Last dispatch from El Salvador

Happy April Fool’s Day. I tried to pull the wool on Facebook by posting the outrageous claim that Morgan and I had purchased a piece of property on the beach down here and were relocating to El Sal permanently come summer. But I guess for anyone who’s even been remotely paying attention to the tone of my recent blogs, that would be a tough cookie to swallow. Or, how’s that go? A bitter pill? A crumbling cracker? At any rate …

What’s definitely, immutably true is this: It’s our last night here in El Salvador.

In anticipation of an early-ish flight, we’ve landed at a sweet little hotel in the center of big, nasty San Sal. It’s called Hotel Villa Florenzia Centro, and though it’s not much to look at from the outside, it’s got a courtyard with all kinds of great light and views and a surprisingly clean and pretty interior. Our room is up on the third floor, and aside from a broken window pane, I’d say we made out well. $15 bucks a night for clean, centrally located hotel digs with shower and television. How many capital cities can boast this? In Japan, $35 just barely got me a capsule pod in a high-rise building with a coin-operated mini-TV and a pair of rental slippers. Digression.

We spent the afternoon hopping buses from here to Metro Center, which is essentially a massive amalgam of high-priced shopping malls, colorful food courts and messy rows of market stalls. The trek from our hotel to Metro took us through some crazy rough areas of town. I am endlessly amazed by how massive and filthy and teeming with humanity the planet’s larger cities are. Of course, the cities of Central America have a unique kind of charm, what with the machine guns and the particularly colorful piles of garbage and the thumping reggaeton and the roving cows, goats and horses. OK, only goats in this particular city, but we were nonetheless taken aback by the sight of a man selling goat’s milk straight out of the creature’s teet, right on the side of a busy market street.

We passed the afternoon wandering through Salvadoran dollar stores, eating pizza and donuts, and playing arcade games, then we came back to the hotel to watch TV and rest.

The last time I visited San Salvador was pretty rough … I blogged about it then and don’t care to rehash, but suffice it to say, the misadventure ended with me wandering unbeknownst through the ghetto of central San Sal, dodging flying vegetables, and locking myself into my hotel room for like half a day with a bag of chips and some beer and a blessedly potent WiFi connection. This time around, hate to say it, having a man by my side emboldened me, and it also kept the would-be hecklers at bay.

Still. Post-colonial charm notwithstanding, this place gets mighty rough after dark, and we’re knee-deep in a purple-orange kind of twilight time as I write, so I doubt we’ll be venturing out again till the morning, when we head to Comalapa airport.

So we find ourselves at an end. I feel a bit sentimental, a bit exhausted, a bit road-weary, a bit wiser, a bit more aware of a few choice personal shortcomings that I’d do well to work on. This trip definitely kicked my ass in certain ways. It’s like this: if traveling during your 20s is all about learning to make bold beginnings, to question assumptions, to open yourself up to unpredictability, to accept adversity, to consider new perspectives, then if you get it right, traveling during your 30s comes to entail a new set of opportunities and challenges. Namely: hewing to principle, pursuing opportunities for deeper growth and learning, seeking authentic experience and asking bigger, better questions, both of yourself and of the places and people you encounter. It is a transition for me, but it feels like the right one to be working toward.

I have so much less to prove now. I know who I am and what I’m after. As we prepare to return home, I’ve got all kinds of new and better Spanish skills under my belt, a journal full of observations and quotes that I hope to turn into a finished, sellable article, and a deeper appreciation for the life I’m a creating for myself back in Oregon. This is the first time in awhile that I’ve had a home of my own to return to after a long backpacking trip. A beautiful home at that, with a big kitchen and a sweet little library/office that I’ve lately been daydreaming of . Morgan and I must be getting sentimental on account of our time away from that magical little beach house … last night we bonded with a beautiful, slightly stoopid boxer we found wandering around outside our hotel. He was sweet as pie and we let ourselves fantasize awhile about getting a dog of our own.

