January 21, 2017
The Ticabus agent had told me to come to the office at 6:15 am
to get my seat assignment. We got up at
5:00 and called a taxi at 6:00. Scott
needed to go to the airport, as he had a flight at 9:00. Since we were only about four blocks from the
bus station, they dropped me off on the way.
The taxi didn’t want to leave me on the street outside the closed
Ticabus office because the hours indicated that it didn’t open until 7:00. The agent had clearly told me to come at 6:15
and I figured that the worst that could happen would be that I would have to
drag my luggage across the street and look for someone in the main
station. I waved them off and the driver
reluctantly pulled away. A minute
later, the agent arrived. She assigned
my seats and I then followed her across to the main station where she accepted
my checked luggage.
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| Ticabus |
The bus left at 7:00.
There were only about ten passengers.
I was the only gringo. We drove
out of Tapachula towards Volcan Tacuba.
The scenery quickly became wilder and more mountainous. Within a half an hour, we arrived at the
Guatemalan border at El Carmen. This was
the part of my journey that I had been dreading. The Mexican immigration window was
professional and quick. They stamped my
passport and I followed the signs across the border to the Guatemalan
side. Then I had to run the gauntlet of
money changers and aggressive, official looking, crooks that wanted to take my
money.
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| Guatemalan Customs |
When I had crossed the border there in 2014, I was taken in
by a fellow with an official looking ID badge who claimed I needed him to
handle my entry into the country and took nearly all my money to “pay for my
visa.” This time I was prepared. I had changed some pesos into quetzales in
advance and brushed off the boys looking for tips. More difficult were the ID badge waving
crooks. One of them grabbed my passport
as I approached immigration and gave me a story about how I needed to pay 200
quetzales because I didn’t have my Mexican tourist card. Knowing that Mexican immigration has just
taken that card, as they always do upon exit, I wrested my passport from his
grip and told him I would pay the immigration agent. At that point, he admitted defeat and looked
for another victim. The immigration
agent stamped my passport perfunctorily and charged me nothing.
The bus was waiting for us outside immigration. I was the third one to reboard. The driver didn’t believe that I had managed
to get through immigration so efficiently and demanded to see my passport stamp
before letting me back on the bus. He and
the conductor were somewhat incredulous that I had pulled it off when several
Central Americans were having trouble.
We waited while the remaining passengers trickled in and then proceeded
to customs. The exterior of the bus was
searched and one passenger had to disembark while they searched her baggage,
but no one came aboard and my baggage was unmolested.
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| Guatemalan Countryside |
We continued through the mountains, eventually intersecting
a highway through the plains where we passed tree plantations and cane
fields. At 10:00, we stopped at a Burger
King for a food and bathroom break. I
ordered a breakfast muffin sandwich which turned out to be easily twice the
size of a similar menu item at home.
Back on the bus, we continued another three hours through the highlands
until we arrived at the Ticabus station/fortress. The air conditioning became progressively
colder as we proceeded. I put on my
sweater and zipped the legs onto my shorts, but couldn’t get warm.
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| Tiny Hotel Room in Guatemala City |
Ticabus had changed locations since my last visit there in
2014. The new station was more modern
and more fortresslike. The bus entered
the parking lot through a giant gate.
The terminal building formed the heart of the compound with hotel rooms
both above the terminal and in another building across a smaller parking area
with another towering gate. I paid my
$25 to the clerk at the snack bar and was ushered to a tiny room in the far
building. I should have bought something
to eat because the snack bar apparently closed after the 2:00 bus left.
Ticabus is an odd organization. They effectively run buses from Tapachula,
Mexico to Panama City, Panama. Many of
their stations include hotels where travelers can lay over or arrive the night before
early departures. Their website appears
modern, but you can’t buy tickets online, although they have been promising
that feature for at least 2.5 years. I
tried to make a hotel reservation online and received a regurgitation of my
information that might have been a confirmation, but didn’t identify itself as
such. I verified that reservation with
the Ticabus office in Tapachula, but the snack bar clerk had no reservation
system and merely wrote my name and payment in a manual ledger. Still, since my bus ticket from Tapachula to
San Salvador cost me only about $35, it was hard to complain. Flying would have cost me $650.
