San Salvador

Travelling via El Salvador seemed the most direct route to reach Nicaragua. We also hoped to escape the tourist crowds here. Only relatively recently has El Salvador begun to really move on from its years spent ensconced in a terrible civil war, from 1980 to 1992. Because of this and its location, tucked down on the Pacific side of Central America, tourism is only just starting to pick up. It does however, have the fastest growing economy in Central America. One of the main government buildings

We went straight to the capital, San Salvador, where we stayed for a few days with a couple of trips out of town. We loved it here. Salvadoreños were incredibly friendly, the streets teemed with markets, people and noise from ghetto blasters and everyone trying to sell their stuff and we didn’t see a fellow tourist in our time here.San Salvador is set in a basin with green mountains all around. The US influence in the country and El Salvador’s reliance on the northern giant is very apparent. El Salvador’s currency is the dollar and the plethora of US fast food outlets is astonishing – Pizza Hut, KFC, McDonald’s and Burger King hog the corners on most major crossroads in the city. Pollo Campero is the only Central American fast food place to compete on the same scale, they were everywhere too and the food to us looked equally revolting. We stayed very near to what we were told is the largest shopping mall in Central America in the ‘Western Suburbs’. It seemed to be a very popular hang out and didn’t seem as socially exclusive as other malls we have seen. Outside the shopping mall

It still made a strong contrast to the hundreds of thousands of market stalls and wheel barrels in the centre which so many people eek a living out of. Many people only sell one thing – 40 tomatoes for $1, wet wipes for $1, 12 mangoes for $1 or 10 bananas for a ‘cora’, the salvadoreno adaption of the word ‘quarter’ or 25 cents. Many people live in poverty in El Salvador which is very evident when you head out of the city in any direction past one room homes built from black bin bags, rusty bits of corrugated iron and used tyres, but with sparkling white school uniforms drying on washing lines. Mainly people are so well turned out, even when they are living in these conditions with no clean water supply or amenities.

While we were here we wandered around the organised and sweaty chaos of the sprawling central area with all its markets. It’s a fascinating place to people watch and there are a few nice, recently restored buildings – the airy cathedral provided us with a welcome relief from the heat. They were putting the finishing touches to its restoration following damage from the last serious earthquakes, one month apart, in January and February 2001.You can just make out tiny people halfway up the scaffolding on the right of the impressive murals.

We also glanced into this bizarre, modern church, built in 1972. Were it not for its Christ statue and impressive stained glassed windows, it would have been a little too similar to a concrete hay barn.

On the smarter side of town in a leafy suburb, popular with embassies, we visited an excellent modern art gallery in a beautiful building.

San Salvador restored our enthusiasm for travelling in Central America. If for any reason we couldn’t make things work in Nicaragua, El Salvador is where we would head to instead.A physical but friendly game of roundabout American football