Chaska in South America

Well, our trip is over. It’s so hard to believe that I’m sitting in my old room in my parent’s house and that I dropped Matt off at the airport today and won’t be seeing him every day any more. I will probably write a couple more posts after this one and try to add some photos that aren’t already included, but this is the last one with new news about our travels. Our last week in Latin America went well and we had an interesting combination of extreme Central American experiences to some experiences that didn’t feel so Central American. After leaving Escipulas in Guatemala, we crossed the border into El Salvador where we spent four nights. We were told by people who had visited El Salvador that the best part of the country were the people and how incredibly friendly they were. Right after crossing the border, we were able to notice how true this was. Not very many people at all visit El Salvador, so the people are not as used to tourists as in other countries. We had taken a minibus to the border and walked over and then had to take a chicken bus (this is the term used by travelers to describe the North American school buses converted to city buses that are used in Guatemala and El Salvador) to a town called Santa Ana, where we planned to stay for a night. There were loads of buses and we were unsure which one to take. Several people offered to help us, including one guy sticking his head out of another bus to ask us what bus were looking for and telling us the bus number and location. Santa Ana is the second largest city in El Salvador, and we read that it was a nice place. It had a nice plaza and church, but that was really all that Matt and I found appealing about the town. Granted we were only there for one day and probably didn’t see everything. One thing that kind of shocked us was how the entire town completely seemed to shut down as soon as the sun went down. We decided we wanted some dessert at about 7 in the evening and wanted to just find a mini market to buy something, but upon leaving our hotel found that every single store that had just been open an hour prior was closed and the streets were almost completely empty. By the looks we got from the few people that were out, we got the feeling that it was just not safe there after dark, and we hurried back to the hotel. The next morning we got on a bus to San Salvador, where Matt’s friends live. Matt has two friends living in San Salvador. One of them is Matt’s old girlfriend from highschool, Jessica, who is there on a Fullbright scholorship and is interviewing several members of a Jewish communtiy living in San Salvador. She is the friend who we planned to stay with. The other friend is a childhood friend of Matt’s whom he hadn’t seen since he was about 10. She spent two years in the Peace Corp in El Salvador and then stayed afterward and has been working for another organization since then. The first night in San Salvador, we stayed at a hostel and went out in the evening with Stephanie, Matt’s childhood friend. We went to a pupuseria and had pupusas, a typical Salvadorian food (basically tortillas stuffed with beans, cheese, or other things.) We had a really nice time with Stephanie and her Salvadorian boyfriend, Eduardo. I wish we could have spent more time with them! The next day we met up with Jessica and spent the next two nights with her. The area of town where our hostel was was pretty nice, and I thought it was probably the wealthy part of town. I was wrong. It certainly wasn’t the poor part of town, but where we went the next day made it look like the slums. Jessica picked us up in her car and as we were driving to the area where she lived, she said “Just to warn you, you are now entering my world, and it’s pretty rediculous.” She was right, the world we entered was pretty surreal. We stayed in a neigborhood of houses that were basically fortresses…houses behind giant walls and metal gates and several with armed guards out front. The house that we stayed in belonged to a family that Jessica was friends with, but they weren’t there. The house was absolutey beautiful and had maids dressed in maid uniforms who, although were not supposed to be working, served us to the point of making us feel guilty. We spent two days of the good life, in which we ate at fancy restauaunts, drove around in nice cars, and even had a hired driver take us on a tour of several nearby towns on one of the days. This was definitely very different from most of the previous experiences we had in Latin America! After three days in San Salvador, we somehow never even saw the downtown but definitely had a unique experience and a really nice time!
After leaving El Salvador, we went back to Guatmemala for two last nights. We planned to go to a place called Chichi, where they have a huge market. We needed to by gifts for our families since we hadn’t bought a thing throughout our whole trip. I had a little issue though. I realized that a bunch of money was missing from my money belt. I didn’t think that it could have been stolen since not all of the money in the belt was gone, but regardless it was missing and I was kind of upset. I kind of had the feeling that I might have accidently dropped it somewhere, and it turns out I was right. Jessica later found it under the bed in the room we slept in…leave it to me to just drop money and not notice. Anyway, we ended up staying in Guatemala City the next two nights (definitely not our favorite city!) but went to Antigua one of the days to do our shopping. It was Semana Santa (holy week), and Antigua is famous for its Semana Santa celebration, so it was really cool to be there to see some of the excitement. It was way too expensive for us to sleep there, so that’s why we stayed in Guatemala City. We definitely had a truly awesome last Latin American bus experiece to and from Antigua! The trip is less than an hour, but it felt like much longer due to our condition. As I mentioned before, the buses are old school buses. They paint crazy colors and designs on the outside, but the inside is just a normal school bus. The seats are not very wide, but they pack up to three or four people into every seat, including the aisle also being absolutely filled. The law is that everyone is sitting, so at times the police stopped the bus and checked to make sure…it’s hilarious, everyone in the aisles just sit and don’t fall to the ground because everyone is packed in so tightly. The bus never fails to stop for more people either. Just when you’re absolutely sure not a single other person can fit, the bus stops and about 5 or 6 more people somehow squeeze on. Chicken buses certainly aren’t for anyone who needs to have any kind of personal space!!
Here are a few photos of our last week of our trip!

 

This is the day we had the hired driver in El Salvador take us to several small towns.  We stopped at an awesome restaurant and had some really good typical Salvadorian food.  Jessica is the one on the right side in the front.  Her Salvadorian friend Alesandra is next to her.  Next to Matt on the left is Jessica’s friend Karen who is from Boston and is also a Fullbright scholar.  Chomie, another Salvodorian friend of Jessica, is next to Karen.

 

 

These are two small towns that we visited.  I can’t remember the names at the moment!  They were not far from San Salvador.  You can see a vocano in the first photos…it is an active volcano and just errupted in October.  We saw some pretty intense photos of the erruption when we visited Alesandra’s uncle in the town.

 

We visited some aritisan shops and were able to watch some men weaving some large blankets and tapestries.

 

Here we are at Laguna Verde, a crater lake, that we also visited while on our day trip to the small towns.

 

 

These two photos are of the main plaza in Antigua, Guatemala the day we went on our shopping trip.  The plaza was absolutely full of people–both tourists and local people.  The indigenous people were dressed for Semana Santa in beautiful typical clothing.

 

We weren’t able to see any processions in Antigua since we had to get back to Guatemala City, but we were able to see a couple Good Friday processions in Guatemala City the morning of our last day.  This is one that we watched in the main plaza.

 

This was hilarious.  Immediately following the somber procession, and I mean immediately, there were TONS of vendors following behind selling everything you can imagine…including the guy shown here selling Dominoes pizza. 

 

This is a chicken bus.  We rode these several times while in Central America.  It brought back such memories of riding the bus everyday in Jr. High!  Almost all of them are painted bright colors like this and have names.

 

One last photo.  This was taken in Guatemala City, but it really shows what a typical street scene in any city in Central or South America looks like.  We’ve got the fresh fruit vendor, food vendors, bootleg CD’s and DVD’s on a blanket, and crappy immitation designer products.  I miss it already!

 

Well, that was our last week of an incredible journey.  Matt and I got back to California Friday night really late and both felt so strange…I still have to gather some thoughts, stories, and photos that I would like to include before I finish with this blog, so stay tuned over the next couple weeks.  Thanks so much for reading this and being a part of my adventure. 

Tags: Travel

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 19th, 2006 at 8:07 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.