I locked myself back in my cell and entertained myself with
the excellent wifi (there was wifi on the bus, too) before retiring early. My bus would depart at 6:00 am the next day.
January 22, 2017
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| The Ticabus Terminal in Guatemala City |
I need not have worried that no one would remember to let me
out of my cage in the morning because they came around at 5:00 am to knock on
my door and tell me to report to the station at 5:30 to check in. I had hoped for some breakfast, but there was
nothing at the snack bar except junk food, so I had a tiny, but tasty, latte
and a package of cookies for breakfast.
For the past year, I had been looking for a slightly larger replacement for
the bag I had purchased in Yelapa in 2014 that had become disreputable looking
over the years. Apparently, those bags
originate in Guatemala. I purchased a
beautiful new one in a larger size for 50 quetzales or about $6.25. That was a couple of bucks less than I had
paid for the smaller one in Mexico.
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| Misty Morning in Guatemala |
It was 61 degrees outside and everyone was bundled up in
boots, hats, and scarves like it was snowing outside. The bus left right at 6:00. It was too dark to see much of Guatemala City
as we drove through. By the time it got
light, we were up in the mountains again.
It was misty and I couldn’t see far.
The roads were bad and we progressed very slowly. I kept hoping that we would stop somewhere
for breakfast, but we never did. The
highlands we traveled through seemed much more prosperous than the jungle near
Chiapas. We drove past modern businesses
and nice new homes intermixed with the sort of shacks that had predominated
near the border.
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| Guatemalan Homes |
By mid-morning, we reached the border of El Salvador. It was nothing compared with the border of
Mexico. The conductor took our passports
to Guatamalan immigration and got us stamped out of the country. A Salvadoran health agent came aboard and
told us to wash our hands to avoid illness.
They the customs official appeared with a list of our names and checked
each of our passports or ID cards against the list. Customs didn’t even bother with us. We never left the bus. Soon we were rolling down out of the
mountains to San Salvador.
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| The Salvadoran Border |
Our first stop was in a nice area on the northern fringe of
San Salvador where I had actually been to buy boat batteries in 2014. Then we spent half an hour crawling across
the city through traffic and arrived at the Ticabus station at 12:00. This station was less of a fortress than the
one in Guatemala City, although an armed guard did open tall gates to let the
bus pass. We disembarked and collected
our baggage. As soon as I stepped out
onto the street, a taxi driver approached me and I asked him to take me to the
Terminal del Sur. I think he thought I
was crazy to want to get on a Salvadoran chicken bus, but he took me there and
located the proper bus for me and loaded my duffel bag aboard. This particular bus had no luggage space
behind the rear seats, so he put my bag on the floor near the rear door and I
took a seat beside it. He advised me not
to take my phone or camera out of my backpack and not to flash more than a $5
bill on the bus. The cab ride to the bus
station cost me $8.
I sat on the bus at the station for a little over an hour
before the bus filled up enough to warrant leaving. I was on the Costa del Sol bus. The bus was just over half full when we left
the station. I was charged double
because of my luggage, but the fare was still only $3. We had not gone far before the bus was
full It seemed that every woman who
boarded the bus had a dish pan full of some type of food that got shoved under
the rear seats or piled in the rear aisle until that area was full and the pans
stretched up the aisle towards the front.
No one could pass the obstructions, but people kept cramming into the
bus until there were young men hanging out the door. Despite having paid for
two seats, I tried to move over to give a spot to a pregnant woman who sat her
little girl there instead. There was a
party atmosphere as we rolled out of the hills and down towards the coast. We call such buses “chicken buses,” but this
was the first one I had seen in a long time with an actual chicken on it. The owner had it wrapped in a plastic bag. She held the bag handles and the chicken’s
feet in her hand and the bird’s head poked out through a hole in the bottom of
the bag. It glared at me malevolently.
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| Waiting for My Ride |
The occupancy of the bus peaked after we took on passengers
coming from Zacatecoluca and gradually thinned as we headed towards Bahia del
Sol. I was one of the last passengers to
disembark. I got off at Hotel Bahia del
Sol and dragged my belongings down the long driveway to the reception
area. My friend, Jan, texted me just as
I picked up my phone to call her. I
continued down to the marina while Jan got in her little boat to come and get
me. We were back on the island in time
for cocktail hour.
