Entries from June 1, 2008 - July 1, 2008
More Juayua photos, care of Jeff Gu
The dog is Eddie, as in Vedder
Freda Moon
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Frolaz and the Volcano
Santa Ana, El Salvador
For the first time in two weeks, we left the house and our computer screens -- for an entire day.
Since arriving here, in El Salvador's second largest city, we've been slaves to our trade. We rented a room at Casa Frolaz, a large, cushy home with internet access, just outside Santa Ana's steamy city center. It has a backyard with a green lawn, yellow and purple flowers and banana trees. Our money is running low, so we've hunkered down to write and send story pitches, listen to NPR online for entertainment and cook for ourselves. For two weeks and $10 a day, it's a change of pace from our adventures in Mexico, but hardly a bad life.
Frolaz's owner, Javier, is like the Ms. Dinsmoor (Ann Bancroft in the '98 version Great Expectations) of Central America -- a wealthy, eccentric, Salvadoran alcoholic, who spends his days doing research into family history and chain-smoking four packs of cigarettes a day. His family, one of the oldest in the country, owns a coffee farm outside the city, where there's a large abandoned hacienda filled with bats and FMLN graffiti on 
the walls. Javier's never had a job beyond his ever shifting hobbies. He's never been married or had children, and when I ask him why, he says, "I don't want problems."
We came to Frolaz on the recommendation of Andrew and Emma, the Australian couple we met in Tacuba our first night in El Salvador. They loved Javier, because he spreads the beer and filet mignon around, and runs a hostal for the company
not the money. I don't know what Javier's saying half of the time (he speaks in a low, shy, mumble), so I don't know why he runs the hostal. But I too appreciate the well-stocked refrigerator of cerveza Regia.
So, we left Frolaz today, to treat our cabin fever with some time away from our computer screens. There's a national park nearby, Cerro Verde, with one of the country's few remaining cloud forests and the still-smoking Volcan Izalco. Tim wanted to climb it. So we left early, got lost on the drive, and barely made it to the park in time for the 11am departure of the mandatory guided tours. There've been attacks on tourists at the park -- armed robberies on the volcanoes slopes. So hikers are required to go with a guide and two police escorts, a prospect almost as intimidating as the robbers themselves.
The hike was brutal. Four hours of non-stop climbing. Down hundreds of stairs through Cerro Verde's forest and back up the steep, crumbling side of Volcan Izalco, then down and back up Cerro Verde again. Two volcanoes in one, with two small bottles of water in the mid-day heat of the tropics.
Next time we leave the house, we're going swimming.
Goodbye to Mexico
Antigua, Guatemala
From journal, June 3rd
On Friday, market day at the Mexico-Guatemala border town of La Mesilla, we ended our affair with Mexico. Now, I'm sitting on a rooftop in Antigua as rain pours torrents on the corrogated canopy overhead.
I hear there's a tropical storm passing through, but it feels like more of the same: rain in the rainy season.
In the rush and madness of leaving Mexico, I failed to see our border crossing as the rite of passage it was. After three months and 5,000 miles, I'd begun to take Mexico -- in all its particularities -- for granted. I didn't notice how much it had come to feel natural to me. I definitely didn't anticipate culture shock when we left, but culture shock there has been. So, I'm grappling with the lack of spice in the food, the absence of music on the streets and the dead dogs everywhere on the roads. I'm missing Mexico, and only reluctantly liking Guatemala. Maybe it's because we don't really have a home right now, but the ebbs and flows of Mexico felt familiiar and warm. And Guatemala can't help but feel luke warm in comparison.
It's nothing personal. It's a rebound relationship, afterall.
More...in the mountains of El Salvador
Hotsprings are awesome.
So are dogs.
