Monday, October 6

The past 1,5 weeks we've spent in El Salvador. We didn't know much more about this country than that it had been a warzone 15 years ago and we hadn't planned to visit it. But our Lonely Planet guidebook of Nicaragua also covered El Salvador and it sounded so interesting that we decided to go.

The people were as friendly as in Nicaragua. Everywhere we walked people greeted us and tried to help us when we were looking for directions. It's a green country with lots of hills and volcanoes covered in forests.

We started in Perquin, a small mountain village. Much fighting took place here during the civil war of '80-'92 and they had an interesting museum about the revolution. It included the remains of a helicopter which the guerilla shot down in '84, with the army general onboard. In town and in the hills around it there were still holes in the ground visible from army bomb attacks. Our guide in the museum was a former guerilla fighter who had been in Bonn in the '80's for surgery on his amputated leg resulting from the war, what a coincidence!
We also visited the nearby village of El Mozote, where in '81 a massacre took place, directed by the same general who was shot down in the helicopter. The army killed all the villagers, more than 800 men, women and children (including day-old babies!) in an extremely violent way. The government still denies it ever happened ...

After that we went to the capital San Salvador, which is not a very beautiful city but it had some interesting museums as well. One museum (Centro Monsenor Romero) was the place where 6 priests and their housekeeper were brutally murdered in '89. A terrible story, but the pictures they showed in albums were detailed and even more horrible, we couldn't look at them.
The other museum we visited was the military museum, showing the other side of the war story. The general mentioned above, was pictured here as a hero, defeating the "bad and evil"...that's another way of looking at things (they also said he died in a tragic aircraft accident.)

After all this sad history, we wanted to do more fun things. So we went to some small towns along the "Ruta de flores" (flower route). It's not the right season, so we didn't see any flowers but the towns were nice. There was a weekend food festival with really good food prepared in the streets (although the breakfasts are still not our favorite: eggs, beans and fried bananas).
We also hiked to a couple of beautiful waterfalls. They were nice to see and even nicer to take a refreshing dive.

In the area in the north where we went the first few days the left-wing party from the revolution was still very strong. But here in the west we noticed a lot of blue-white-red flags and they appeared to be from the ruling right-wing political party. We also noticed that the grass alongside the roads was cut, the garbage was collected and the streets in town much cleaner. The political situation is relatively stable, but the feelings still very strong and from both sides the people don't treat each other equally.

We didn't see astonishing nature in El Salvador, but we're glad we went to visit it. It's interesting to visit a country and hardly meet any other tourists. We were always the only westerners on the bus, often the only western tourists in a hotel and we have not seen any big tourist bus.
Right now we're in Honduras for our last 4 days before flying to the US and we're surrounded by tourists visiting the Maya ruins in Copan.