January 23, 2017
Jan installed me in her little guest house, which consisted
of two bedrooms with a bathroom between.
It was quite comfortable, but had been unoccupied for some time and the
plumbing revealed problems when the water was turned back on. No water was getting to the toilet tank and,
when I poured a bucket of water in it to flush, it leaked out onto the
floor. After cleaning all the algae out
of the shower head, I got a shower, but the shower faucet leaked so badly that
I had to turn the water back off afterwards.
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| Jan's Casita |
We started the day with a trip to the hardware store to buy
six bags of cement to be used to improve Jan’s cistern. Jan parked her truck at the hotel. When we got there, her truck battery was
dead. A couple of the marina employees
brought out a charger and charged it enough to get it started, but we didn’t
dare turn it off again, so we left it running while Jan bought the cement.
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| Returning to the Island |
The more advanced group came from 3:00 to 4:00. They ranged in age from eleven to
fourteen. There were two boys and six
girls. We started with a review of
opposite adjectives. We then asked them
to write five sentences describing a person or thing. It took them half the class, but all of them
were able to do it. I was impressed. We were pleased with how the classes had gone
and glad to relax when the children finally left.
There was no city water and no electric utility on the
island. Wells had once provided fresh
water, but salt water had intruded, so water needed to be collected from rain
or purchased from the filtration plant.
Electricity came from solar panels and was stored in batteries that were
topped up by running a gas generator for a couple of hours at night. Jan also had inflatable solar lights we used
as flashlights and at night when the generator was off. Jan was in the process of building a large
cistern to store more rain water for use during the dry season.
My casita had a sink, toilet and shower gravity fed from a
tank on the roof, but I had had to turn off the water because the shower faucet
leaked so badly.
January 24, 2017
Tuesday was our shopping day. Jan had broken her glasses so we had planned
to go into San Salvador to get her some new ones. The death of the truck battery meant that we
had to go to PriceSmart to get a new one and there were other errands to do in
the city.
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| Inside PriceSmart |
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| San Salvador Newspaper Headline |
Once Jan was finished at the optician’s, we went downstairs
to buy a watch battery for one of the cruisers and then decided to get lunch
before going grocery shopping. I had
been in El Salvador for two days and not yet eaten a pupusa (corn meal patties
filled with various ingredients), so we went to a pupusa stand in the food
court. We each got the lunch special of
two pupusas and a drink for $1.99. This
was actually expensive for pupusas, but they were larger than normal and very
tasty. I had one chicharron (fried pork
belly) and cheese and one bean and cheese.
They both came with cups of tomato sauce and pickled cabbage. It was a very tasty and filling lunch.
After lunch, we went to Super Selecto (a modern grocery store)
to pick up some groceries. Then we
headed across town to the hardware store.
The traffic was heavy and it took us some time to get there. Jan knew half the staff at Vidri, the big
hardware store. We needed to buy new
innards for my toilet and a washer for my shower faucet. Jan chatted with a couple of the clerks and
then we went looking for one of them who was on his lunch break because she had
prepared a glossary of hardware terms in Spanish and English for him. We eventually found him sitting at a table
across the street. He spoke some English
and was very grateful to Jan for her effort.
She couldn’t resist helping anyone who wanted to learn English.
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| Groceries Waiting on the Launch Ramp |
Back at the island, I made straight for the Casita to
rebuild the toilet before it got dark.
We verified that water was coming through the intake hose and cleaned it
thoroughly. After replacing all the guts
of the toilet tank, we turned on the water and still nothing was flowing. This was mysterious. I decided to take apart the new valve and
water came rushing out as soon as I loosened the screws. Algae grew in the PVC pipes because they let
light through and it had clogged the valve.
The old one probably would have worked fine if we had thought to clean
the algae out of it, but we had needed to replace the leaky seal between the tank
and base, anyway. Finally, the mystery
of the toilet was resolved and I was able to flush, although I still had to
keep the water turned off because the shower leaked. Jan decreed that it was time for a rum, so
the shower would have to wait for the next day.