In the harsh light of morning, we semi-bagged the idea, and, in fact, I balked in terror at the idea of committing to something, anything, for (UGH!) 14-16 years, but you get the point. Life on the road is romantic and beautiful and painful and infinitely interesting. But life at home has its own kind of charm. Like, you know how amazing and life-affirming it feels to take in a massive breath of fresh air, just suck it down into your lungs and really relish for a moment the feeling of being a thumping, pumping, ever-evolving carbon-based life-form? That’s sort of what travel is for me. But, as author Terry McMillan so sagely pointed out back in the ’90s, you’ve also got to exhale. And that’s what home is for me. A long, luxurious breath out. The other shoe dropping after a deliciously protracted pause. The  ever-anticipated and completely natural second act, so sweet in its inevitability.

I keep circling back to that word. “Sweet.” Because it is, really. All of it.

Goo cakes, green mango and other tough-to-swallow things

We’ve made it to our final destination … Suchitoto! Check out this view:

View from our room at Villa Balanza, Suchitoto, El Salvador.

It’s a great little artsy mountain town an hour out from big, smelly San Salvador. We’re staying in an adobe house perched right at the very edge of a mountain overlooking Lake Suchitlo – La Villa Balanza. It’s at the bottom of the steepest cobblestone hill I’ve ever seen. Ever. The views are crazy and so is the wildlife. Between the roosters, the cicadas, the orioles, the snarling pups and the roving band of drunken men that congregates outside our window each evening, it’s hard to fall asleep before midnight or to stay asleep after 6 a.m. A bat even flew into our room last night! So we’re siesta-ing a lot.

Tomorrow, we’re going on a horseback ride through the mountains to check out some guerilla camps.

Truth told, though, I think Morgan and I are both ready to go home. My belly’s been rumbling again and we’ve both grown tired of the seemingly unending stream of logistical hardships that befall us at every turn. Does that sound grumpy? Hmpf. Something about the five-week mark regularly turns my traveler’s heart weary.

Food has been the biggest issue on this trip, no contest, and I’m not even complaining too long or too loudly about our mutual cases of salmonella poisoning, because gastrointestinal distress is pretty much par for the course when you venture into the developing world. Fair enough.

What I take hearty issue with is the service itself. Take this morning’s breakfast. Neither Morgan nor I was in  a great mood for starters, and I’d already logged two hours of work before we began the hike up the hill to the hotel’s restaurant, which conveniently doesn’t open till after 9 a.m. On the way up, we got into an argument about whether the kitchen’s water was filtered and drinkable – the girl we asked said yes but I was concerned she hadn’t understood the question, as I’ve noticed “yeses” and “nos” around here don’t mean quite the same thing they do at home, and are, instead, approximations.

My breakfast was passable – it’s hard to screw up scrambled eggs and beans, which is one of the few things I’m eating at this point – but Morgan took one bite of his pancakes and just about turned green. He spit a mouthful of half-chewed cake into a napkin and then by way of explanation dug his fork into the middle of the remainder of the cake. Goo oozed out between the tines. Totally raw in the middle.

We semi-politely sent the cakes back, and while the kitchen girl was giving them another go on the obviously not-yet-heated-up grill, a pair of Salvadoran health inspectors walked in for what I can only guess was a random check. Five minutes later, while the inspectors were busily checking expiration dates of bottled beer, the cakes came back. Still raw in the middle. And I’m not talking a little chunky or runny. Totally goo.

So we sent them back again. The staff seemed super annoyed, perhaps partially on account of the inspectors’ presence, and Morgan was pretty much fuming. I told them we didn’t even want the nasty cakes anymore (less politely, but still politely enough). A few minutes later, they landed back on the table yet again, looking rather tattered by this time after their third round on the grill, but still oozing batter.

At that point, we ditched the whole project and headed out the door. I could tell the proprietor was offended. Feeling mutual.

I recognize that there are different standards of service in different parts of the world, and I’ve learned after these many years of travel to leave my North American expectations of quality and cleanliness at home. But it ain’t easy, especially when the problem seems to be people just not trying. We’ve had similar issues pretty much everywhere we’ve gone, and at this point, eating is less a pleasure than a pain, which is saying something considering how much I love food!

