If you want leisure, then head for the national parks. But if you like to see real life, spend some time on the road
‘If you want leisure, then head for the
national parks. But if you like to see
real life, spend some time on the road’
Because everyone works along or just off this road, the
soft-shoulders and verges were throbbing with men carrying machetes and coffee
beans, fruit stalls, coconut vendors, school kids, bicycles and tuk-tuks,
pickups and even the odd donkey. I saw some men selling live iguanas,
illegally, holding the panic-stricken lizards by their tails.
I had a private guide in El Salvador, and a chance to see a bit
more of the country. We spent a night at El Imposible, a national park named
for its terrifying chasm, down which passing pack animals and muleteers would
frequently fall to their certain death. I went birding at dusk and dawn and saw
a mottled owl and a rare white hawk, before rejoining the highway to the
capital. San Salvador was a sprawl of a city, visibly Americanised in its
layout, fast-food outlets and strip malls. I saw the huge mural in front of the
main gallery, known as the Monument
to the Revolution, commemorating the 1948 uprising that toppled
President Salvador Castaneda Castro. With the Quetzaltepec volcano looming
above, it was a dramatic enough setting – but I don’t go to Latin America for
Burger Kings.
Suchitoto was far more my size of city. It has plenty of
colonial buildings, and the plaza was a busy social spot with a funfair by day procession
was moving and there were moments of real beauty, with folksong, a children’s
choir, and some uncompromising words from a local priest.
Honduras & Nicaragua
Honduras has only a short section of the Panamericana. While it
is largely uneventful, I did catch a mellow, shrimpcoloured sunset over the
Gulf of Fonseca – a stretch of water that provides Honduras
with a port on the Pacific.
The land seemed to open out wondrously in Nicaragua. Here the
volcanoes were far away and huge tracts of dead-flat farmland flanked the roadside. Tobacco, banana, sorghum
and pineapple were planted
everywhere; people dried coffee beans out on the pavement or
even the road – traffic is
rarely heavy off the main highway.
On Ometepe, an island in Lake Nicaragua, I got to taste the
spoils – and it was the and fireworks at night. After a few beers, I watched as
local men ran around wearing horse-shaped frames that were adorned with rockets
and Catherine wheels. They chased girls and kids and basically ‘shot’ them with
small explosives. It was hilarious – in
a ‘this-could-go-horribly-wrong’ sort of way.
With my guide, we re-joined the Panamericana for the five-hour
ride to Perquín, the operational base of many of the guerrillas who fought in
the Civil War of 1979-1992. All Central America’s countries have seen strife of
one kind or another, but El Salvador lost as many as 80,000 people in its proxy
war. The village of El Mozote, in the
north-eastern highlands of the country, was the site of the
worst single massacre of the civil war. Some 1,000 civilians were killed, and
only 450 or so have been accounted for; many of the slain were children. I
happened to be in town for the interment of some recently discovered remains.
Share This:
Softtravel Tourism
I'm Softtravel Tourism. A full time web designer. I enjoy to make modern template. I love create blogger template and write about web design, blogger. Now I'm working with Themeforest. if you want this templates contact me in gmail:softtraveltourism@gmail.com.
No Comment to " If you want leisure, then head for the national parks. But if you like to see real life, spend some time on the road "