Aneel's Travelogue

I got talked into something crazy...

Mongolian Charity Rally 2010

I'll probably be keeping a journal there instead of here, for that adventure.

I've been pretty busy since I got back from Central America, and haven't had a chance to write up a wrap up. I had a really good time on this trip, both in the road trip and diving phases.

Here are my pictures from El Salvador and Honduras

And several of my friends took pictures of the diving part of the trip. Gina and Cary have posted theirs, so far.

The excitement of the return trip was a search for an airline agent who would be able to convert the vouchers we were given for our delayed flight to Roatán into Business Class upgrades. It took quite a few tries, but we finally found her. In case you're ever flying TACA through San Salvador and need to make a change to your ticket, the place to go is the Flight Information desk before the second security check.

The flights themselves were pleasantly uneventful.

I haven't been updating much because I've been spending a lot of time underwater. I've been diving about four dives per day, which has pushed me across the 50 lifetime dives mark.

I've also picked up a certification in Enriched Air Diving, and have been diving on Nitrox. That means that instead of breathing normal compressed air, I'm breathing a mixture with more oxygen and less nitrogen. Less nitrogen buildup means that more, deeper dives are possible, but the benefit that I'm more interested in is that I feel less tired after dives. So far it's been pretty good.

The diving has been fun. We've seen a bunch of pairs of reef squids, schools of Bermuda Chub, a big puffer fish of some sort, and lots of smaller fish. There were a bunch of small jellyfish in today's dive, which I don't think I've ever seen outside of aquariums. Some of the best dives have just featured great light, rather than particular creatures.

It turns out our clever plan to return the rental car the night before in order to catch our 8:55 plane to Roatán wasn't necessary. When we tried to check in at the airport, we were informed that our flight was delayed... they guessed it would take off around 2:30. Ouch.

We spent most of the day in the VIP lounge, being served extremely salty food and bemoaning the fact that, while the Wifi allowed us to connect, it didn't actually have a connection to the wider Internet.

We're at Coco View now, and have met up with the rest of the group.

It was raining in Juayúa when we checked out of the hostel, so we decided to head down to the coast instead of hanging around town. It was a pleasant drive out. We stopped in La Libertad for a late lunch and then went looking for Playa San Diego. It turned out to be a little tricky to find, since there are buildings built all along the beach. There's beach access between them, though, so we parked and walked through to the beach. It was pleasantly sandy, but the waves were not as huge as they were at the beach we stayed at earlier.

We checked into an airport hotel and dropped off the rental car. Total kilometrage: 1669.

The airport hotel is weird. It's like a little piece of the US. The desk staff greeted us in English and didn't understand when I accidentally used a Spanish word because I couldn't bring the English to mind. The lobby is full of people from the US. There are microwaves in the rooms. They charge for Wifi.

It turns out that there's an extra thing to beware of when you're diving in fresh water: without the telltale taste of salt, it's easy to get water in your mouth and not realize it. Both Mona and I had rough nights due to something in the water.

We dallied at the hotel until 2pm (an unusually late checkout time for this country), and decided to head down to the coast and stay at the place that Manolo's dad recommended, Barra de Santiago. Unfortunately, the internet connection at the hotel was down, so we couldn't do any research into places to stay there. There was a brochure in the room that mentioned a place, though, so we at least had somewhere to ask for directions to.

It took us longer than we expected to get there. The turnoff for Barra de Santiago was a dirt road marked by a little sign on a bus stop. We missed it the first time through and had to ask several people for directions. Driving along the dirt road was slow, and since we had practically no information about exactly where the hotel we were looking for was, we had to ask for directions three more times. As dark fell, we found the beach that the hotel fronted, and, based on the assurances of passers-by that the beach was passable, drove out along it.

It turned out that the hotel was asking a jaw-dropping rate for a room, about 4 times the most we'd paid anywhere else in the country. Maybe that would be worth it for a day on a great beach, but since it was already dark it seemed too much to pay for a bed. Driving onto the beach turned out to have been a less-than-stellar idea, despite the assurances. It took a bit of pushing to get us back onto solid ground.

We headed back inland to visit a night market that Mona had been interested in seeing. We arrived a little too late to see it in all of its glory, but we got a feel for it. There were lots of little stalls with corrugated roofs selling various ingredients and cooked food items. They were sold out of iguana, but still had some rabbit on the grill.

We ended up driving five miles on past the night market back to Juayúa, where we were happy to find that the hostal we stayed at last week had rooms for us.