Everything takes an hour, even if you’re the only customer. And half the time it’s not even what you ordered. Or there will be random hunks of raw potato or beef or what-have-you just hanging out in the food for no discernible reason. Or the chef will switch out the listed sides for whatever is already cooked up and ready to go. Or the server will tell you they’re out of 2/3rds of the menu items and you can’t help but suspect that they just don’t feel like making them. Or a place will close early on whim.

And the worst-best part is if you peek through any given kitchen’s door, you’ll often see like a zillion people working in said kitchen, and yet they STILL can’t get the food out quickly or correctly. For every 10 kitchen workers, two will be hugging, three will be texting, a few more will be chatting and joking and wrestling and maybe one or two will actually be cooking or cleaning.

It is, indeed, hard to reprogram your standards. During my year in Mexico, I became deeply, intimately aware of the fact that we North Americans all subscribe subconsciously to a Cult of Efficiency. Things must be fast, the credo goes. Things must be pleasing to look upon, and to smell, and to taste. Things must be done correctly, consistently, and with spirited haste.

In other parts of the world, abstractions such as Relationships and Relaxation and Mutual Accommodation are prized over speed and service. Time is less linear than circular. An hour is less a standard unit of measure than a vague marker of an arbitrary hunk of time that’s going to pass you right by anyway, either way, so why stress?

And if you didn’t order (and what’s more don’t really care to eat) that pile of food that has just been set lackadaisically before you, well, does it matter all that very much? Have a few mouthfuls of cold, crusty scrambled egg ever sent anyone to his early grave? Couldn’t you suffer through a few rogue potato peels in your margarine-soaked vegetables without coming to any real bodily harm?

Won’t a sour, underripe and slightly mangy-looking mango fill your belly just as well as its sweet, yellow brethren?

In theory, yes. In practice, No. No it will not.

Maybe if the prices weren’t so high and the expectation of a generous tip so unabashed, I’d feel more charitable. Maybe I just have a lot more evolving to do. Probably a little – or a lot – of both.

With that, I’m off to hunt down some lunch from the downstairs fridge. Soggy, salty, pizza leftovers here I come, if the proprietor’s son hasn’t eaten them, that is. He’s got a nasty reputation in these parts for just such offenses.

Oh, and a Virtual PS to whoever stole the two pairs of underwear I left hanging on my windowsill: Really? You’re welcome. I think.

Flight home is Monday.

El Cuco loco!

Still no computer cord ... excuse the lo-res ... La Tortuga Verde!

This note is coming at you from the wilds of eastern El Salvador. The semi-wilds, at very least.

We hadn’t planned to venture this far off the map, but things in Tunco just weren’t what we’d hoped for, so plans changed. Nobody’s fault, really. It’s just not the chilled out little enclave it once was. If I were 21 and looking to get wasted and laid, sure thing, give me Tunco with its noise and its clamor and its careless procession of fiestas. But I’m not 21. I’m 30-and-a-half. And it’s not just my changing tastes that cause issue. It’s my need, more and more, to be amongst my own kind.

So strange. Have you ever been somewhere that just felt wrong? In a deep and unsatisfying way? It was like that with Tunco, and so we cut our losses and begged our way to a partial refund from Papaya’s Lodge and were on our merry way, no hard feelings.

We spent a few days in the northeast of El Salvador – Perquin and Mozote, to be specific, both former FMNL guerilla strongholds during El Salvador’s bloody civil war. We did some pretty intense guerilla tourism up there and I’m working on a piece about it, to be unveiled at a later date. It was definitely the highlight of our trip, for me at least, and I got some amazing material and met some pretty awesome Guanacos. After that, we decided to hit the beach by way of San Miguel.

The bus ride to the playa was rather eventful. I struck up a friendly conversation with a talkative if slightly rough-looking hombre seated in front of us. He was sorta greasy and slick, but he spoke good English and I smiled politely as he told me how he used to live in Virginia, how he knew right away I was a gringa, etc., etc. Morgan was being super rude to him and refusing to join the conversation, and I figured it was simply because he didn’t like the locals flirting with me.

