A Parking Lot With a View
Another winding and pothole-riddled drive ferried into the local tourist destination of El Cuco.We pulled into our campsite parking lot at Rancho y Marsicadas Mama Juany just in time to enjoy a red and gold sunset from the restaurant’s beachfront seating area. A few fishing pangas were just coming in and we relaxed our senses over a cold beer, watching the fishermen haul their boats up the shore.
We awoke the next day to a beach full of El Salvadorean tourists frolicking in the sand. One of the interesting things that we’ve noticed on this voyage is a tendency among Central American beachgoers to eschew both towels and bathing suits. Commonplace yet confusing, we’ve grown accustomed to seeing families roll about directly on the sand and wash off in the waves….in jeans and shirts. Granted, we’ve also witnessed a respectable contingent of shorts and bikini aficcionados, but the long pants and shirts costume remains quite prevalent.
Surf’s Up
El Cuco’s long and sandy beach is a popular destination for el Salvadoreans and its surf breaks bring in droves of surfers from abroad. A quick walk up the beach from our campsite brought us to Playa las Flores, the area’s premier surf break. The main break is a short, but well-formed right point break. The rest of the beach is well-endowed with a fun beach break, which offers welcome respite when the point is crowded with pros. Or when a competition is underway, as was the case our second day there.
The town of el Cuco doesn’t offer much beyond the beach, so we spent a solid three days thrashing ourselves in the waves. By the end, I felt like I was starting to get the hang of that break. Granted, after two years of surfing, 10-year-olds still offer us stiff competition for the waves, but after all our practice, we were finally beating some of them in the lineup.
The Concerned Tourist
Hey! Hey!
The man waved at us from across the street like we were the last cab on New Year’s Eve.
How do you get out of here!?
Thick beads of sweat formed where his Panama hat met his forehead and genuine desperation brimmed from his eyes. A bus idled across the street, its windshield painted with “La Union”, the name of the next town over. Jordan and I exchanged glances, unsure of how best to address the man’s question.
The bus is charging too much! He volunteered as an explanation. How did you guys get here?!
Well, we drove. We’re doing this trip…
I thought this was a touristy place! People told me that this was a touristy place! We’re the only ones here!
This statement was patently wrong. Tourists surrounded us. The beach was littered with them. They streamed into and out of shops. We knew what he meant, though, as much as we hated admitting it to ourselves.
We were the only white tourists present.
We couldn’t really help him, so we left him with a muttered “good luck”. Poor white guy…adrift in a vast and colorful world.
It’s a Small World After All
I recognize that face…
Two pale bodies sat in stark defiance of the Concerned Tourist’s earlier observation. I couldn’t immediately put names to their faces until two blond children streaked past us, shrieking complaints in French. There ordering dinner at Mama Juany’s sat Yann and Natascha, our neighbors for a single night, months ago at a campsite in Puebla, Mexico.
We toasted to another happy meeting of neighbors in our amorphic City on Wheels as the sun burned in another deep red setting. Alex, another freshly-met overlander sharing our campsite joined us and we spent the evening opening beers, sharing stories and burning our tongues on blistering 35-cent pupusas.
Traffic Jam
We knew that the following day would prove long but that should have been on account of border officials, rather than cows. Because we are slow learners, we followed Google down a dirty and fractured earthen gash through the jungle, rather than returning to the highway the way we had come. The mistake was obvious early on, but Yann and Natascha’s camper stood no chance of turning around on the seasonal river that Google deemed a road and there is strength in numbers, so we pushed slowly on.
Contrary to what you might expect, we hit traffic.
A herd of cows with nowhere to turn kept our convoy inching exasperatedly forward over the course of an hour. Two hours into a 50 minute drive, we passed La Union on our way to the border. We briefly wondered where the Concerned Tourist had escaped to and how.