sauce.  It was “muy deliciosa” and filling.  I scarfed it down for lunch as we rolled on toward the border.

As we passed the town of Taxisco at 1:05PM, there was intermittent light rain.  It was now 60km to El Salvador.  Traffic wasn’t bad for a holiday weekend and the 2-lane highway was generally wide, smooth, and well-maintained.  Every few kilometers, we were crossing small rivers on their way to the Pacific.  The terrain was mostly hilly with a mixture of forests, crop and livestock agriculture, and scattered towns.

After passing a large lake, Laguna del Comendador, we made a 15-minute lunch stop at a gas station which featured unappealing junk/fast food.  I was glad that Violeta had packed me a good lunch. 

As we approached the border, there was a 3km long line of trucks waiting to go through customs.  Fortunately, the Guatemalan cops waved us around them.  “These poor truckers are going to sit there for hours,” I thought. 

There was a 10-minute queue to get our passports stamped to leave Guatemala.  I had to translate for an older American guy who was in line with me.  He was driving his car to Panama, he told me.  The Guatemalan border official told him he would need a “permiso” (permit) to get the car into El Salvador.  The guy was confused.  He said it was easy to get his car into Guatemala from Mexico – he paid for a permit at the border.  It wasn’t clear to me whether he needed to have gotten the El Salvador permit in advance (online, maybe?) of his arrival at the border.  I would have thought he would have researched all this in advance of having to cross seven international borders with his car to get from the U.S. to Panama.  Then, the clueless guy said to me, “I don’t care about El Salvador.  I’m going to Panama.”  To which I replied, “You may not care about El Salvador but each of these little countries has its own set of rules, and you’re stuck with them."

 

We drove on a few hundred meters to El Salvador immigration.  A couple days earlier, I’d learned that El Salvador now uses U.S. dollars.  So, luckily, I’d brought a few with me.  To get into El Salvador, one has to pay a US$12.00 entry, in cash.  They don’t accept credit cards or the equivalent in Guatemalan Quetzales.  At first, they said they had no change but the nice Salvadorian immigration official eventually brought me three US “gold” dollar coins for change from the ten and five I’d given her.  Most of the other passengers were in similar situations regarding exact cash.  One of the other passengers had no dollars or Quetzales to trade, wanted to borrow money from me, and said she would pay me back through PayPal.  You can’t even use PayPal in much of Central America and I didn’t like the idea, so I told her I didn’t use PayPal and didn’t know how it worked.  I don’t know how everyone else fared but we eventually all got our entry stamps.  The entire border process seemed to take at least an hour.

While waiting to get the $12 payment straightened out, I ran into the older American guy who was driving to Panama.  The El Salvadoran border police were taking him to customs to get the permit for his car, so I guess it wasn’t a big deal after all.  Now he told me more of his plans – the story gets more interesting and a bit weird.  First, he asked me if I was a communist.  I was taken aback by such a bold question but laughed and said “no”.  I guess that’s what he needed to know so he could tell me more.  He was headed to Paraguay in South America.  Once in Panama, he would put his car on a boat which would take him to Colombia in order to get around the roadless Darien Gap.  He recommended I acquaint myself with some guy I’d never heard of who has a show on an alternative radio network and has a website where he sells dietary supplements.  I thought of asking him if I could sell him some oceanfront property in Paraguay (it’s landlocked, by the way).  He also recommended that I not return to the U.S.  I noticed that he had an eastern European accent and was missing most of his upper teeth.       

