High on volcanoes

So when we last left you, we were about to get dinner. It was great. A lot of restaurants will have their normal menu as well as another dish(es) of the day for about half price. Thus we got huge plates of steak, chicken, rice, beans, salad, plantains, and (most importantly) hot sauce and ranch. RANCH???? Yes. RANCH. In Nicaragua. The hot sauce here rules, too. Our friends at the Lizano company make ¨chile¨and ¨salsa¨which are both great in their own special ways but are best when combined. You can get them in the U.S. too and you should.

Granada is a beautiful colonial town with lots of sun, churches (everywhere!), a fort, a lake that was once considered for a canal instead of lake gatun in Panama, and all the houses are painted like flavors of ice cream. We counted pistachio, blue raspberry, cotton candy, rum raisin, strawberry, and lemon sorbet. Granada is one of the wealthier and more conservative cities in Nicaragua (read: somoza supporters) but because of this it is very well maintained. One feels safe at all hours, there is no trash in the streets, all of the colonial buildings look as pretty as a colony, and some of the main streets have huge sections blocked off for pedestrians. Interestingly, people are also hugely obese. We have not noticed this since we left America but gosh darn if there weren´t some lard butts in Granada. I´m talking Texas sized rears.

This became especially noticeable the next day when we hiked to the top of Masaya Volcano, which awesomely sports five craters. One normally thinks of ¨summiting a volcano¨as an aerobic activity. Not here. Everyone took a bus to the top and climbed the last couple of steps only if they were particularly determined. THere were over a hundred people at the top who had participated in no exercise other than sitting upright in a van. We (the fat lazy americans) forwent the 2 dollar shuttle and hiked 12 miles in, up a volcano in the heat of a Nicaraguan day. We might just be stupid. One of the craters is very active and spouts smoke constantly. Sometimes, at night, you can see the intense fire burning from the molten lava still chilling (so to speak) in the center. Another older crater is marked by a cross to guard the world from the gateway to hell. It was placed there by a priest in the colonial era and stopped the natives from sacrificing virgins to the hag god within (all true). With huge black volcanic boulders perched craggily all around, one can understand why they thought it looked like hell. We suspect walking across it would certainly feel like hell. The third crater we saw was much older and filled with green trees, bushes, birds, and stuff. Stew peed in it and felt like the king of the world. We never found the other craters. Weird.

After the volcano, we caught a bus to downtown Masaya, a small town about twenty minutes outside of Granada. Masaya is famous for its large market of Nicaragauan handicrafts, and as we have assiduously avoided all earlier market opportunities for fear of spending too much money, we (Tori) figured (demanded) it was time to give this one a shot. The market was full of every variety of ceramic object, beaded jewelery, and woven cloth a girl hs always dreamed of. Too bad we had seen so much artesania on the streets that it all looks kind of the same too us now. Honestly, a person can only look at so many beaded bracelets before they all look the same. Stew tried on a bout a million belts in quest of something to hold up his now too big pants, but there wasn´t anything right or for the right price. He did, however, find a pretty awesome Sandino T-shirt that has now magically morphed into a tanktop. Despite our lack of purchases, we still had fun giggling at all the tourist traps. It was a nice, relazing afternoon after our hike.

We spent the next morning in Granada checking out ¨La Polvora,¨ known in English as the White Fortress, built by the Spanish in 17something9 and later converted into a prison by Somoza. We climbed the tower and got a great view of the icecream city. The fortress also had some colorful gardens full of strangely shaped flowers we´d never seen before. We swear some of them looked like flourescent dragon babies.

After La Polvora, it was time to hit the old dusty road again. We were itching to catch another island. We jumped on a bus to Rivas and then on a smooth-riding, albeit crying baby filled, ferry to la Isla de Ometepe. Ometepe means ¨island of the two breasts¨in Nahuatl, the ancient Aztec langauge (also true). It is so named because of all of the women on the island expose their breasts (false). Actually, it is composed of two different volcanoes and a strip of land that forms the cleavage.