January 25, 2017
My friend, Jan, had three large dogs – two Doberman mixes
and a big black lab named Ember. I was
awakened about 6:15 when Ember came bursting through my screen door and bounded
onto my bed to say good morning. She was
soon followed by the younger of the two Dobermans, Wolf, who also wanted his
morning pats. His mother, Shadow, was
pregnant and was spending a lot of time digging nests in the sand. Jan had no idea how she had gotten pregnant,
so didn’t know exactly when to expect the puppies. It seemed like she was getting close, though.
I got up and set to work on fixing the leaky shower. I had to chip away some cement that was preventing me from unscrewing the valve. I cleared the cement away from the valve, but needed a better wrench to get it out, so I got dressed and went up to the house to get coffee and breakfast. After a little break and chat with Jan, I took a crescent wrench back to the casita and pulled the valve out of the wall. Sure enough, the washer was bad as I had expected. I changed it and put everything back together. The shower no longer leaked, but it was still filthy from all the algae that had come out of the pipes, footprints from all our repairs, and the cement crumbs. I drew a bucket of water from the rain barrel and washed down the shower. By the time I was done, it was time for us to leave.
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| Ember |
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| Wolf |
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| Shadow |
I got up and set to work on fixing the leaky shower. I had to chip away some cement that was preventing me from unscrewing the valve. I cleared the cement away from the valve, but needed a better wrench to get it out, so I got dressed and went up to the house to get coffee and breakfast. After a little break and chat with Jan, I took a crescent wrench back to the casita and pulled the valve out of the wall. Sure enough, the washer was bad as I had expected. I changed it and put everything back together. The shower no longer leaked, but it was still filthy from all the algae that had come out of the pipes, footprints from all our repairs, and the cement crumbs. I drew a bucket of water from the rain barrel and washed down the shower. By the time I was done, it was time for us to leave.
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| La Brasas |
After lunch, Jan gave the kids their lesson. They were reviewing commands and verbs. We played Simon Says for half of the lesson
and they enjoyed that. Then we played
Chinese Checkers with them. They cheated
at both Simon Says and Chinese Checkers, but they were well behaved kids and we
had fun with them.
It was nearly 5:00 by the time we got back home. I finally got my shower and then I had a
little time to study Italian before it got dark.
January 26, 2017
I had a little time before the 1:30 class to wander two
doors down and visit my friends Bill and Jean.
Isabel, one of the islanders I had met the last time I was in El
Salvador, was there sewing some window covers for one of the cruising boats and
I got to say hello to her. The two
trawlers I had met in Chiapas were due to arrive that afternoon but, even
though the port captain had driven out from La Herradura, they didn’t make it
to the rendezvous point by high tide. We
didn’t have long to visit, but agreed to meet later for a drink and a swim at
the home of some friends who lived on the mainland side.
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| Improvements to the Cistern |
I reviewed the numbers one through five with the boy. He did well with two and three, but had
trouble recognizing the others, although he could count just fine if I showed
him a picture of four or five items.
Gradually, the other students trickled in. Despite Jan’s lecture that missing more than
three classes would result in expulsion, three students were missing. The island school was closed for painting and
Jan suspected that the parents might have assumed Jan’s school would be closed,
too. The school on the island was seldom
open five days a week.
We reviewed the numbers one through five with all the kids
and then the older kids split off to work on six through twenty while I
continued to practice with the little ones.
A few of them did pretty well, but others had more trouble. The youngest one had done well at first, but
lost interest and became very shy. We
worked with flash cards and then I had them run to numbered stakes on the
grass. Then I had them tell me where to
run. They got a kick out of that for a
few minutes. Finally, time was up and
Jan quizzed each of them and rewarded correct answers with a candy.
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| The Main Road on El Cordoncillo |
We had a short break before the older kids arrived. We reviewed adjectives and nouns with them
and then dealt each of them five picture cards.
They were asked to write a sentence describing each of the cards and we
tried to guess which ones they were describing.
They knew the colors very well, but didn’t do as well with the other
adjectives when pressed.