As soon as the guy hopped off the bus, however, Morgan was like, “Didn’t you see his hands?!”

Apparently, they were covered with “MS-13” tattoos, identifying him as a member of El Salvador’s most notorious and violent gang, the Mara Salvatrucha 13 (“Clever Trout Gang” in English). We tried to decide which would have been worse: if he and his companion had tried to start shit with us, or if they’d tried to be our friends. Probably, the friends scenario would have ended worse, we agreed, because how do you beg off a night out on the town in the company El Salvadoran gang members without causing offense? You don’t.

Sometimes I am not the most observant soul.

In any case, we eventually made it safe and sound to our destination, a long, thin double lot of beachfront paradise called La Tortuga Verde. It’s essentially a backpacker resort and turtle sanctuary located on a long, dusty road between Playa El Cuco and Playa Esteron in the far east of this tiny, vaguely mango-shaped country.

Tortuga is the pride of a blissed-out Miami Beach expat called Tom, and it’s as close to perfection as we’ve come on this bumpy, five-week sojourn. Cheap, clean rooms with screened in porches and huge bathrooms (nevermind the family of cucarachas that lives in our soap dispenser) hammocks everywhere, a full menu with some good seafood, and a big, clean pool.

The beach here is huge and empty and full of strange looking sea and sky creatures. I go running in the morning and walking in the afternoon and I wish desperately for a telephoto lens.

Things have been quiet since we arrived last Monday and we’ve slipped into a sort of routine.

Mornings, we wake up ridiculously early – say around 6 a.m. – and Tom and Morgan head to Las Flores, a point break a few minutes west of Cuco, for surfing. On their way, they drop me at Tom’s office in Playa El Cuco so I can hook up to high speed Internet and get some of my writing and editing work out of the way. Tom’s office has not got much to recommend it by way of atmosphere – it’s an empty, unvarnished first-floor apartment in the middle of town with a broken toilet, a plastic table and chair, a standing fan, and a single solitary boarded up window. It abuts a brothel / beer bar on one side, where I’m told the whores cost $3 and which I almost mistook for a regular bar on my first day in town. Most days, I leave the officina door open and the iron safety gate shut so I can watch the taxi drivers and the drunk fishermen wander in and out of the whorehouse. Sometimes, the ladies themselves even venture into sunlight, usually to escort a customer back to his car after the visit is finished. These women are dumpy and usually dressed in shiny, skin-tight, synthetic tops, but they don’t seem unhappy. However, my efforts to take in the scenery and breathe in a bit of fresh ocean air are often thwarted by a few key subversive El Cuco forces.

One: when the door is open, I’m easy to spot, and people constantly try to sell me mangoes and coco water and really ugly souvenirs through the metal grates. On Friday, a brown hand reached through the grate and push the inside door open and when I stood up to confront the intruder, I was greeted by a schoolteacher and a crowd of about 30 high school students all staring at me in bewilderment. I couldn’t figure out what they wanted, but the teacher kept holding up a little plastic baggie which appeared to be filled with pepper and asking for something indecipherable and I wasn’t in the mood to translate or pantomime, so I just shook my head and pretended I spoke no Spanish.

“No vivo aqui,” I kept saying, and eventually they gave up and went away.

My best guess is they wanted a pair of scissors, a drink of water, or perhaps were on a scavenger hunt of some bizarre sort. You figure it out.

The other issue with keeping the office door open is that the cocteleria across the street has by some stroke of fate come into an old fashioned jukebox packed to the gills with Mariachi numbers and terrible modern Spanish pop, and as soon as they’re up and about – usually around 7:30 a.m. – they start blasting it full tilt. I’m talking the loudest, thumpingest music you’ve ever, ever heard. Even from across the street, it makes my ears bleed and my stomach ache, and worst of all, they enjoy changing songs halfway through, which has always been a personal pet peeve. It seems like a losing strategy for attracting breakfast crowds if you ask me, but very, very loud music is sort of due course around here. I’m talking ridiculously, insanely loud, so loud it rattles your skull and you can begin to hear what the person a foot away from you is saying.