Our first day in Ometepe was spent climbig Volcan Concepcion with our righteous dude of a guide, Jesse. He´s our favorite guide thus far. Jesse went at our speed, cracked lots of jokes, spoke Spanish slowly enough that we both could understand, and cut us a good deal on top of it all. However, he also convinced us that it would be a good idea to hike back from the volcano to Mayogalpa, the city we were staying in, rather than taking the normal bus back from the base of Concepcion. This tacked on a solid 3 extra hours to our journey. There were definitely benefits to this: we walked over volcanic rocks through a dried magma river (totally sweet), Jesse taught us how to crawl like guerrillas under farmers´barbed wire fences, checked Capuchin and howler monkeys, saw magic mushrooms growing on cow poop, and met some cows on the dirt road at the bottom. However, by the time we got to back to town, we were ready to collapse. Which we did, immediately.

After an hour of delicious sleep, we were rudely awakened by our hotel owner´s grand children playing soccer on our door. By the way, our hotel was not really a hotel. It was more of a family complex, one of which owned a restaurant with a giant courtyard behind that included three extra bedrooms. It was, however, the only hotel in town that would let us use their kitchen. The ¨baño general¨was half price compared to the rooms with a private bath, but that was fubar. We enjoyed our private room where we didn´t have to wade through chickens, pigs, wild dogs, parrots, and children in order to use a narsty loo. Anyway, with children kicking a soccer ball at our door, we decided we had to get out for a little bit. Thus we wound up at Jesse´s bar drinking beer and eating steak before we went to bed at 7 p.m.

9 a.m. the next morning came surprisingly quickly for our tired feets. Jesse had planned a full day starting at 5 a.m. in order to see the island, but since it was raining, we decided to scrap the plans of motorcycles and beaches. Eventually, after a bus, a hike, a hitchhike, a hike, and a bus, and a hike, we were 25 kms from our hotel at a place known to have the best petroglyphs on the island. This was the main reason we came to Ometepe. THis is also, evidently, the worst possible reason to come here. If you want to see something more exciting, do anything else. Tori saw one on the walk up and declined to take a picture on the grounds that ¨the ones we have to pay for will be better.¨ Wrong. That was the only interesting petroglyph, standing in a cow field and on a rock about 3 feet high. The carvings at Tikal and Ceibal were much better, as are the Nasca lines. Plus we had to pay a dollar each, got led around by a crazy maid that didn´t know where the glyphs were, and ate a lemon that had crazy numbing chemicals on it. We hitch hiked back to our hotel with the help of the ministry of health (no joke) and got off the island.

Everyone on the island had assured us there was a bus waiting to take us to San Juan del Sur but this was not the case. Side Note: they re-use saints´names so frequently for cities that there are two San Juan´s in NIcaragua and are distinguished as ¨north¨and ¨south¨...we´ve been in 5 Santa Cruz´s since beginning this journey. After a fierce ¨piedra papel tijeras¨(rock paper scissors) battle, we decided to pay our taxi driver an additional 8 dollars to take us all the way to San Juan del Sur and skip the bumbling metropolis of Rivas. We later found out that Rivas is the site of William Walker´s grave. If you don´t know who William Walker is, he is the boldest of American imperialist swashbucklers. ¨My own company? Psh, my company needs its own country,¨ said Walker with a flourish of his gallant hair and a flash in his grey eyes.

Anyway , now we´re in San Juan del Sur which is a great beach town that looks like Myrtle Beach if every surfer from San Diego had moved with it to Nicaragua. Surfers really do have a way of transforming the culture of an area faster than the boldest imperialist. It looks nice though, so we´re going to go check out the beaches.

Gustaf and Anna have a blog ,too. Here it is, with some pictures. If your Swedish is rusty, use google translate (www.google.com/translate) and your imagination.

http://www.resdagboken.se/Default.aspx?documentId=3&userId=269145&section=blog&entryId=2204577&journeyId=373399

The Carribean Coast of Nicaragua

We left Leon about a week ago to make the long journey up to the Corn Islands off of Nicaragua´s Moskito Coast in the Carribean.

