Wednesday, January 18, 2006

It was only twenty minutes to the border in a minibus. The trip across the border went smoothly. Stamp out of Honduras, stamp into El Salvador (for a $10 fee) and off we went. El Salvador, the smallest country in Central America, took up an entire page of my passport with its 90-day tourist card sticker. I would be annoyed, but one of my most cherished dreams is to need to go to an embassy and get extra pages put into my passport. So thanks, El Salvador. I like you already.

We had to look for an ongoing bus. In other words, no young men ran panting up to us shouting, “La Palma? San Salvador? Santa Ana?” But we found the bus area, and our bus, on our own and after sitting there for half an hour, we started the trip. Winding roads, of course.

The first thing I saw as we moved away from the border area was a field strewn with plastic bags. There was some other trash as well, but it was inconsequential. The plastic bags, drifting through the air, caught ragged and flapping from fences and tree branches were easily the star of the show. Bright new bags, faded old bags. Stripes, solids. All crackling and streaming in the wind. The intrusion of the bags only highlighted the beauty of the landscape behind them, the rough-cut green hills and moutains rising all around us. It was ugliness causing beauty, like a sunset in a smoggy sky.

The second thing I saw was a dead dog being eaten by carrion birds. Two or three of them were gathered around the body, which was still perfectly intact. One pulled with its beak at the dog’s head; I saw the skin tent away from the skull without tearing. The rest hung back, perched on the fence alongside the road, waiting. I had never seen such a thing before and it made me feel ill.

The Lonely Planet – I am going to throw that thing out the window – said that although La Palma is only twelve km from the border, it’s a fifty-minute ride. That was either a typo or the roads were much worse two years ago, because it was no more than fifteen minutes to La Palma. The ride cost fifty cents each. Did I mention El Salvador uses U.S. dollars? This is so weird to me. Quarters and dimes in Central America. The quarters seem bizarrely tiny to me.

La Palma so far is very, very chill. Not one person tried to steer us to their hotel, or sell us a tour, even though we’re very close by the highest peak in the country. It’s also the epicenter of Llort paintings, but no one seems to care if we buy any or not. So we floundered around and eventually found our hotel.

This hotel, Hotel Paseo El Pital, is the coolest ever. Our room is literally bigger than our apartment at home and contains more furniture than our last four hotel rooms combined, including a mini-fridge and a TV with cable. I’ll save time by letting you view the photos for the rest. But there’s just something about this room that appeals to me. It could be the fact that I’m sitting on a couch… a real couch. We haven’t sat on a couch since we left the U.S. As a budget traveler, you just get used to sitting up on the bed and hoping the wall is clean enough to lean against.

There’s just something about this room. Maybe it’s because it’s so much like a little apartment that it makes me feel at home? It’s certainly not luxurious, though I think it may have been, thirty years ago. Now it has a kind of faded feeling to it, with sweet little 70’s touches like the orange hanging lamp and the vertical blinds with the missing slats.

The hotel also boasts a pool, but I hardly see myself diving into that murky green water, especially since it’s pretty chilly outside. Still, ooh la la, a pool. The drawback is the price: $10 per person per night. Yikes. We’re just going to have to watch the hell out of that TV while we have the chance and, like, sleep on all the beds.

We were so enamored with our room that we got food to go so we could eat it on our own little dining table and chairs. Michael got pupusas. I was bewitched by a Maruchan Instant Lunch, which the pupusa lady was nice enough to fill with hot water for me. We got back to the room just in time to catch the beginning of a black-and-white Rita Hayworth movie called Affair in Trinidad. It made me miss my grandfather because I started thinking he probably saw it in the theater, way back in the day.

I am really looking forward to going out tomorrow. Nobody stares at me here. I’m looking forward to not getting stared at.

HOURS IN A MINIBUS: 6.30

HOURS ON THE BUS: 129.75

 

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La Palma's two major streets.

Room.

Room from another angle. (This one taken by me.)

Room from yet another angle. What? We really liked the room.

Our own front porch.

Path down to the room, mountains in the background.

Murky swimming pool.