Tom, who is fond of punch one-liners, has made up a little joke about it:

Why do El Salvadorans play their music so loud?

To drown out the silence.

Bada-boom bada-bing. There is definitely some truth there.

At any rate, Tom and Morgan usually pick me up around 10 a.m. and we head back to Tortuga for breakfast and hammock time. I’ve been eating tons of fruit and eggies and suffering the bad coffee. Afternoons, we sun on the beach and by the pool, take siestas, go for walks, etc. A few days back, we took a boat ride out to the nearby Mangalay Bay, a twisty, turny maze of mangrove that feels a bit like the mini-Amazon. We also visited the shrimp boats in search of dinner that day, although too late, as they’d sold all their catch off.

Evenings are more food, more reading, a few Golden beers or coco locos if the mood strikes, and off to bed ridiculously early. We’re talking 8:30 p.m., here. I am definitely becoming an old lady. I like it.

Best of all, Morgan is doing some design work for Tom in exchange for a generous room/food tab, so we’re pretty much living for no cost these days. It’s wonderful, but all good things must end, and we’ll probably head out in a few days. We’ve got about a week left of vacation and we want to hit up Suchitoto before San Salvador and the airport. Supposed to be a lesser cultural capital and it’s on the way, besides.

There’s much more to say, but my thighs are stuck to this plastic chair and my laptop is overheating, so I’ll sign off. Photos and thoughtful, eloquently penned essays on the wonders of this sweet, slightly downtrodden country to come. We return to Cannon Beach April 2, soon enough that we’ve begun to make up a mental list of things we want to do and eat when we get back. Top of the list: good coffee and pizza, plus ribs at Bigfoot’s in Seaside for Morgan, hot showers galore, high speed Interneting, and, for me, lots of long-distance running.

PS: I bragged on The Facebook that I’d read 15 books since we arrived and someone requested a list. I guess I’m going to make myself look slightly less erudite when I reveal the full spread of titles, as many were cheesy, mindless indulgences. Ah, well. I’m up to 17. Here goes:

Books read during this trip, with authors included as I recall them:

“Empress Orchid” – Anchee Min

“Flint” – Louis L’Amour (The best Western writer of all times, introduced to me by my late Papa Tom. Gracias, Papi!)

“La Societe du Spectacle” – Guy Debord (Nothing does wonders for your Spanish skills like reading a book in French, believe you me)

“Tanner on Ice”

“Tanner’s Virgin”

“A Long Line of Dead Men”

“Working” – Studs Terkel

“Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married” (Terrible but sort of awesome Brit Chick Lit … abandoned halfway through)

“The Wayward Reporter: The Life and Times of AJ Liebling”

“Salvador” – Joan Didion

“The Carrie Diaries” – Candace Bushnell (give me a break, it was all this one hostel had!)

“Start Something That Matters” – Guy who invented Tom’s Shoes

“Cat’s Eye” – Margaret Atwood

“Surfacing” – Margaret Atwood

“Light on Snow” – Anita Shreve

“At First Sight” – Nicholas Sparks (worst book of ALL TIMES! AVOID!)

“Shirley” – Charlotte Bronte (In progress, because I’ve gotten a hankering for reading material that will stimulate my brain instead of merely my spinal cord)

“Sophie’s Word” (In progress)

3.3 unintended consequences of hitting 30

Life of the spicy variety

I’ve been 30 for a clean three-and-a-half months so far. It’s mostly been a very good thing, but any life transition, whether you seem to be trading up or down, entails trading off. For me, entering the neatly arranged, mostly dust-free annals of the legitimately Big People has definitely had a yin yang element to it. To wit:

