El viaje

After another swim in the lukewarm water on the volcano blackened beach we jumped in the car. It is very hard to slow Lu down and since she had color back in her face and a depth back in her voice i did not even try. Also the beautiful crab that somehow climbed up half the way up the stairs did not oppose.

„Where to Hase?“

„To El Salvador!“

„El Salvador it is!“

Having looked at the map i immediately regretted the decision because it meant going back up the same way since for a good 1.5h before being able to turn southeast bound.

But stubborn as we are , not believing in google maps, we asked some locals, there was a river heading north, if there was another way. Best way to describe it is a mangrove taxi.

So for around 30 minutes we cruised up through the mangroves, accompanied onboard by two motorcycles, another car , the „captain“ and three women, one of whom had a sack full of turtles (?!) with her.

Shortly after turning east (and much less then 1.5hours !) we approached a very long queue of trucks. Very long being easily more than 5 kms.

(Here i quickly need to pause because today when writing the cacao post , being a bit more thorough with grammar and style, i realized i have been twisting then and than up often in the previous posts. I think it comes from the German “dann” adverb which not only fulfills temporal and conditional but also conclusive functions. As a conclusive adverb, „dann“ is routinely used to introduce explicit conclusions of conversations. „Dann“ can also operate as a discourse marker and initiates conversational closings. So in my defense i always automatically associate “than” with “dann” which, of course, is wrong. „Than“ is used in comparisons as a conjunction and as a preposition. I seriously can not be bothered to correct everything but eventually when reading through the posts again, i will. I think i am not the only German who mixes this up frequently. Writing it down and making a point of it will help me in the future)

And while at it. I love the word queue in English. Q ue ue . What a word!

And while talking about good words , i also have to share one, which Pipo recently sent me.

Obviously i am a little stoned, so all the more fun with adverbs and words like queue and Nudelauflauf 🙂

Back on topic. Yes , the trucks, the border.

There were so many that traffic , in both directions, got reduced to one lane.

This can be tricky at times.Especially when a truckdriver thinks he now has to overtake another truck.

The border was great! Nobody really knew what documents you do or do not need .

But one thing was clear, and obviously very important, we needed to copy the Guatemalan temporary import papers for the to the El Salvadorian temporary import papers for the car.

Nobody , even the ladies at the office , could really explain why , or how but luckily we met a nice fellow German in the waiting room who faced the same peril.

Dominik used to live in Munich, just around the corner from our flat, before he left 4 month ago. He bought a car in the States and wants to travel to Argentina. We exchanged numbers and we hope we will meet the dude at some point again. Nice guy!

So around 2 hours later of back and forth of clue- and pointless car and serial number inspections, we drove on. All the way down to a village called La Perla where we realized we needed new sim cards.

An old lady mama with 5 kids, a couple of ducks, chickens , pigeons and a frog sitting in the back yard, sold them to us.

The vegetation did not change much , but the coast got cliffier and steeper.

Not quite having had a destination, we finally settled in El Zonte, which is a surfers paradise , with one of the, apparently, best breaks in El Salvador. Unfortunately, we arrived late and only got a glimpse of the sunset.

The hotel is nice and chilled just two bays east of El Zonte. We are hanging in hammocks, researching, writing , sucking on cacao pulp , having marisco sopas and thinking about Nude lauf lauf.

The weather could be better but even though it is raining , it still is very warm . Not sure yet but we will probably stay another day or two.

We like El Salvador!