This was no easy task. We left Leon Saturday afternoon, and 4 buses, 1 boats, and 2 days later we were on the Carribean coast, in the port city of Bluefields. Then we got on a boat that we thought was taking us to the Corn Islands. This was not the case. We arrived at Bluff, a nothing port town with one resteraunt and one hotel. At least the hotel was pretty cheap. We walked around the entire town and the beach in about the hour. The most exciting thing that happened was meeting a drug addict turned evangelist on the beach who tried desperately to convert Tori. Stew was a lost cause, apparently. He did tell us that the town was supposed to become a major port for the Soviets, but this was undermined by a hurricane and a counterrevolution. Thus, the town has nothing. Oh well, it wasn´t too bad for a night.

The next morning we returned to Bluefields to try to get to the Corn Islands once more. This time, we got more accurate information about how to get there, though we had to wait around a day for a boat. Damn Bluff. Bluefields was interesting in that it´s a city totally different from any other central american city we´ve seen thus far. Most people speak english with an island twang - weird grammar, strange vocabulary, and words from other langauges are liberally mixed in. Spanish was much easier to communicate in than English, which was wacko. Finally, we weren´t gringos, just ¨whitey.¨ Also, no one serves tortillas with meals on the Carribean coast. This came as a quite a shock to us, but thankfully tortillas were replaced by tostones: deep fried salty plantains. They rule. In fact, they own tortillas.

After two boring days waiting on the coast trying to get to the Corn Islands, we caught a boat to Big Corn Island. We woke at 6 to get in line for tickets at 7 so we could sail on the 9 a.m. boat. Sometime after 8 they started selling tickets and it was about then that it started to rain. I guess that´s Island time for you. Only the rain shows up consistently. The boat ride was uneventful, unless you count thunder storms in a tiny shaky craft in the middle of the sea eventful. We felt like sissies for feeling so miserable, until we realized the coast guard officers on the ship were puking. Then we felt like badasses. To be fair, half our nausea may have been caused by Gustavo Leyton. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7vwBoiZea0&feature=related We watched this for an hour of the six hour hellcruise. Around hour two, we decided to fly back to Managua. One good thing about the trip was that we met some great people and bonded. Gustaf and Anna, our new best friends from Sweden, made the trip very enjoyable and along with John and Kim from Chicago joined forces to reap the Corn Islands.

We decided to stay on Big Corn after the ride, which turned out to be something of a mistake. It was still pouring rain, so we grabbed a pizza and a beer with the Swedes. By the time we got to a hotel, Stew´s bag was soaked and smelled like a wet dog that had been skunked. and then left in an unplugged refrigerator. Tori smelled a little bit better. Everything on Big Corn was super expensive, so we made macaroni and cheese on our stove before retiring at 8.

The next day we woke to rain again. Tori said ¨This is a miserable island.¨ Then the sun came out and we all had fun playing in the beach. Tori took back her maldigas. We made stew with Anna and Gustaf before heading out to Little Corn on a much shorter and very fun panga or sweet little motor boat that jumps four feet out of the water and smacks your rear like a frat boy at initiation. Little Corn doesn´t get rain as much, because it is better than Big COrn. It is also cheaper and prettier and allegedly has better scuba diving. Which is also cheaper.

We shared a room with Gustaf and Anna at Hotel Sunshine, owned and operated by Dustin the Redneck Texan, a title he proudly bears. The hotel was cheap and great, though the mysterious smell in the bathroom confounded all. We suspect this was what caused the swedes to get a cabana on the other side of the island, five minutes away. Maybe it was the snoring.

There is basically nothing to do on Little Corn, which is great. We spent the mornings swimming and reading in the sun, hiked in the afternoon rain, cooked meals in our hotels rockin kitchen, played pool and drank cheap beers at our hotel, talked with travelers about other great destinations, considered diving but rejected it because we are cheap and wanted to save money for our plane tickets to buypass brownfields. We did go snorkeling one day with the swedes and had a great time. It was pouring rain, which is pretty cool to see from below the water. If you´re wet, you´re wet. It´s an old Pollock family proverb that ¨water is wet.¨

One night, we went out to a Cuban restaurant for a great dinner. There is no ATM, so we pulled the ¨friendTM¨move where you pay for everyone elses meal and make them pay you in cash. This works well until the rain takes out the credit card machine and they won´t let you leave the island till you leave them a check and everyone is thoroughly confused about the payment. Actually, it worked well enough even then because we got a great meal and had enough money to leave. And may have gotten a free meal. By the way, Bank of America, we definitely did not write a check on this island.

