I saw my first gunfight today. On the curb of Boulevard de Los Heroes, a wide-eyed kid dashed around the corner from a petrol station, a fat-arse cop in half pursuit. The kid fell over a piece of errant fence wire, the cop stumbled around him, grabbed his collar. The kid shook free, the cop yelled out, the kid pleaded with his cheek bones, then took off again, past a busy pupusa stand. Another cop joined in, more into it and up for it, waving his gun into my flight path, riding shotgun in a taxi cab, two metres away and counting. If I had a camera I’d be rich or famous. Instead the action turns a corner; young couples wince a little but don’t miss a black bean bite. Three shots fire, more screaming, then silence. The traffic snarls 50 feet forward.
the road a scuffle breaks out. A young man, slightly older than the suspected gunshot victim, is dragged from a parked bus, handcuffed then kicked repeatedly by a male officer. A female officer spits in the assailant’s bloodied ear. A young girl on the bus receives attention from fellow passengers. An attempted robbery, said the taxi driver whooping for sunset in his city.
Earlier, I’d paid a dude called Duke $15 to drive me from the airport in his shiny red pickup. You would have done the same. Duke stopped at a fruit stand to pick up a mate who callled his cell phone, and for a moment, when Duke asked if I liked coco, I thought, righto, here we go. I couldn’t find my passport and panicked. But coconutis refresco and delicioso, so what the hell am I thinking? Paranoid.
San Salvador is green and surrounded by mountains. The drive from the airport is far better than in many parts of the world – Cape Town, Mumbai, Istanbul. Here there are no blatant signs of poverty (the eastside is where its hardest) just a faint tropical tinge and fat-bellied, laid back men and chocolate coated, firm-chested young women, formally dressed and searingly beautiful, like edgy Spaniards on holiday.
Zona Rosa, the swanky part of town, is colourful and cool , a leafy western suburb filled with murals and fashionistas, busy parks with kids playing basketbal and futbal, couples pushing prams. It’s all bucolic enough, 28 in the shade, prominent war heroes watching on from inside stone statues.
I stop at a pupusa stand that specialises in rabbit. I buy a cabbie Hernandez a coke and two cheese pupusas covered in pickled vegetables and salsa picante as hell. He gets me home for eight bucks. I cross the road for another beer at a boqueteria seafood joint selling giant pints to pissed up locals singing Mexican folk songs and spitting in each other’s open mouths. The barman tells me the table of 10 Americanos just left, so I tell him I’m just one Australiano who wants a Pilsener and some guacemole and he laughs like I’m crazy, and I look at myself in the corner of Saturday night in San Salvador, salute the guards and thumb a phrasebook that offers no clues tonight. Then I cross the road, pass out in the air conditioning, and wake at 2am to kickstart this blog. It’s all bueno, baby, bueno.
Domingo is go slow day in San Salvador, but the slowest days still start early. My resident aide and snap happy comrade, Tomarto, arrived at sunrise, reeling from a near-fatal airplane incident. I cursed the receptionist then met the random Australiano in the lobby for breakfast and a seedy briefing. A couple of cafes con leche and we hit the David Gusmao Museo de Anthropologia in Zona Rosa. The guards are languid with the keys, so Tomarto chains two ciggies while we wait by an iron sculpture of a self-confessed drug victim. Inside, the highlights are the rocks – big nutty boulders with deep, red indigenous scribbles scattered around a lush garden. It’s like a prehistoric Ameroindian fun park. The ‘Religion’ room is the second highlight, with beautiful ceramics and jewellery dedicated to the sun god. These icons maintain a truly stylish aestethic that outlasts the kitsch of contemporary worship. They’d look just as cool around a catwalk model as a human sacrifice
.
Next stop is the Modern Arte Musuem (MARTE), housed in a sleek building up the hill. The entrance is dominated by a 30-metre tall curved mural of a man bursting out of his skin with revolutionary zeal. We’re the only visitors even though it’s free to get in. We change hotels because that’s part of the job, stopping at a few along the way. Then it’s lunch at an Italian joint, segundo lunch at a Mexican joint and iced coffees in Central America’s biggest mall. The Metrocentro is a modern day church, with entranced punters shuffling shoulder to shoulder among the latest brands, made locally but still no cheaper than found in North America.
