El Tunco, El Salvador

Surfing, swimming, sweating profusely, muchas pupusas and the first of many chicken bus trips.

We've left behind Guatemala and travelled southeast to our next country, El Salvador. El Tunco is a small beach/surf town - if you can even call it that! Two or three streets are all there is to this place, lined with a mix of surf shops, restaurants and hostels. Supposedly on the weekend it's a crazy party town but we were visiting midweek so it was hard to imagine this, as it almost resembled a ghost town whilst we were there.

Back at sea level and edging closer to the equator, temperatures and sweat levels have substantially increased to the point of a minimum of 4-5 swims and/or cold showers a day. Lows of about 24-25 degrees and highs of 30+. Lucky we have a beach almost on our doorstep and hot water doesn't exist in the accommodation here.

El Tunco is known for its surfing, so we thought we'd give it a crack and hired a couple of boards to share on our first day. Our collective surfing history was somewhat limited so we were all really just freestyling on this one. Mike and Rich managed to get out there alright and get up on their first wave together as Cat and I looked on from the beach. This particular stretch of beach (El Sunzal) requires paddling quite far out, possibly about 100m-200m or so. It became apparent we'd left it too late in the day though to head out, particularly by the time Cat and I tried as the currents and waves just prevented us from even straying far from the beach itself, let alone to reach any decent waves to try to surf on. El Tunco is a black sand beach with stones too, which makes it not overly enjoyable for swimming or for walking - especially when the tide is high. We returned late afternoon to much different surf, and the boys managed to get a few good waves. Meanwhile Cat and I got thrashed in the waves near the beach and I almost got taken out to sea in a strong rip whilst getting dumped with suddenly huge waves!

Sunsets are something El Tunco does well. Due to the fact that the beach is south-facing, you can actually see both sunrise and sunset here. Scores of people flock to the beach front with beers in hand to watch the sun go down each evening, others out catching the last waves of the day with the sky a mix of orange and pink as a backdrop. Stunning.

The following morning we vowed to get up early (6:30am) considering this is the best time for surfing and we were thankfully rewarded with this truth! Mike sat out due to a reinjured chest/rib but Rich had some good runs and us girls gave it a shot, with not much success. Cat managed to catch a wave the whole way in, just not standing up! And the only time I managed to get up was when Rich gave me a push onto the wave to get the momentum going. Back to the drawing board to find some strength in the arms to get on the waves on our own.

New country means new local food and for El Salvador that means pupusas. Pupusas are essentially fried thick tortillas - almost like a thick pancake - with various fillings, usually combined with cheese. Chicken and cheese, beans and cheese and revolutas are the usual suspects, the latter of which is actually quite tasty despite what the name implies - consisting of pork, beans and cheese. We went through a fair few pupusas in our time in El Tunco, usually served with a tomato salsa and a coleslaw of sorts, they're a cheap meal when you only need 2-3 and they set you back a modest 50-75cents US each. I think we will be having a lot more of these over the next few days!

Pupusas aside, eating in El Tunco is expensive so we caught our first "chicken bus" into the nearby town that is La Libertad to buy some groceries. Chicken buses are also common in Guatemala, local buses that are actually old American school buses usually with a colourful paint job - so called because people can take anything and everything on there with them, including live chickens. Our bus rides so far haven't been quite so eventful, but they work on express pick ups and drop offs from anywhere along the road. There's always a couple of guys on each bus who collect the money, whistle at the driver when people want to get off and help people with their things at lightening speed but the bus is still already driving off when you've only got one foot inside. Payment is a combination of honesty based and a memory test for the guys working on the bus as they usually take payment every few pickups as opposed to when each person gets on. Somehow the chaos of it all works.

La Libertad is a pretty grungy little place that didn't require a visit for anything other than cheaper groceries and to attempt more ATM withdrawals. Mike and I have been battling to get any $US out since we arrived in El Salvador, even after trying multiple ATMs. Still unsure if this is due to the ATMs not agreeing with our travel card that usually doesn't have any problems, or if they just have no cash in them. Thankfully Cat and Rich withdrew a decent amount of cash before we left Guatemala which has been enough to bankroll the four of us so far, but cash funds are definitely getting low between us so hopefully our next stop will provide the goods.

With the confidence of catching a few chicken buses up our sleeve, we thought we'd try another direction from El Tunco - inland to the Tamanique waterfalls. You can do this as a tour from El Tunco but we thought we'd give it a go semi-independently to save some cash. We made it to the Taminique town with no problems but still without having found a local "guide" to show us where the waterfalls actually were. 10 steps in the direction of the waterfalls though and local guy sitting outside his casa asked if we needed someone to show us the way. We agreed but had to haggle his price from $5USD a person down to $3 a person - still steep compared to other blogs we'd read but still cheap really and we couldn't have done it without him. The path was not signposted in any form, you wouldn't have even known there was a waterfall there unless you'd done prior research as we had.

Twenty minutes of downhill walking later, on terrain that would have benefited the use of our walking sticks from Acatenango and sneakers as opposed to the trusty jandals, we arrived at the waterfall. It wasn't so much a waterfall - more comprising of a few different swimming holes - but it gave us a spot to do some jumps and cool off for a while. The local guys there clambered all over the rocks for various outrageous jumps and provided some good entertainment in between our own jumps. I think there was a bigger waterfall we could have visited as well afterwards but we were all spent and didn't want to get back to El Tunco too late so we gave it a miss. Our guide Antonio was absolutely dripping with sweat on our walk back, this time via a cemetery. We weren't really sure why he took us through there, nor did we feel overly comfortable about it but we made it back to the town in one piece.

The El Salvadorian people so far are already noticeably different to the Guatemalans. They're much less friendly and open, but perhaps they are more guarded here due to higher causes. The murder rate in El Salvador is one of the highest in the world. Just a week ago they had the first day with no murders recorded since January 2015. So I suppose perhaps it's not unreasonable to not be so friendly, but perhaps it's just down to this area too - so I shall keep an open mind for other areas of El Salvador! The locals also just wear regular clothes as opposed to traditional dress and the women seem to wear quite a lot of makeup which is something we haven't seen for a while. El Salvador is quite dirty, there is a lot of rubbish around and it's not unusual to see people chucking rubbish out the window of the buses. It's pretty sad really, it's obviously not something they care about. On top of all that, everyone speaks much faster Spanish and potentially with a different accent too because just when we thought we were making progress, we're back to feeling like we can't understand anything again!

We're backtracking a bit from El Tunco now, heading northwest to Juayúa via long distance chicken bus, complete with terrible music which is heavy on the bass at 6am and videos to match. Mike had a rogue near-vomiting episode this morning too so let's hope there isn't the real deal whilst in transit!Read more