Today we flew to Managua (way too much money but way better than getting back on that boat or the 9 hour overnight bus tour through theft town) and three hours after leaving Little Corn, we were in Granada. It is like a prettier rainbow version of Antigua on a lake. We´ll investigate this further tomorrow. For now, dinner.

Three Countries in one day

After our intense experience in El Mozote, we decided that we needed to get back on the road and keep heading south. Chile is still a long way away.

We woke up at 4 a.m. to begin our long day of traveling. Then we turned the alarm off and woke up at 6 a.m., feeling much more optimistic about the day. We hopped a bus toward San Miguel and jumped off at ¨km 18 on the military road.¨ THankfully, someone on the bus knew what that meant. From there, we grabbed another bus toward the border. We stopped to get breakfast (40 cent pupusas and 10 cent coffee). When we went to use the only bathroom in the town (maybe this is an exaggeration...) in a cool looking bar, the owner turned out to have lived in America and bought us beer at 9:30. What a nice guy...for a yankees and cowboys fan.

The next bus dropped us at the border of Honduras, which we walked across after paying the 3 dollar entrance fee. No stamp in the passport, just a piece of paper. Bummer, but I guess we´ll get some stamps eventually. We got on a micro bus (minivan) to the border with Nicaragua, several hours away. We got totally swindled on the fare, which really annoyed us. It just feels like everyone is taking advantage of you because you´re an American. We spoke better Spanish and were dressed worse than some of the other passengers, but were still targeted. I guess after what the U.S. did to El Salvador (or Guatemala, or Nicaragua, or Honduras, etc) it makes sense. Still, it made us unhappy.

We walked across the Nicaraguan border, too. Customs and IMmigration are, as always, really annoying, but it was exciting to finally get here. Also, it felt cool to have succesfully crossed two borders in one day even though people said we couldn´t do it in time. We hoppped another Micro to CHinandega where we got on a bluebird (school bus) to Leon. SO MANY BUSES!!!

Leon is a beautiful colonial city that holds the oldest and possibly largest cathedral in central america. Impressive, grandiose, opulent and Catholic. It is a great little city and very fun and comfortable, despite having some of the highest poverty rates in Latin America. Also, it was a focal point of the revolution in Nicaragua, largely due to the university here which produces very radical students.

The revolution in Nicaragua seems pretty similar to El Salvador´s, only they won through military force rather than having to wait almost 20 years to win through political process. El Salvador´s current president, Mauricio Funes, was elected 100 days ago and is from the FMLN. Since his election, he has nationalized health care succesfully (according to a Salvadoreno), made school free, and provided social security income to anyone over 80. Not bad for a ¨first 100 days.¨ Maybe Mr. Nobel Peace prize should take some notes.

We explored Leon´s museums and art galleries. One of the museums is in the old prison where the Somoza dictators tortured and executed Guerrillas, poets, crazies, and dissenters. Stew got a haircut in the courtyard at one of the museums, including a ¨Shape up¨(razor trimmed edge around neck, ears, forehead, etc). Later we went out dancing at a bar with some of the artisan kids living in our hostel. We bought jewelry from them, too. TOri has a wire chain necklace with a tiger´s eye stone and Stew has a leather cord with a javelina tooth. We look awesome.

We´re heading off to the Corn Islands in the Carribean today, or as far as we can get in one day.

El Salvador´s Revolution

We´ve been pretty busy since our last post. Our last stop in El Salvador was the tiny mountain village of Perquin, headquarters of the FMLN during the revolution-cum-civil war in El Salvador. We got quite the history lesson at the Musuem of the Revolution in Perquin, as well as at the guerrilla base camp (open for tours) and at nearby El Mozote.

