Four Week Tour of five Central America Countries

El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Belize, Nicaragua

Following the trail of the Mayan People

Friday Feb. 7, 2020: Late night arrival on Avianca at San Salvador airport in El Salvador, followed by Boca Olas Villas shuttle ride to some pretty seedy streets to the seaside hotel. Reminiscent of years ago ride from airport to hotel trip in Belém through heavy rain. Late dinner at the Villas, then a short walk down the beach looking for town I found a very 3^rd world village and noisy night club full of locals dancing and drinking beer, myself only the latter. Saturday morning we toured the fish market at Playa El Tunco with a great variety of fish and other sea creatures being traded by locals. Then a van drive to Suchitoto, with a stop at an unremarkable Mayan ruin. Sunday morning we drive through the woods Cinquena at one point arriving at a forest camp where we have a presentation by a gentleman who participated in the Salvadoran Civil War, Oct. 79 to Jan 92 our speaker active on the rebel side, FMLN. With language, accents, and hearing impairments of the writer, not too much learned.

Saw significant herds of dairy cows in a couple places with only sheet metal shacks for facilities. There are basically no milk storage facilities or refrigeration and all milking is done by hand. Dairy farmers make an early morning round selling some fresh milk, but most is dumped into cheese not requiring refrigeration. The terrain is very hilly to mountainous and at this season sun parched jungle. Later rainy season turns it into lush growing jungle. Remnants of small hilly fields of corn scattered about with stalks standing but dead as corn has already been harvested. Soil tilling is all done with a hand hoe by men with no animal horsepower, (horses, mules, buffalo). Beans and corn are planted at the same time. Corn is grown at the end of wet season and is harvested in the dry season. Dead corn stalks are left standing and when the wet returns the beans sprout and the corn stalks serve as bean poles.

Later in the afternoon a cruise around Lake Suchitlan on whose shore the village of Suchitoto is situated. This lake created by hydro dam on Rio Lempa in 1973. First good dinner of the trip at a restaurant suggested by the guide.

Monday Feb.10; Today we drive west to Ataco in our large van – we are about 8 people. Stopping early at the Cihuatán ruin, a post Mayan pre-Spanish (900 AD) city. Proceeding west through volcano and coffee country. In the early twentieth century El Salvador’s main export product was chicle, the chewy stuff for Wrigley’s chewing gum (their main customer). At some point around the early 50s a synthetic product took over and over time El Salvador converted largely to coffee as the main export. Perhaps a similar story for Guatemala. Alfredo, our local guide seems to know the subject matter, but is poor communicator as he continually yells in 3 word blasts, followed by mid-sentence pause, then a blast, it seems a speech impediment of some nature that I have never heard.

Coffee, having taken over from chicle in El Salvador, grows on bushes in the shade of larger trees. The “beans” looking much like cherries. We are given the impression it is largely harvested by free-lancers who spread out in the forest and are simply met at day’s end on the highway where the day’s picking is collected and they are paid plantation agents. Seems rather hap hazard, but the terrain is so rough it prohibits taking any meaningful amount of coffee out by any other route, and no place to turn it into cash anyway. After arrival at out hotel, Mission de Angeles, at Ataco we have an early evening tour of a local coffee processing plant. Variety is the theme. There are many stages of picking the beans, many varieties and even more ways of processing it into different blends of the end product. Quite a large reasonably modern plant with a lot of high value coffee bags around. There was a significant earthquake during the night rocking our small hotel, but no notable destruction.

Next day, Tuesday, we depart for San Salvador, but detour to Cerro Verde National Park (Green Hill). A hike in the park takes us along the rim of a volcano where there is a good view of the ¼ mile wide crater 1000 feet below. Later arriving in San Salvador to join more travelers for the main trip, about 14 total now. Next day Joya de Cerén, a Maya farming village.

In San Salvador a couple times when we had “dinner on your own” our guide was high on taking us to get “pupusas,” a ball of corn meal stuffed with cheese and miscellaneous vegetables, ground meat, beans of your choosing cooked on a griddle – street food - dinner for $1 plus $1 for a beer. Maybe the guide watching out for his own budget? Expecting spicy food with chile sauces like Mexican, I found the food in all five countries quite plain and uninteresting. Also on 8 of 16 days on the core trip, OAT treated us to “dinner on your own.” This appears unusual and a negative of this tour. Better in India or Thailand where there is lots of interesting food.” El Salvador Album (Note photo date setting was wrong in the camera)

Thursday Feb. 13: Overland to Copán Ruins, Honduras crossing the Guatemala border twice along the way. This is a very large ruin occupied for 1000 years by ancient Mayans where we spent much of a day. Two nights here then we drove to Guatemala City on Saturday. Honduras Album

Monday Feb. 17: Drove to and visited the dump school and the safepassages.org. In 1970 Henley Denning visited to practice Spanish and found kids living from the Guatemala City dump. Now 750 children in the school. All focused on making students and parents self-sufficient productive citizens. Currently to scavenge the dump for recyclables etc. one must be 16 years old and purchase an annual license from the city at $15.