We got up early and hopped in the car to drive down to Lake Ilopango for our first freshwater dives. The drive went well until we hit the dirt road, at which point we missed all of the supposed landmarks. Eventually we found a road leading down to the water that looked promising. Since it seemed pretty iffy for the car, I hopped out and went down to the waterline. Sure enough, there were a pair of boats at the beach with the dive shop's name on them. As we were parking the car above, where the road was still marginally passable, a Jeep showed up with Nick, the divemaster in it.

The dives were interesting. The lake has a 20 foot thick layer of warm water at the surface. The water is green and soupy, and visibility is terrible. However, once you descend below the algae, the temperature drops a few degrees and the water becomes clear. It's neat to look up and see green instead of blue and to watch the silhouetted fish eating the algae layer.

The first dive featured some steps that may be Mayan ruins. There are large stones that look like purposely cut blocks, rather than a natural formation. They form one slope of a hill that might be a step pyramid, if more blocks are under them. However, they haven't been investigated by a qualified archaeologist, so for the moment they're officially still a mystery.

There were also areas of sulphur deposits surrounding cracks in the floor of the lake. While swimming by, we could feel warm water rising out of them, and in one case could see the different temperatures of water interacting. It's pretty neat to know that we were diving in the crater of a volcano that's still at least a little active.

The second dive followed the sides of a pair of volcano cinder cones down. We could see huge rocks formed by lava flows and then cracked. The lines of each flow were apparent in the broken cross sections. These cones were used for target practice by helicopter gunships during the civil war, and the divemaster found a corroded bullet casing on the sandy bottom. There's also a story about some thieves who robbed a farm on one side of the lake and managed to sink their boat on the cones while making their getaway. We found a number of old metal coins down there.

It's handy that Bahman has an unlocked phone. We got him a SIM card at a tiny store on the tiny main street of a tiny town on the side of a huge mountain. The woman helping us was very amused by his phone, which kept switching out of the phone app because of one bumped button or other.

Unfortunately, the dive shop that had been recommended to us told us that they could not get someone to do the Lake Ilopango tour on Thursday. So we called another dive shop, the one we'd been trying to reach on Saturday. They said they had a trip going out tomorrow! We told them we'd take it.

Of course, that meant that we had to cut our visit to the mountains a day shorter, so we started heading upward. We drove up to the access road to El Pital, the highest peak in the country, looking for a hiking trail. After a while of navigating increasingly poor roads, we realized that we must be driving on the hiking trail. And that it was probably not a great idea to continue. We found a place where there was enough room to turn around, and headed back down the hill.

We stopped for lunch and a last little bit of sightseeing in La Palma, and then drove towards the village of Concepción Quetzaltepeque, the hammock-making center of El Salvador. The sign pointed us to a suspiciously rough-looking road, but when we asked passers-by, they said that we just had to go recto, recto, recto (straight, a long ways) to get there. After maybe 40 minutes of driving about 5 mph on a gravel road, we came to a turn where we found pavement again.

Sadly, the hammock-making was not in full swing. There were a few stores open and they made token attempts to sell us some hammocks, but they were mostly garish colors or bad materials (cotton/poly blends or just polyester).

Since the Civil Police office was right there, we decided to ask for directions, just in case there was a better route back. The policeman directed us to drive recto, recto, recto along the main street and assured us it was paved all the way. Sure enough, we drove back in about 10 minutes to a turnoff from the CA-3 that we'd passed by earlier. It was labeled for some other town beyond Concepción Quetzaltepeque.

We're spending the night in Suchitoto, and planning to drive down to the Lake to meet the divemaster in the morning. We went for an upmarket hotel ($50/night instead of $25), and we're the only people here. It has a warm pool and a great view of Lake Suchitlán.

We swung by a dive shop this morning to try to arrange a lake dive this week. They usually only do them on Saturdays, so it may not happen, but the shop will see about it. The remarkable thing about this is that it was our first driving trip of any significant distance in San Salvador in which we made no wrong turns.

We rearranged our itinerary slightly to make diving later in the week easier. We planned to spent tonight in Suchitoto, and head up to La Palma later in the week, but we've reversed those in order to be closer to the capital (and the lake dive) later.

La Palma is a pretty town in the mountains. It's very close to the highest peak in El Salvador, and almost at the border with Honduras. The town is famous for art, and many of the buildings and lampposts are covered with murals.