The musuem was tiny but powerful. It was hard to remember that we were really getting only getting the FMLN´s side of the story because sympathizing with the government in this war means you´re probably evil. The revolution in El Salvador began in a familiar way. The social system was highly stratified, with the legendary ¨14 Families¨owning practically all land and all businesses in the country while the vast majority of persons could barely practice subsistence farming. As always, student groups reading Marx, Engels, Trotsky, and the rest of those radical old white guys, got uppity, protested, and thus were shot. The FMLN, a political party turned communist guerrilla group, got organized in the mountains to avenge the students, fight the army, liberate the people...you know the drill.

The thing that distinguishes El Salvador´s war from most others are its duration and brutality. The war raged until peace accords were signed in 1992, and even then it wasn´t all over. The guides that led us through the museum were former guerillas, the pictures of martyrs on the walls were their friends. The Salvadorean Army - US trained and supplied, but of course - blatantly disregarded human rights, and any other sense of basic moral decency. This was really brought home to us at El Mozote. Today a monument, El Mozote was a small mountain town populated by religous, evangelical peasants who found themselves caught up in the middle of a war they wanted no part in. The army wrongly suspected these peasants of organizing a guerilla force and supplying existing FMLN forces. Instead of doing their research, soldiers came into the town, separated the entire population by age and gender, and then killed them all in incredibly gruesome ways. This includes babies of only a few months, pregant women, teenagers, grown men -- everyone. One pregnant woman was crushed to death by a massive stone placed on her stomach, which made the unborn baby´s bones penetrate her organs. Every girl over the age was taken to a nearby mountain and raped before they were murdered. They justified killng the children because ¨one day they will become guerrillas.¨Only one woman managed to flee to the mountains, where she survived for 8 days in the woods. She is the only reason any one knows this massacre happened, and no one knows how many more like it might have occurred but lacked surivors.

Learning about this kind of history made the two of us feel incredibly guilty for what our government has done, for what our tax dollars have paid for. Without the funding and training from the US, none of the violence of El Salvador´s revolution could possible have been so severe. Though the war had already begun, it took a dramatic turn with Reagan´s election. Indeed, it is only inthe 1980s that massacres like El Mozote began to occur.

Strangely enough, in a place that some might consider one of the most dangerous areas of El Salvador in the fairly recent past, we felt safer than anywhere else -- safer than you might feel in Washington, DC. The people welcomed us, they were eager to share their stories and asked that we spread the word such that something like this would never occur again.

Red, White, and Brown (skin tones)

After more than enough time in the big city of San Salvador, we figured it was time to hit El Salvador´s world famous beaches. If you look at a map, you´ll notice that El Salvador is a really narrow (50 miles at its widest) strip of beach a hop skip and a splash north of the equator. THis means that the entire country is basically a beach.

We caught a bus to La Libertad which is a little more blown up because of all the surfers that have mvoed there from aroudn the world. We decided to go to the more secluded beach of El Palmarcito. We jumped off the bus at a bridge and took a cobble stone road to the beach. Question, when are cobblestones just regular stones? WHen they´re big enough rocks that it is no longer convenient to walk on them. ALso known as hobble stones.

We were the only tourists aside from two boys from San Salvador who claimed to be teenagers. Being cheap, we opted to camp underneath the gazebo rather than pay for a room. This made it easy for Stew to roll out of the tent and into the pool for his morning shower.

THe beach is pretty much empty except for a couple of local surfers at sunset and fishermen sporadicalyl throughout the day. THere are two huge cliffs that mark the ends of the beach, though there are trails that lead up and over them. El Palmarcito is probably 200 meters of sparkly black sand and big fun waves. Over one of the cliffs is a path to another beach which is maybe 30 meters long. This one was less fun because there were rocks on the bottom where the waves crashed. Along the path, however, there was a pool that filled up with salt water from the ocean spray but was partly protected from sharks. Which made Tori feel a lot better.

We spent two and a half days chilling at the beach and exploring some of the trails and overlooks. It was great fun and very relaxing. Also, it was really cheap and we managed to stay under budget every day. Eventually, we got tired of being so happy and caught a bus to another beach.