The taxi takes us on a drive-by downtown to check out some hotels that charge by the hour but are close to the international bus terminals. Past the Teatro Nacional and the stage where beautiful Roméro spilt his gospel and his blood, we take a wrong turn and suddenly a tranny is up in the window offering directions to her backside. The next corner and ten ripped gangbangers are necking bottles of guaro and hissing at our skinny white faces. The final turn is a byway that circles beneath the Panamericano Highway and reveals a kid graphing under the bridge and some daywalking chromers idling in the background.
It’s siesta time, but soon after we chase the weekend in a few tipico restaurants and empty bars. The night before, running late outside my window, has done a number on the city. The day’s seventh cabbie drops us home in time for Melrose Place. Amanda is even hotter en Espagnol.
What started as a lazy stroll through the lakeside artsy village 50km northeast of San Salvador has ended in the little bull running half on fire across a basketball court packed with local kids and onlookers cheering to blitzkrieg marisco y cumbia el salvador-style, munching plantain chips doused with chilli and lime. Today is the festival of Santa Lucia, the crazy hot chica who pulled her eyeballs out as a sacrifice to beauty, her idol now dangling them in the palm of her hands in the Iglesia across the way.
Suchitoto is a beautiful colonial town with muralled walls, elegant doorframes and sweeping lakeside vistas. Weekenders flock here for art and fiesta. During dinner at the Lupitas del Portal, we met the young owner, René, just returned from a Meso-American tourism conference in Nicaragua. He was hosting his cousins, one from Orlando, a computer games programmer who grew up in Managua, the Nicaraguan capital, during the Contra Wars of the 1980s, and Rico, who fled to San Salvador as a kid.
My resident aide, Tomarto, devoured a plate of carne and together we cruised back to some lakeside pimp pad to blow out in preparation for an unscheduled ride upon the world’s oldest, creakiest, craziest Chicago Grande – or Ferris Wheel – in Central America and beyond. To settle our nerves we drank shots of corn liquor fused with orange juice.
The girl sharing the carriage laughed and screamed for 41 long rotations. After disembarking we drank more Golden, then drove around the corner and into a throng of familias – two thousand plus – all jostling to see the beauty queen, the reincarnated Santa Lucia, waving deftly in a white glove, in a gold dress, eyeing each camera for four hours straight.
My identity has been revealed! I feel like a sham super-hero whose super powers turn out to be lame and downloadable, like a really loud clapping noise or super cyber sexiness. Last night I slept in a dogbox named after an El Salvadoran writer whose canon is as ferocious and tragic as any in Central American literature, condemning foreign powers and complicit upper classes for raping this region of its wealth. More on that maybe from someone who better understands.
The morning drifted into mid-morning, the heat drying out my spongy orthopaedic sandals as we walk out the town map. We then ate breakfast with Lidva, an elegant, laugh-filled senorita who just took over management of a new hotel overlooking the plaza and Iglesia Santa Lucia. The linens are hand-woven in the onsite weavery, the articulos handmade by off-the-wall artistas and the breakfast smoothies pulped pink with tamarillo bits.
The afternoon is spent recharging by the pool which overlooks man made, fungal Lago de Suchitatlan. Falcons hover above my keyboard. In the afternoon we miss a half-booked lake tour, so instead visit Lidby at Hotel Las Puertas again and get the town scoop in return for my secret, and she of course calls Rene at Suchitoto Outfitters and now he wants to know why he wasn’t included in the last guide and I’m apologising for leaving the bar last night without paying for those last two beers. It goes on until we both grow up.
Rene gathers himself, and a few others, and we follow the virgin whose burial is being reenacted in the Iglesia Santa Lucia. Another beauty queen passes by to much rapture. Firecrackers are running hot, but we head straight to the house of Javier, a 70-year-od firecracker maker who gives us a demonstration in his courtyard of how easy it is to kill yourself.
It’s midnight the day after this post is due and I’ve just had a solid satsuanga, or spiritual chit-chat. This journey beyond time and space has inspired me to start at the end of this day and most likely work backwards. What ended bizarrely for me should at least entertain you from the outset.
