The bus ride to Las Augilares was one of my favorites. I had a comfy seat and wasn’t crowded. And in El Salvador, they have much more interesting bus food for sale, and people making elaborate sales pitches for burn cream and advil. When we got to Las Augilares, we got off the bus in a smelly, dirty, busy city and quickly went to the bus to take us to Suchitoto. That was a nice bus ride, too. We rode for about an hour through pleasant countryside, and the bus was quite empty.
Suchitoto
The first thing we had to do in Suchitoto was find a hotel. We went to all the places in the guidebook, only to find they were WAY overpriced. If there is one drawback to traveling in El Salvador, it is that they overcharge for hotels, everywhere. At the last hotel we tried, the 2nd and 3rd friendliest men in El Salvador called 3 or 4 other hotels in the area and asked about room availabili
ty and prices for us. We finally found one called Posada del Sol that sounded decent. When we got there, we liked the rooms, and managed to talk them down to a price that was only a bit too expensive instead of ridiculously expensive. We had cable TV, which we wanted so we could watch the elections in Honduras. They had great cable TV, including our Denver NBC affiliate station. So I also got to hear the local news and weather report for Denver. It was cool. The hotel had two pools, which made the kids happy. It was a cute hotel, but we were again the only people in the hotel, and it was really also a family’s house. So the lobby of the hotel was clearly their living room. But it was fine.
We went out to the main square to look around. It was a very pleasant square, with a nice fountain, trees, and benches. We looked around the small handicraft market on one side of the square, and spent quite a bit of time in the church, which was clearly very old. It was also very big. This church was a classic Spanish cathedral, with large columns, and statues lining the outside aisles. We got dinner in a little café on the main square, which was very nice, being able to sit outside and watch people going past and having dinner.
Back to the hotel after dinner, the kids played in the pool, and I relaxed by the pool.
On Saturday, we got up fairly early and went back to the square. We ate at a different café, that served bagels! Then we wander
ed around the town some more. We went and looked around the Teatro, where they were preparing for a play that night, but we walked around the small art gallery outside the auditorium. It was a really elegant building inside, nothing you would expect in a small town in El Salvador. We also saw the city park, which had lots of trees and places to sit. We decided to walk down to the waterfall that was in our guidebook. First we stopped by the cultural center and had a look around, but it was severely lacking in charm or anything interesting. We started down a dirt road toward the waterfalls, which a friendly woman had said was 15 minutes away walking.
We ran into a tourist police, which is a special arm of the police specifically to help tourists. We chatted with
him for a while, he told us all the places in the states where he had relatives, and said the waterfall wasn’t too far to walk. Really we didn’t have much choice, because there were no moto-taxis or anything in the town. We kept walking. After walking for about 20 minutes we were getting grumbly and hot. We kept walking. Finally a truck pulled over and we asked the guy how much farther it was. He was very friendly and said we were almost there, but offered us a ride. We accepted, and in another 2 minutes we were really there. We first walked to the scenic overlook, which was shaded and pretty and looked out over the lake, and it was a very beautiful view. Then we hiked down to the actual waterfall. This was a bit of a stressful hike for Lindsey, because there was no real trail, just jagged rocks sticking out everywhere, so very dangerous to take the kids down it, but we managed. The rocks that form this waterfall, and all around that area are in hexagonal shapes. It is natural, but it looks man-made.
It was really remarkable.
After we hiked back up we decided, it is too hot and too far and all uphill. We will sit here and wait for a ride back up. We waited a long time, and one completely empty truck went by, and even though we waved and thought the children looked pretty pathetic, he didn’t stop. But finally a cable repair truck stopped and picked us up and gave us a ride back up the hill. It was the best ride ever.
Back in the town, we had lunch at our hotel, and then rested. The kids went swimming, I took a nap. In the afternoon, we went back out, and happened on another parade, this one much smaller than the one in La Palma. It just happened that this weekend Suchitoto was celebrating their founding day or something, and that night was going to be the crowning of the new Miss Suchitoto, including entertainment and a free play at the Teatro. There was a military marching band stationed in the square, and we sat and listened to them play ‘My Way’ and ‘Let it Be’. Then Lindsey asked a tourist police about a restaurant we had heard about that had art made out of civil war artifacts. The very friendly tourist police man offered to drive us there in the police van. Well, alright!
We went a little ways out of town to see this restaurant, which was neat, and had some interesting artifacts, but actually no art made out of artifacts. Lindsey bought her kids a coke, and the police got a coffee and a juice, and we sat around and asked them questions about the war. We are pretty sure the police that drove was on the side of the rebels, and the other police was on the side of the national army, but now they are friends. When we finished our drinks they drove us back to town, and we ate dinner at one of the sidewalk cafes and watched the preparations in the square for the crowning. A local astronomy group had two telescopes set up to look at the moon, and people lined up to look through. Someone was juggling fire, and there was a bit of a colored light show being projected onto the church. It was great stuff.
When we were done with dinner it was still over an hour before the show was supposed to start, so we went over to the teatro to see if the play was on. It was packed! Lindsey and Brian picked their kids up and let them watch for a few minutes from the back. They said it looked very professional, good costumes and sound and lighting. We went back to the square, but the kids were very tired, so we went back to the hotel before the crowning started.
On Sunday morning, we got up and went out for breakfast. We ate a place that had pancakes on the menu, but when we ordered four orders of pancakes they said they were out, so we said, well that’s too bad, guess we’ll have to leave. Then they found pancake mix and made us pancakes. We decided to go back to the hotel and pack up, but on our walk back, we happened upon a bus going down to the lake, 30 cents a person. We thought, sure, why not, let’s go down to the lake. The ride down was pretty nice, on a nice paved road lined with trees. When we got to the bottom, we found ourselves at a tourist center that we had to pay 50 cents to enter. So we paid. Inside the tourist center was a huge restaurant, 3 artisan carts, and a small playground. There was a lawn leading up to the lake, where guys in boats tried to sell us a ride out to the islands, but we declined. The kids played on the playground, and then we left. It was an entirely underwhelming tourist center.
We caught the bus again, and thought we were headed back up the hill, but we were wrong. We drove down a little bit farther and picked up a campesino and his dog. The dog looked us, and we looked at the dog, and the bus started to back up. The bus backed down a bumpy hill for a long, long time. Finally, after about 10 minutes, it stopped and let a woman off. Then it drove forward up the hill and drove us back to the city center. We got off a couple stops after the dog.
Then we headed back to our hotel and packed up. We caught the bus back to Las Augilares, where we waited in the heat and exhaust fumes, for the bus back to La Palma. Both bus rides were uneventful.
We took the bus past La Palma to a small town called San Ignacio. There was a cheap but pretty nice little family run hotel there, with a pool. We moved in, then went out to find something to eat. The town is very small, and there wasn’t much to find. We ate, then went back to the hotel. The kids swam, I watched TV. In the later evening we went out again, and again found something to eat. An early night, and in the morning we caught an early bus to the border.
bus dropped us off near the border. We walked through a completely deserted border station. The immigration office was closed, everything was closed. We thought how strange it was, that maybe we could just walk right across the border. We almost did, too. We were past the last building in the border station when an official came up behind us and told us she needed to check our passports. She checked them, and then said we had to pay 3 dollars each. Well we kicked up a fuss because we are cheap, but she was firm about it.
We were on our way again. We got into Honduras, got a taxi to a bus, took the bus to Santa Rosa. Stopped in Santa Rosa for some groceries, got our last bus back to Gracias.