The bus was supposed to be easy and short but 4 hours and 4 buses later, we finally got to Playa los Blancos. NOte that it is not Playa DE los blancos (beach of the whites), nor Isle of Wite, but White Beach. Which is not exactly appropriate because the sand was really quite gray. Still, it was a very long and wide beach with hot sand and fun waves. and hammerhead sharks. We saw a woman preparing one for dinner. Stew asked later and was informed that there were a lot in the water, but "only little ones." He didn´t tell Tori.

We ended up spending three days here, rather than the intended one. We tried to go to La Puntilla to check out another beach. When we got there, people swarmed us and tried to rip us off for ridiculously overpriced shitholes of hotel rooms. When we asked the manager for the price, she told us she had to ask the boy that had recommended us what he said he was going to charge so she didnt undercharge us. What a system of thievery. We left after checking out the beach and swearing a blood vendetta. We hopped back on the bus and returned to the awesome room we had been in where for $16 a night we had a great pool with an underwater table to drink at, water bar stools, two slides, and beach front access. Also, Cheech Marin appaers to own the hotel. We ate 40 cent pupusas for almost every meal and cooked the rest. What a great time.

Eventualyl, our bodies were too pink to remain in paradise and we reluctantly hopped a bus to somewhere. It turned out to be San Vicente, so we got on another one to San Miguel. This was the focal point of the revolution and people here apparently remember the war very vividly because of all the people killed by american trained soldiers. It is a sleepy town with a bunch of people that speak english and good fast food. We´re heading to Perquin now to check out a museum and go hiking. What nerds.

Still in San Salvador

We´ve spent the last few days in San Salvador trying to see all of the sights nearby. We have only had a moderate level of success. Despite spending a longer time here than anywhere else so far on our journey (except Los Gatos), we have only seen about half of the attractions. The city is huge and confusing and all the buses go everywhere. Salvadorenos are very willing to help, even if they do not know the answer. Thus, we have spent the majority of our time lost.

Still, what we have seen has been pretty cool. Since Joya de Ceren, we have seen the historic center of San Salvador. This included a beautiful national palace, which is still in the process of being restored. It is pretty cool to see tourist attractions when they aren´t all done up in their make up. There was an exhibit on colonial El Salvador, which was basically an exhibit on churches. There were also cannons. Stew posed as a judge in the supreme court room. Tori posed with a cannon and looked like a badass.

We also saw the cathedral which was really pretty but not too different from the others that we have seen. Santa Ana´s was newer but more impressive...at the turn of the 20th century there was a ton of money due to the rise in the coffee industry and El Salvador´s lush volcanic soil which gave the beans a special flavor and led to people getting really rich. They built a grandiose cathedral in a gothic style to demonstrate something...presumably that they were as rich and cultured as Europe. Thus, the more recent, less important cathedral of Santa Ana is better to take pictures of than San Salvador´s.

San Salvador has another important church called La Iglesia Rosario which is probably the most interesting architecture for a church that we have ever seen. The building is basically two massive arches connected by terraced concrete, filled with colored glass mosaics to let in light. It looks like a rainbow inside the otherwise concrete and metal structure. The bulding is filled with metal sculptures depicting Jesus´s life, death, and resurrection. Everything is made out of construction scraps and has a rather industrial feel, countered by the warmth of the stained glass windows. It is supposed to be in contrast to the opulence of the Catholic churches in which everything is dipped in gold and plated in diamonds. This church seemed to resonant more strongly with the local, impoverished community.

Yesterday, we tried to hike Volcan San Salvador. After waiting 30 minutes for a bus, taking 4 different buses for two hours, and being no closer to the volcano when it started thunderstorming, we decided to give up and get lunch at a mall. At least we managed to take care of some errands, like buying Stew a notebook and toothpaste. We also got to see Salvadoreno mall culture. It looks a lot like in the U.S...angsty teens and beauty queens. When we got back to our hotel, we saw a missed call from Eduardo, Tori´s brother Alex´s friend from highschool.

Ed came and picked us up from our hotel in his super cool black truck, and we got to go hang out at his beautiful house up in the hills in San Salvador. You can see the soccer stadium, including part of the field, from the park about a block away from his house. If El Salvador wins their next game against Mexico, they´ll play Honduras at home. We learned from Ed that this will be the biggest deal in a very long time in San Salvador....if this happens, we will be sure to stay out of the city, which will become a total madhouse. In contrast, Eduardo will be sure to make it to the game. Still, we´re rooting for El Salvador to make it to the world cup.