I had told Bill and Jean we would be done at 4:00, but the
kids lingered until 4:20 and it was 4:30 before I could get back up to Bill and
Jean’s. They made me a margarita and we
hopped in their dinghy and zipped across the estuary to the dock at Terry and
Andrew’s. Terry and Andrew were
building/renovating a house on the mainland side. They had a beautiful pool and yard and were
close to finishing a lovely house. We
lounged in the pool with our drinks and talked until the sun started to dip
low. I got back to Jan’s before dark,
but I missed dinner. Jan ate her big
meal at noon and just had a snack for dinner.
Since she was thin and I needed to lose a few pounds, I was adopting her
eating habits. A missed meal didn’t kill
me.
January 27, 2017
I woke at 6:00, but read until 7:00. We had a leisurely morning until 10:00, when
Jan was supposed to have a meeting with the local bank. They were going to send a banker to talk to
the people on the island about how they could obtain business loans. Loans had been unavailable to them because
they didn’t have proper addresses or verifiable income because the economy on
the island is mostly all cash. Jan was
the treasurer of the island’s non-profit organization. One of the missions for the meeting was to
change the signatures on the organization’s bank account. We arrived at the designated spot a few minutes
after 10:00 to find only one of the other officers in attendance. Jan called the president who came down to
join us. Apparently, the banker had
cancelled the meeting. We chatted for a
few minutes and then agreed to reconvene when the banker was available.
I studied Italian for a couple of hours and Jan made some
Italian wedding soup for lunch. At 1:00, Jan's worker arrived to resume work on the cistern.
The previous day, he had cut and bent pieces of rebar to bridge the
corners. He finished drilling the holes
in which to insert the rebar and then he and Eduardo (the caretaker) made
concrete forms out of metal mesh and slabs of plywood.
Jan’s two high school students arrived for their English
class at 2:00. Christina’s father, Jose
Luis,
came with them. He chatted with Jan's employees and distracted them from working on the cistern the entire
time we were talking to the girls. His
daughter, Iris, was an only child and he was clearly very proud of her. Both of the girls spoke pretty good English,
although they were somewhat shy about it.
They had both just started their first year of high school at
fifteen. High school begins at grade 10
in El Salvador. They both hoped to go to
university. Christina wanted to be an
architect and Iris wanted to be a chemist.
She struck me as being a serious, studious sort of girl. She was perhaps the only child on the island
with her own computer. It was a bit
tough to keep the conversation going, especially with all the commotion at the
cistern, but we chatted with them for two hours. Jan had to keep getting up and checking the
back of the property for intruders because, the previous day, iguana hunters
had used the cover of the English classes to throw tree trunks across the
spiny pinuela hedge and come onto the property to hunt the iguanas. Jan had had to have Eduardo toss all the
downed wood from the neighbor’s property onto her side so the iguana hunters
couldn’t pull the same trick again. The
neighbor had many large trees along the property line and was too elderly to
maintain them himself.
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| The Pinuela Hedge |
After the girls and the workers left, I cracked a beer and
sat down to write.
January 28, 2017
I had stayed up late reading the night before, so I slept in
until 7:30. I got up and took a shower
and washed my hair. It was a little
warmer at 7:30 than at 6:00, so the cold shower was bearable. For once, we had nothing planned for the
day. I made a cup of coffee and lounged
around until it was time to start cooking lunch. My big plan for the day was to make drunken
chicken. Drunken chicken is made with chorizo,
diced tomatoes and vegetables, tequila and orange juice. Everything was slightly different than at
home, but it still turned out tasty. We
sat down to a nice meal about 1:00 and even had a glass of wine.
After lunch. I sprawled in the hammock and read. Jan worked on the lesson plan for Monday’s
classes. She was going to teach the
younger kids colors and the older kids adjectives to describe people. About 4:30, one of the island women came by
selling fried tortillas with pickled cabbage, hard-boiled egg, cheese, and
salsa. These were the local version of empanadas, a dish that varies from turnovers to tamale pie, depending on the country. I got dinner for both of us for
$1.40. The food was very tasty and
satisfying. I had done without dinner
the previous two nights and it was nice to eat something substantial for a
change. After eating, I returned to my
hammock. It was a perfect day in
paradise.
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| Island Takeout |
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