It doesn’t have the best reputation does it, El Salvador? Travel in El Salvador conjures up stories of civil war, drugs gangs, high crime levels. Not a place you’d think to buy a cheesy fridge magnet. We could skip El Salvador, go through Honduras and by-pass it completely. But we’ve spoken to enough travellers who’ve spent time here to hear that these days, it’s not what you might think… it’s not that bad. El Salvador these days, they say, suffers from a poorly funded PR Department. Use a bit of common sense, avoid the inner-city deprived areas and El Salvador is an undiscovered gem. Okay…. we’ll check it out.

Arrival El Salvador

We entered El Salvador for the first time in a bit of a hurry. We’d just left Costa Rica, rushed through a troubled Nicaragua on a ‘truce day’ and spent just one day in Honduras (see last blog). Once in El Salvador it took us just a few hours to reach the airport, find safe parking for Cuthbert and book flights for the next morning. Less than 24 hours after arriving in the country, we were winging our way to UK for some long overdue time with our families. Skipping forward three weeks… we’re back, refreshed and ready to explore the (allegedly) dangerous, crime-ridden, mosquito infested hole of El Salvador. Oh… and the tropical rainy season is just getting into full-swing. Nice!

Out and About Travel in El Salvador

So… assuming you’re not out for a crime-fest or bit of drug-gang culture, what else is there to do in El Salvador? We first headed to the coast: a nice little beach camp to help us get over the jet-lag. Here we can also work out how to fit our newly acquired quantities of Marmite, Yorkshire Tea, Branston Pickle and Paxo stuffing into our limited Cuthbert space! El Salvador has some lovely black, volcanic sand beaches but it’s damn hot and humid (not to mention overcast) down there at this time of year! So after a few days we head into the hills and some cooler ground.

La Ruta de las Flores (The Route of Flowers) is a string of lovely mountain villages/towns each with its own character and quaint, cobbled streets. There’s yummy regional food and the pupusas (corn-pancakes stuffed with cheese, meat, beans, whatever…) are delicious. The scenery is stunning with volcanos around every bend, but in the prevailing overcast, rainy season we are only occasionally lucky to see the crater-tops.

Along the route, we reckon there must be a lot going on in subterranean El Salvador. Not only did we see venting volcanos and emerald green crater-lakes, but also thermal springs of bubbling mud and steam-vents gushing out of the ground. There is also a substantial river flowing with hot water over a pretty waterfall. This could be an attractive place to bathe, but it really wasn’t crystal-clear water. As with many developing countries, El Salvador sadly hasn’t yet quite got the hang of the anti-pollution measures employed in some other parts of the world.

There are several archaeological sites of pre-conquest civilisations such as the Mayan and Pipil people. The ‘village’ of Joya de Cerén is one of the most curious, having been buried for centuries in ash from a volcanic eruption around AD 600.

A bit more up to date, we visited a military museum which, in addition to the obvious old aircraft, guns and memorabilia, hosted such random objects as the Pope-mobile actually used by His Holiness on a visit to the country in 1983 and scale model of the whole country. We really loved this fascinating diorama of El Salvador, showing all the terrain and volcanos. It’s an inspirational idea to educate (not just) children about the geography and geology of the country in a visual, hands-on, 3-D manner. We stood there for ages tracking our route around the country so far and the volcano hikes that we had done.

Home on Ilamatepec

Talking about volcano hikes… we decided to conquer the rim of the highest volcano in the country: Volcan Ilamatepec (that’s Volcan Santa Ana for the non-indigenous amongst us). It’s not the toughest hike in the world, but hard enough if you don’t do that kind of thing every day. It’s compulsory to join a group with a guide (and an armed police officer goes along too, just in case… you know!) and it’s no exaggeration to say that we were in the upper-end of the participating age range. Some of those kids raced-up the mountain like whippets up a drain-pipe and Marcus did a fine job of keeping up with them. I trailed towards the back of the group, but it was surprising how many of the millennial youngsters couldn’t even keep up with me (kids today, huh 😊!!).

As we set off on the hike, we heard a little bell ringing on the path behind us. As we looked around, a local chap came hurtling past us all, carrying a large cool-box on his shoulder. He raced off into the distance and we thought no more about him until we reached the crater rim. There he sat with his cool box, safe in the knowledge that we would all pay generously for a nice cooling choc-ice after a hot, steep climb. Bless that man and his entrepreneurial spirit. He had a far lighter load to run down with!

The views down into the venting crater were spectacular; we could have sat and gazed all day. But not 5 minutes after scoffing the ice-creams, the heavens opened. I mean really opened. The guide shouted for us all to descend quickly; an exposed hilltop isn’t the safest place to linger in an electrical storm. We took a few seconds to don our Gortex then hot-footed it back down the volcano. The thunder cracked around us and the rocks that we had clambered over to ascend were now predictably much more slippery.

The surprising thing was how quickly the paths between the boulders turned into torrential and very fast flowing streams. It became a risky exercise of river-running down a steep, rocky slip-face. At times, the rain fell so heavily across our faces that we could hardly see the ground (or water!) below us; all we could do was follow the colourful blur of the person’s jacket ahead. Not surprisingly, our descent was considerably quicker than the climb.

At the end of the day, our marvellous Cuthbert served us yet again in wonderful style! Whilst all the other tired, sore and dripping-wet hikers climbed uncomfortably into their cars for the drive to hostels down in the valley, we were already at home. Kettle on, then a nice hot shower and clean, dry clothes. Bliss. We love you Cuthbert. Home is where we park it 😊.

So far, travel in El Salvador is proving itself to be a proper little gem! A diamond-in-the-rough maybe, but nevertheless, a real little gem. And there’s more to come…

El Salvador Photo Gallery