Eduardo´s house is lovely - it goes up a hill and has beautiful gardens, and the architecture is clean and modern. However, the coolest part about it was the zoo! We got to see macaws, tucans, five green and yellow parrots, an adorable cappuchin monkey that swang zanily from branch to rope to branch, three kinkyjews (yes, that´s the real name....we think that´s how you spell it), a big loveable, and relatively tame racooon, a ferrett, a hedgehog, five (mini) sharks, five dogs with really awesome names (sambucca and garbanzo are standouts), eleven cats, and more. Stew even held the hand of the raccoon! It was really fun to meet all of the animals, and it definitely made us miss having doggies around. Eduardo was so welcoming and fun to hang out with -- it was really nice to be with someone from back home.

After chilling out at Eduardo´s house for a while, it was time to see his restaurant, Citron, situated in the San Salvador´s Zona Rosa, stomping ground of the fabulous in El Salvador. The restaurant is in a former house (there´s still a living area upstairs), so it has a small (read: romantic) outdoor seating area and a little citrus tree garden. The decor is elegant with smooth, modern lines. It has an open kitchen, and we got to sit right up on the counter overlooking it. This made for an especially fun evening because we got to watch Eduardo cook and chat with him all night.

On to the food: oh my gooodness, we haven´t eaten this well since.....we don´t even know when. It was heaven. Stew said it was the best meal of his life, though he also once said that after eating In-n-Out burger. Our first course was a signature dish at Citron: yucca gnocchi in a pesto cream sauce made with four different kinds of basil and a Salvadoran flower bud. Even though the menu changes every few weeks, it´s been on the menu since the restaurant opened four or five years ago. The gnocchi were fried to perfect crunchiness on the outside, while their centers were soft and yucca-yummy. The pesto was a delicate yet flavorful compliment. We devoured it.

Oh, and the bread came with tomato garlic oil that we couldn´t stop ourselves from polishing off in about ten minutes flat. Eduardo claims that it only has tomato, garlic, and oil in it, but there must have been some kind of crazy secret ingredient. Or maybe he´s just so good that he can do things with tomato and garlic that we mere mortals can only dream of.

For our main course, Eduardo whipped up a special plate of farm-raised venison with a rich orange citrus sauce, mashed sweet potatos, a tomato-mushroom ragout (special crazy looking tropical mushrooms, that is), and venison chorizo made with lavender and rosemary (I´m pretty sure it was lavender and rosemary...). It was out of this world. We´ve both had lots of venison thanks to Stew´s family´s hunting prowess, but this was unlike any deer we had ever tasted. The meat was so tender it fell off your fork, the citrus sauce was so flavorful and awesome we drenched everything possible in it. The potatoes were sweet, delicious, and whipped to perfection. We relished every woodsy-tasting crazy looking orange mushroom on our plates.

And then we had dessert. It began with three different kinds of ice cream: bacon (Stew thought he had died and gone to heaven), corn with cinnamon, and a tropical fruit whose name has escaped us but tasted like a sort of guava-citrus combination. When Eduardo asked us which one was our favorite, we took turns declaring each one the winner. In retrospect, Tori votes for the fruit and Stew votes for the bacon....but now we´re struggling and second-guessing ourselves, so maybe the best one really was all 3. The second dessert course was cinnamon sugar churros with a chocolate hazlenut sauce and mascerated strawberries. We have decided there is nothing better in this world than a deep fried dessert with chocolate. Even though we didn´t think there could possibly be anymore room in our bellies, we somehow managed to eat every last bite.

All in all, it was a fabulous night with an incredibly gracious and welcoming host. I think it may have been the best night of our trip so far! Next time Eduardo comes to the US, we are going to show him a truly outrageous time. Thank you, Eduardo!!!

Today, we are off to beach at La Libertad to try our hand at surfing. Yippee!

S

Checking out El Salvador (she`s hot!)