I was relieved when Salvadoran customs waved us through without checking out the horde of luggage on the roof rack.  Once on the road again in this new (for me) country, my ass was getting sore from riding for hours in this van.  El Zonte was only 100km away.  I knew that our two-lane highway had curvy stretches ahead but we could certainly get there in less than 2 hours.  WRONG!  I’d been following our progress on Google Maps on my cell phone and noticed something that bothered me.  40km ahead there was a red slow traffic line on the Google map that extended several kilometers along CA-2.  Must have been a crash – well certainly they’ll have it cleaned up before we get there.  But, as predicted by the Google Map Gods, traffic came to a screeching halt right where they said it would.  I looked again at the map and saw the problem.  Five kilometers ahead, CA-2 did a dogleg.  It turned left on to Highway 12 leading from a beach town and inland to the large cities of Santa Ana and San Salvador.  Then a couple kilometers beyond the first intersection, CA-2 turned right off this highway and continued to follow the coast toward my destination.  That left turn must be the problem, I concluded.  After ½ hour of inching forward toward the intersection, I advised the other passengers in English about the left turn.  More than another ½ hour later we reached the intersection.  Highway 12 was 4-lanes with heavy holiday weekend traffic headed from the beach in the direction of the cities.  There was neither a stoplight nor a cop directing traffic and Highway 12 drivers had the right-of-way.  Everyone making that left turn from CA-2 had to wait for an opening, say a Hail Mary, and go for it.  You’d think the highway department would have recognized the problem and…..naa, this is Central America.  Hell, most of the police force probably had the holiday weekend off anyway except for those who were busy arresting more gang members. 

The next 30km to Mizata was relatively bland – numerous residences and farms – but after Mizata came the most scenic stretch of the trip for the next 20 km to El Zonte, my destination.  It more or less followed the contour curving back and forth some 30 times; toward and then away from the coast.  It went through five tunnels, one of which was about ½ kilometer long.  It passed a couple of ocean view points.  I think much of the route went through dense tropical forest but, because of all the delays, it was now pitch-black outside – shit!

But there was still one more annoyance left for the day.  We were only 5km from El Zonte when the driver suddenly stopped, messed with his phone, then turned around and drove back about 5km.  He stopped, asked someone for directions, then turned around again heading back toward El Zonte.  He kept stopping and asking for directions.  Finally, he found an obscure gate along the highway which a guard opened for him.  After nearly a kilometer of bouncing around on a 4-wheel-drive road, we pulled up to the Lagarza Hostel.  Four of our young European passengers piled out.  Of course, the driver had to take the tarps on the roof rack off and hand packs and surfboards down to these folk before we could head back down the awful hostel access road.  I’d been patient and mostly laid back all day, but this pissed me off.  I mean, since young people are so adept at using their damn phones, why couldn’t they have found the hostel location on Google Maps, etc. and helped the driver find it.  We had wasted at least ½ hour delivering them to their surfers’ paradise, it was now almost 7:00PM, and I was feeling tired and irritable.  Damned if I was going to let the driver get lost finding my accommodation (it wasn’t well marked).  I followed our progress into El Zonte on Google Maps and directed the driver right to an unmarked gate.  The remaining couple in the van (young Germans) also had reservations at the same place.  We got through the gate using the lock combination which the manager had sent us by WhatsApp.  By the way, everyone in this part of the world seems to communicate by text on WhatsApp.

Left:  It was a bit tricky at night finding the unmarked entrance to the accommodation where I stayed in El Zonte.  Right:  My room was small but clean and a ceiling fan kept it cool. 

 

I found my little room which was clean and comfortable with a single bed, shelf space for my stuff, plenty of electrical outlets for charging, and a fan which was whirling away keeping the room sufficiently cool (no air conditioning) in the warm tropical air.  My final requirement for the day was food.  I was starving.  The manager had sent a text with information on restaurants.  There was a pupusaría about 3 blocks away.  I love pupusas (the national dish of El Salvador) and headed right down there after unpacking a few things.  The restaurant would win no awards for atmosphere – it had a tin roof and bamboo sides with benches and tables.  Pupusas were being cooked on a hot grill for the few customers already there. I was confronted by a menu with lots of choices (many of them vegetarian or vegan).  Most were only a buck each (25 cents extra with cheese).  All had refried beans as a filling in the round patties made with corn or rice meal.  You chose the extra ingredients.  It looked like two would be enough for a meal, but I splurged for three:  one with mixed veggies, one with basil, and one with spinach.  They provided a jar of a coleslaw-like mix of cabbage, carrot slivers, onion, vinegar, and spices as well as a pair of tongs to spread the mixture on top of your pupusas.  The bill came to $4.50 including a lime soda.  Damn, they were good!