Pedro is 18-years-old and topless in my living room, his eyes like dinner plates smeared with Worcestershire sauce. His friend Marca is scary strange; he wears a Santa hat and lights candles on our coffee table. He wants my money because his five brothers want his, the Mara gangs are pressing his back and his zapatas are falling apart.
Pedro’s girlfriend is chewing her fingernails in the kitchen. She is the caretaker of Rural Residencia Quecheláh in La Palma, a mountain retreat near the Honduran border. Her bosses are away in Portugal and she has hosted an impromptu party. Tomarto and I crashed it by ringing her bell at 8pm. A healthy walk from town via a sketchy neighbourhood, the Quecheláh – an otherwise tasteful abode – does not often host surprise guests. The beds are unmade and she cannot look me in the eye. Two mangy guard dogs yelp at the window, confused by the unforced intrusion.
Pedro takes my five dollars to buy some beer, and Marla takes forty for the room. It’s awkward because we both know the owners won’t see it. Pedro returns with two cans of light (80 cents) and a warm bottle of water, pocketing the change for his troubles. Kids on coke will be kids. There’s an awkward stand off because Pedro’s mate won’t leave what is essentially our hotel room. Tomarto fires up momentarily; I feign sleepiness. A huntsman scampers across a bright blue triptych. Everyone ashes in a Rajasthani cigueserro. The TV won’t work and the fuzz drives out the intruders, who are also the hosts, who have the only key and who now crunch in the gravel, tapping on our window, searching for an imaginary cat. It feels like a B-Grade horror film where Pedro gets slashed by my fingernails.
Earlier we met a Danish NGO for a glass of V8 juice. Giving is at last the new take. Afterwards I met an ageing salsa starlet who declared it not possible to reach La Palma for the night. By boat, taxi and bus, we did it in four hours, riding the last of every mode. In Chalatenango, we had a brisk lunch in Cafe Colombia which shared an open window with a gym. Three tables played chess while a foxy aerobics instructor blasted pupusa-filled mamas into shape. The gym toilet is also the cafe toilet, so I lined up to wee while giant young men crunched weights on wooden benches and slapped their giant chico balls.
Every world has its adventurers, and the physical world has more manifestations than any other. Today we met a digital artist from Colombia called Richard E Johnson. A reality-surfer of tremendous skill, he joined our table on the plaza in Suchitoto wearing a white singlet over his wiry, tanned frame. He was leaving the next day after a three month stint creating demented techno canvases internationally in-demand. He’d been travelling non-stop since he could remember (I’m guessing he was 55+), had arrived in Central America via a two year bus trip from New York and would reach Panama’s Darien Gap in good time. Also a recent year or so in Guam (“it’s near Australia, right?”) as a fractured space architect, and some mention of computer-driven psychosis and collaborations in Ghana. Johnson left our table reeling with positive energy and ran off into the night.
There’s an El Gringo in every half decent artsy tourist town in every half developed part of the world. And humanity is better for it! Suchitoto has Robert from California who heads up community projects with Quaker contributions, the occasional hands-free tour and a kickback pupuseria. He laughs deep and honest from behind a bushy Bill Bryson beard. We promise to stay in touch, to help him find more funds to help more locals go to university. It’s all good and we both know it.
Earlier we strolled the cartoon-coloured walls of La Palma and bought some nuevo naive paintings from a young girl in a cooperative then jumped a bus for tiny San Ignacio tucked away in the hills. A quick directionless stroll around the town square then the gathering of maps for further recreation. A long bus back to Suchitoto in the heat, but well served by cranking bus tunes, roasted cashews, plastic bags of cane juice and hard chunks of green mango sprinkled with salt and chilli. My body and mind rattle soon after sunset, so I swim laps of the pool in the dark. I have a scheduled chat to home and nod off anxious in love.
Don Pablito is an ex-guerilla soldier from Cinquera, a tiny town near Suchitoto. Don Pablito hid in the mountains around Cinquera while his four sons were shot by the Salvadoran government in the bloody civil war. A fifth son shot himself in the head soon after with an AK-47. Don Pablito speaks freely and honestly about growing up in one of the countrý’s poorest regions. He speaks of how the Catholic priests would encourage the poor to remain steadfast, that their rewards were yet to come. Parishioners fainted in the aisles and carried on. Then the military started to make unscheduled visits, stern generals preaching the evils of communism, how communists ate raw baby flesh, how communists sported devil horns and tails, how communists transported teenagers to the Soviet Union, how communists beat and killed the elderly.