1. Fewer heart-crushing rejections, more frequent episodes of heartburn. Finally, finally, I am in a happy long-term relationship and cohabitating successfully with a life partner. This is an inarguably good thing. Sadly, my twenty-something penchant for inflicting terrible heartbreaks on myself and then blaming the other person for the whole mess (except for the times when it was genuinely just totally their faults … Looking at you, Brent W. Piss off. And you’re not invited to read my blog anymore) appears to have done permanent damage to my blood-pumping chest organ. (Pall Mall, Gauloises and Montana cigarettes may also have played a role.) That meaty, cavernous muscle is still thumping stubbornly away (I ran four miles yesterday, what!) but I’m not the man I once was. I now struggle to abide: tomato products, painfully, wonderfully spicy foods (CURSES!!!!!), cheap beer, sleeping too long on my right side, and, for some bizarre reason, apples and apple cinnamon Cheerios. It’s a bum bum. Of course, if proffered some hypothetical choice between the two types of heartache, I must concede I’d rather swear off ketchup, ketchup-sized dollops of Sriracha and hot tamale candies, even if it makes things like pizza and eggs and Thai food taste not half as glorious.

Nom d'une pipe! Les Gaulouses Légères!

B. A significantly diminished desire to sleep around, paired with a significantly impaired ability to sleep, in or otherwise. Now that the bulk of my weekend nights are spent cozily watching movies and drinking wine with my man, now that I’ve sworn off principal vices such as Boys and Excessive Boozing, and now that I no longer feel the need to eat four ecstasy pills whilst dancing my head off in a sleazy London club in an attempt to impress a bunch of strangers (who are, by the way, definitely not impressed by such things, especially when you proceed to vomit on their shoes and forget which country you are in and then suddenly it’s 8 a.m. and you wake up in a tube station feeling filthy and ashamed … figuratively speaking, I mean), considering all of that, you’d think I’d sleep as soundly as the angel that I have inadvertently become. I don’t. No matter how tired I am, I struggle mightily to drift off at bedtime, let alone to sleep in past 9 a.m. Make that a brisk and bright 6 a.m. if I’ve been drinking heavily, which is about as awesome as it sounds. And ditto for naps. Double even! Of a Sunday, I long for nothing more than to snuggle up in the rectangle of sunlight that cuts across our living room couch and shut my faculties temporarily down. My brain, however, thinks this idea is completely retarded, and usually tortures me with a noisy, shamey monologue to the tune of: HEY! YOU, MISSY! YOU HAVE SHIT TO DO! JUST OPEN YOUR RIGHT EYE A SMIDGE AND OBSERVE – OBSERVE, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD – THE FILTH ON THE COFFEE TABLE AND THE OPEN WINDOW LETTING THE RAIN IN AND THE STACK OF WEEKLY NEWSMAGAZINES THAT ARE ABOUT TO BECOME IRRELEVANT BECAUSE YOU PICKED THEM UP IN PORTLAND TWO WEEKS AGO AND STILL HAVEN’T READ THEM YET AND HOW WILL THAT MAKE YOU FEEL WHEN YOU HAVE TO RECYCLE THEM, UNREAD? HMH? So, naturally, I give up on napping usually after the first few minutes. And the worst part of my sleeping-related reversal is that my inability to sleep in no way translates to me not being completely exhausted. Did I just drop a double negative? You bet.

I hate it when your mouth talks.

• An abiding patience for the struggles of the young, the elderly and the (genuinely) afflicted, paired with a rapidly vanishing patience for the problems of everyone else. My ability to endure unfounded complaining and whining seems to be inversely proportionate to the number of hours I work in a given week. But I’m not sure I mind. You see, this calculus of long days and ever-shortening intra-personal fuses has cleared the path for a revelation of sorts: for some people, the essential act is having the problem, not solving the problem. Which is fine, but at this point in my rapidly advancing years, I only have the energy to involve myself in the alleviation of legitimate suffering. Even then, I do a pretty crappy job, but I support and endorse such work heartily. To my mind, there is no work on this earth that is bigger or more important that the work that asks us to grow, to challenge ourselves, to become better. Priorities!

Finally. What I like to call The Big Point 3, or the The thirty-three-and-a-third rule of hitting your third full decade on earth: Whatever youth giveth, be it wasted or not, or wanted or not, age is prone taketh and reshapeth into something way the hell more sensical and symmetrical. Even when it hurts. Especially when it hurts.