Sunday, January 22, 2006

It’s supposed to take an hour and a half to climb to El Pital, the highest point in El Salvador. It took us three days. Laziness struck us hard in La Palma, partly because of the chilled-out, completely non-rushed feeling of the town, but mainly because of the cool room that we hated to leave.

The trip to El Pital, 2730 meters high, involves a short bus ride to San Ignacio and then a longer ride to Rio Chiquito, where the trail starts and then the hike.

On Friday we woke up and simply decided to do the hike the next day. No rush. But we made a real plan and set the alarm for 8:00 before going to bed. On Saturday, we got up at 10:00 and by the time we had eaten, it was after noon and the next bus wasn’t leaving until 1:00.

Sitting on a non-moving bus in San Ignacio at almost 3:00 p.m., we decided it wouldn’t be a good idea to attempt such a hike that late in the afternoon, so we got off the bus and went back to La Palma. But we were determined to do it right the next time.

Again we set the alarm for 8:00, but this time we got up at 8:45 and had finished breakfast in time to catch a bus at 10:30. The bus from San Ignacio took almost an hour to get to Rio Chiquito, and we started our hike just before noon. At the beginning of the walk, we bought a couple of pieces of fruit from a young girl, grenadinas, aka snotfruit. Blech. Michael liked his, though. He chewed and swallowed his whole, while I tried (unsucessfully) to separate the seeds from the clingy, viscous gray mass around them, so maybe that's where I went wrong.

This was not a tough or technical hike, but the rutted dirt road was so steep that we had to stop to rest an embarrassing number of times. The views were nice, but I was not expecting to share the road with so many cars. The road is not just a hiking trail, but an actual road. There was not a steady stream of cars, but enough to be a bit annoying. Some of the cars were fancy, expensive Land Rover types with tinted windows rolled all the way up, and some were dented pickups with twenty people riding in the back. All kicked up a tremendous amount of dust.

The price for entry to the very top has gone up to $2 per person. It was nothing like we imagined. We both sort of vaguely pictured some pristine mountaintop, rugged and deserted, where we could sit and gaze down on a vista of farmland and lesser peaks, and contemplate sitting at the very top of El Salvador.

What we found was a big parking lot holding all the fancy cars that had passed us, a camping field full of vacationing Salvadoran families, shouting and playing games and dismantling tents, and a pupuseria. But that was cool too. I mean, you take what traveling gives you.

We sat on a cute little wooden bench/table that someone had built into the side of the hill leading down into the camping area and watched kids run up the hill and roll back down again. After a while the clouds blew in. Not way up above us, but right among us, so that we were actually inside the cloud which was very awesome, though really cold. We didn’t have time to check out what the LP calls a “nerve-wracking log bridge” leading to Piedra Rajada, which is some kind of large rock, and which may have been that rugged deserted lookout. Too bad we didn’t get up earlier. But we had a good day anyway.

Now that we’ve finally summited El Pital, we need to get moving. This $20 USD per night room is adding up and there’s so much to see elsewhere. We plan to go to Suchitoto next.

 

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Salvadoran girl, La Palma.

Grenadina bought on the trail to El Pital.

View from the trail.

One of many cars returning from the summit.

El Pital, the top of El Salvador.

Me walking down the trail/road from El Pital.

We were waiting for the bus back from Rio Chiquito when a horse walked by.