After visiting the school, the dump, and Safe Passages facilities we drove west to the highland. Guatemala City is about 5,000 ft., like Denver. We drove across a pass at about 7,200 ft. and downward to Lago de Atitlan at Panajachel. This town, on the lake and surrounded by numerous volcanos, is popular with tourists and also the site of many Ex-Pats. Little wonder as it is truly spectacular scenery and great weather. At Sololá and above are many sites of hand tilled agriculture on steep terraces, growing carrots, onions, potatoes and other vegetables. Unlike the rice and tea terraces in Southeast Asia or Japan these terraces appear to just a loose soil gouge in the hill about 6 feet wide, enough for one row of crop and rebuilt by hand each season. I spent the rest of my time in Guatemala unsuccessfully trying to get convinced that this doesn’t all just wash down the hill when the wet comes?

Wednesday Feb. 19: First went to a nature park in Panajachel and hiked up the canyon to slide down an 8 segment zip line trace. Then began the drive to Antigua. Along the way we passed through a village, in the neighborhood of Cimaltenango or Tejar that seems to be the destination of all the imported used cars, trucks, and school buses from the north. Here they refurbish and sell to the Guatemala market. Most unique are the “chicken busses” that are school bussed rebuilt in very flashy colors, trim, and gaudy decoration. A story goes that someone flags down a new truck of some brand on the highway, pays the driver to give him a couple hours to make a fiberglass mold of the grill and front end, then takes the mold away to make flashy chrome or painted fiberglass replicas to install on the refurbished school busses. These busses are used for general transportation of people and some good on top, between cities and local villages of Guatemala.

Also in this area we visited a family brick works that molds and kiln fires thousands of bricks and roof tile. I confirmed that the tile on my Redondo Beach house are indeed ornamental (rain is kept out by the membrane beneath) and that tile, commonly used south of the border, that do keep out the rain require an additional treatment process to close off the water porosity.

Antigua established in 1543 was the Capital of Spanish Central America - Guatemala to Mexico - including Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua and part of Costa Rica. However in 1773, the town mostly old world masonry architecture was nearly totally destroyed in an earthquake. Capital was moved to Guatemala City in 1776. |In Antigua we stayed in the excellent Casa Santo Domingo Hotel & Museum. The Museum fairly extensive. We ride the Chicken Bus to a neighboring village just to get the experience.

Guatemala City and surrounds are fraught with crime. The narrative is that poor economy and living conditions drove young men to migrate to US from whence they could find employment and send money back home. In the US the extensive drug trade and illegal status of many immigrants migrated to So Cal and elsewhere gangs. Many apprehended and deported back home. Still unemployed and now adept at crime, gangs proliferated back in Guatemala, whose dominant activity is extraction of protection money, reminiscent of the US Mafia in places like New York and Chicago in the first half of the twentieth century. Guatemala Album

Saturday Feb. 22: Flew north to Flores and explored some additional Maya ruins over the next day. Tikal National Park ruins. Then Monday Feb. 24 we proceeded to Belize. I had visited Belize before in May of 1991, 29 years before, on a SCUBA dive trip flying through Belize City to Ambergris Caye. Excellent diving and accommodations around the caye. This time we are entering by road across the western border from with first stop at the Cahal Pech Mayan ruin. Belize City is hot, dry, and poor appearing, while the western rural area seemed lush more well-kept and maybe prosperous. We visited Calker Caye by small boat and went on a tour chumming for nurse shark and snorkeling. Our main OAT trip ended in Belize City with most heading home while I and about five others proceed to the post trip in Nicaragua. Belize Album

Wednesday Feb. 26: Flew to Managua for two nights at the Intercontinental Managua, isn’t that where my boss Howard Hughes vacationed in later life? On the intervening day we toured Managua and by bus to Leon, the sight of numerous encounters of the Sandinista revolution. Friday morning we saw some sights around Managua and set out after lunch for Granada, one of the first Spanish cities in America founded in 1524 – 32 years after Columbus. Granada is on Lake Nicaragua and our boat ride in late afternoon was spectacular with thousands of birds of many species and spider and capuchin monkeys entertaining us from the shoreline trees. I climbed to the top of the old Guadalupe Church bell tower across the street from our Hotel Real La Merced which yields a pretty good perspective from above the city – used by William Walker as a fortress in 1856. William Walker, the subject of a long entwined saga in American history. After failing to colonize California he moved on to Central and South America. Eventually taking over Granada, with a small force partially financed by Cornelius Vanderbilt, and declaring himself President in 1856 of Nicaragua! Granada when he, on the run, ordered it burned. Still on the run, he was executed in Honduras in 1860. There’s even a movie Walker that I watched after returning, but seemed to be largely comedy and probably not a source of much fact. Nicaragua Album

Friday Feb. 28: The DOW down 2000 points this week. Maybe a thing called Corona virus is the Black Swan this time!

Monday Mar. 2: Fly back Managua to Los Angeles, just ahead of the world freezing up of the corona virus – which within a couple weeks struck Central and South America very hard.