A local school teacher reminded Don Pablito that the church and the government were eternally corrupt in El Salvador, and that communism, despite the waves that Castro was making, was not of any concern. A young Cathlolic priest arrived and quickly condemned the church’s subjugation of the poor and its constant meddling in politics. Cooperatives were organised and the standard of living dramatically increased.
Then gradually the killings began. A young girl who spoke out in church against the government was gang raped for three days then cut into pieces for display on the road into town. The villagers fled into the mountains where bloody resistance was formed. Everyone killed everyone for years to come.
War tourism is sustainable and therapeutic. Reconciliation is held back by lack of truth and courage. Cinquera has a new mayor, an opposition Arena party right-winger who was shot a week after being sworn in. The FMLN, borne out of Castro’s calls for the Salvadorian resistance to unite, gained power in the country for the first time at the 2009 elections.
Meanwhile a Catholic bishop from Mexico at a recent mass in Cinquera, denounced all attempts by the guerillas to maintain the memories of what took place in the surrounding mountains. Don Pablito himself is forbidden from attending a Catholic service, even though he remains a devout Christian.
We sit silent in the courtyard while Don Pablito’s grandchildren play around the stone grill and his two daughters wash laundry in a stone trough. The death is all so recent, and I think of my home and my future and promise to keep plugging away.
Rene takes us back to Suchitoto, where we pick up his wife Lorena and drive west for Santa Ana. We stop at some ruins that have closed and pepper Rene with questions about ice cream flavours and Nicaragua and university and corruption and salsa and everything outside the car going by.
Rene takes us back to the real world via Suchitoto, where we pick up his wife, Lorena and drive west for Santa Ana. We stop at some ruins that have closed and pepper Rene with questions about all facets of life here. We decide at the last minute to stop by the Mayan ruins and an infamous little coffee store in Chalchuapa…
Spirit is alive in El Salvador. On a warm, still Saturday night like any other warm, still Saturday night, Jason and Carla throw a booming party for the state’s Rastafarian community and all who love fire, drums and electro-spirituality. It takes place at TrenchTown Rock on the outskirts of Chalchuapa, on the faint edge of Tazumal, the country’s finest Mayan ruins. The Japanese pour money here into preservation and protection from homeless gangs that dig holes under the fence and sell pieces at the blackmarket for more guaro.
‘Maya’ George drives us to the party around ten. The club’s in an outdoor parking lot, tables serving coffee, tea and 1-litre bottles of Brahva from Brasil. The smart shoppers eat famous garlic potatoes, but our bellies are full from plates of yuka (the Mayan root vegetable) and chicharrones (fried pork). Swilling around with the beer is a coconut shell full of chilate, a Mayan corn drink that Rasta Maya George sells from his house filled with braids and bangles.
It’s filling up steadily, but with only 80-odd punters floating around the edges, it’sstill rocking all the same. The staff are dancing bouncing around under huge heads of knatty dreadlocks. We find a table on a rise to scope what is now my new favourite place. We’re welcomed with unrehearsed, overwhelming reverence, like we’ve partied together all our lives. Outside the wire fence for a gathering, I meet David, an intensely intelligent, gangster-good looking Dell employee who grew up in Boston and sleeps in his car by choice. A cyber radical of the highest order. He announces to his friends that our visit should be hugely respected as it represents a growing interest in his country. He said he had our backs. Everyone keeps saying this. There are good people everywhere in the country, like everywhere of course, but right now it feels like there are heaps more per capita in El Salvador.
We left the club after another all-in dance up, a tall blond white girl with dreads – the only white girl I’ve seen in El Salvador so far – does her best to ignore us, but the dance floor is not that big and eventually she laughs at us as we laugh at ourselves. Twenty kids pile into a table in the back corner. The owners chant down our departure and we leave as Rasta heroes, deep in the night in TrenchTown.