So, we´ve spent the past 4 days in El Salvador.

We started out in Santa Ana, the ´Queen of the West´, according to our guide book. It´s a relatively boring city close to the guatemalan border...but El Salvador is small enough that nothing is too far away from any border. We spent an afternoon sightseeing and had seen everything the town had to offer: a museum with 3 exhibits, one on the eruption of Volcan San Salvador in 1917 (tourists kayaking on the lake in the crater went flying!), one on salvadorean currency through the ages (now they use the US dollar), and one on mammoths (they´re large); cathedral (closed for remodeling, so we saw the outside view); casino (a private members only club we also saw from the outside); an art school. We left the next day.


We arrived at Lake Coatepeque just in time to see the beautiful day turn into a thunderstorm. Even though it prevented swimming, seeing storms over water is always cool. Tori also didn´t care because at this point she was sick as a dog and just slept for 18 hours. Stew had to bide his time wandering around the town....that is, the dirt road. He got a $2 steak though, which made him happy. We left Lake Coatepeque around mid-afternoon the following day, even though we had planned to stay there for two days. After all of the beautiful lakes/water we saw in Guatemala, this wasn´t really up to snuff. I guess we´re getting a little spoiled in that regard.

Other substantial motivating factors leading to our early departure included Stew´s near death experience by electrocution in the shower (Central American hot water means electric coils installed above showerheads.....not very safe, especially when poorly installed or when you´re 6ft4), and the owner of our hotel was an evil trannie. The wo(man) just about killed us with her evil glare when we went out for breakfast, and then tried to charge us for breakfast on the way out....but the night before, she said the resteraunt was closed (at 5pm) when a fellow traveller tried to get dinner. Wack.

We got to San Salvador in two evenings ago. Unfortunately, Stew got realllly sick yesterday. We took it easy, which was actually a welcome change in some ways, except for the whole Stew puking part. We´d been running around from place to place to place for a while, so it was nice to have a day to catch our breath.

Today we went to Joya de Ceren, a Mayan village that got volcano´d in about 600 AD. Unfortunately, the museum was closed for renovation (this is starting to feel like a recurring theme), but we got to walk around the archeological site and check it out. This is one of the only sites where you can see how Mayans actually lived from day to day; i.e., itçs a village, not a temple or political center or astronomical viewing area, ect. Turns out Mayans had saunas! Weird, because all of central america kind of feels like a sauna just walking around. We ran into some older Americans driving out of the park as we were walking to the bus stop, and they picked us up and took us back into San Salvador and dropped us off at the musuem we wanted to check out. Pretty sweet. It turns out that the wife of the pair worked at the Embassy, and she gave us a pretty hard sell on joining the Foreign Service...we´ll see...right now, working for the government - the very gears of industrial capitalist machine- doesn´t sound too enticing.


The anthropology musuem was quite well done. The exihibits included:
-a photo exhibit of U.S. leaders with El Salvadorean leaders. Madeleine Albright was thrown in too. And some of the leaders weren´t from El Salvador, per se, because the picture of Joe Biden was with Costa Rica´s president, Obama was with Trinidad and Tobago´s leader, and Hillary Clinton was looking terrifying with El Salvador´s first lady. It was interesting to see Hillary´s picture from 15 ish years earlier when she had visited the first lady and had been the much more attractive of the two. No longer the case.
-an exhibit on agriculture during the mayan era. This was boring.
-a display of pottery and weapons through the ages. Stew´s dad makes much more impressive guns and knives than the Spanish. There was a breast plate with a dent from a musket ball, demonstrating that the gun was real weak sauce.
-general anthropological hibbity gibbity.
-art and stuff. also some stuff on religiyawn.
- a statue of a naked chick washing clothes hiding behind a tree in the courtyard. Also, a metal sculpture called delirium tremens that is supposed to demonstrate the way that God filled the artist with such hallucinatory exultation that it was similar but better than any intoxication from drugs. Cool?
All in all, a very well done museum.

Now we´re at out hotel, not a hostel, which our guide refers to as "the latin american version of a bed and breakfast." It is nice. When Stew was sick, the owner made him vanilla tea.