El Salvador

25 January 2008
El Salvador / Guatemala Border, El Salvador
                The bus pulled over, and an immigration man got on the bus, and asked for everyone’s papers.  We didn’t get our passports stamped.  The bus ended up stopping on the other side of the border for about 15 minutes while another immigration person with gloves on went through everyone’s luggage.  Since our luggage was all locked up, it wasn’t gone through. 
                There was another hour and a half on the bus until reaching San Salvador.  The plan right now was to stay here a night, then go to a city on the eastern border close to Honduras for an evening.  We reached the bus station around 5:30 in the evening.   Since the city wasn’t set up for us to take a bus directly to the area we wanted to spend the night in, we talked a taxi driver into taking us to our hotel for $4. 
                Hotel Florida was clean, and very accommodating.  We took showers, and settled on a restaurant around the corner for dinner.  Before dinner we went looking for something a little farther away.  After walking 2 blocks all we could see on this main street was 2 Burger Kings, Pizza Hut, and a KFC.  The restaurant we ate at was nice, and quaint.  We ordered two beers, and 4 pupusas.

26 January 2008
San Salvador, El Salvador
                After getting ready we talked to the gentleman at the front desk about getting to the bus station that could get us to San Miguel.  He said if we weren’t going to take a taxi we had to walk to a main street about a mile plus away.  We decided to be adventurous and took off with our packs into San Salvador.  As we walked through the town we continued to be surprised by El Salvador.
                El Salvador promised to be probably one of the most dangerous of all of our destinations for this trip.  Our guide book kept mentioning how likely we were to be pick pocketed during the day and definitely mugged at night.  It also promised to have citizens that had more guns than in Iraq or Afghanistan.  Everyone we talked to about El Salvador said they traveled all around Central America, but never to El Salvador.  As we traveled through the country and through the city of San Salvador we saw nothing to support any of the negative comments.  The roads were in the best condition of any of the countries we’ve been too.  The people were all very helpful (and un-armed).  American corporations have poured into the city.  We saw nearly every fast food place imaginable along with other U.S. based stores like Payless Shoes.  As we walked through San Salvador it literally felt like walking through parts of LA (and no, not South Central). 
                We finally got down the main street where we caught our bus to the bus station.  Total cost of that bus was $0.50 for both of us.  As we walked into the bus station we were quickly directed to a bus leaving for San Miguel.
                On the bus we still didn’t have a clear idea of where exactly we wanted to end up for the night.  As much as we really enjoyed El Salvador, our guide book just didn’t layout anything to go see or do, so reluctantly we decided to push into Honduras. 
                Our bus arrived in San Miguel and a nice gentleman with one arm told us (in English) where to go for a bus to Eastern border.  As we went to where we were directed, another gentleman said his bus was going most of the way to a place called Santa Rosa.  We hopped on and paid $1.20 each.  Once in Santa Rosa a bus for the last leg to the border was waiting.  On board the final bus for El Salvador we paid $0.90 each.
                At the border a couple of people said it would be absolutely necessary to take a little “rickshaw” (bicycle cab) to border that was 2km away.  With our book saying otherwise and seeing all the locals bypass the rickshaws, we decided to walk.  Around the bend, there was the border.  As we walked up we were a little nervous because we were not stamped coming into El Salvador.  The official that looked at our passport seemed more interested in all our other stamps.  They passed the passports off to the immigration officials from Honduras (who were in a nice air conditioned room while the El Salvador officials were standing outside).  They handed back our passports (once again, with no stamps), asked us to each pay the $3 for the tourist fee, and we were on our way into Honduras. 

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