The Past Month...Guatemala, El Salvador, & the Frickin Car!

While we were happy to leave Belize, we had little idea what would be in store for us. Shortly after dropping Jason off at the airport in Belize City, Pepe (the van) started running poorly but I assumed that is was bad gasoline. I have always assumed that third world gasoline is very poor quality, and full of water and dirt. After the worst road on the planet (the sixty mile muddy uneven dirt stretch from Belize to Guatemala) I had pretty much decided that this problem wasn´t going to be fuel related. So we pulled into a town called Flores to find a mechanic that could fix the problem. Well, Latin America is very different in it´s automotive services...all you have to do is show up, and nine times out of ten, they just tear into the problem with highly evolved testing equipment. These tests consist of tasting the gas, testing the spark with bare skin, and countless adjusting and listening. After several hours of looking, the mechanics said that we would have to go to Guatemala City for real testing equipment. We got a hotel for the night and in the morning we started the seven hour journey into the city.

So now that the car has made it to Guatemala City we find a mechanic and he prods and probes for at least seven hours and says that he's fixed it and that the problem was dirt. Now I'm not a mechanic, but dirt being the sole reason a car running poorly sounds fishy to me. Nonetheless, the car was running fine so we were happy.

The car is happy, we are happy, and two full days of mechanic service has set us back $70 USD. Finally, we are on the road to El Salvador, where we will spend a couple weeks due to the fact that we won´t be going back through El Salvador on the way up north. On the road we discover that after about five hours of driving that the car isn´t really fixed, and that we are going to need to try again in El Salvador. The search for a mechanic that knows a thing or two about Vanagons in El Salvador is kinda tricky, and after about one week, four shops, and three trips to San Salvador (The Capital of El Salvador) we got the car fixed.

So we had been staying in this little village on the beach called Sunzal, and we were very to just chill for a couple days without having to go and sit at a mechanic shop for eight hours a day. We surfed, read, took a week long Spanish course, and enjoyed ourselves. Also while we were in Sunzal, we celebrated my birthday, and after about two weeks of staying in one spot we had made a few friends...one of them had the same birthday as me. Needless to say, my birthday turned out to be a good party. The next night everyone decided to go into the capital to watch a football match(soccer)...Costa Rica Vs. Honduras. I was hoping for some crazy fans, but that didn´t happen. However, we did get to ride home in the back of a pick up truck for one of those real Latin experiences. After a couple more days at the beach we decided it was time to push on and head up to the mountains for a couple days for some culture, and museums.

In the mountains we visited several places with some good art. There was also a lot of history about the civil war...a very heavy experience. The first town we visited is called Suchitoto, it is a small colonial town with beautiful architecture, and a lot of war history. while we were there, we went on a hike into the mountains to see some old FMLN (Gorilla) camps and where quite a lot of the fighting occurred. The next day we went to Perquin were the civil war museum is. The museum did a great job of portraying how many people were actually affected by the war.