Santa Ana

El Salvador's second city, Santa Ana is as quiet as a second city comes. It still has many dirt roads and the market is like something out of the Congo. But on a recommendation I settled into Casa Frolaz. It's a private house turned into 3 roomed hostel and the owner - Javier, is a famous Salvadorenan artist not to mention cook, historian, story teller and general all around nice guy.

In fact most evenings we just ended up in Javier's lovely back garden, drinking beer and discussing everything from Obama to the state of El Salvador's football team to the world economy to the price of property and gang warfare in San Salvador. The only thing to spoil the fun were Javier's mammoth (and I mean mammoth) Avocados that would fall intermittently from the tree above our heads.


Killer Avocado.

On the last day I took a bus up past the lovely Lake Coatepeque to Cerro Verde. At 11am they run a tour up either Volcano Santa Ana (the highest mountain in El Salvador), which is a leisurely 1 hour stroll or up Volcano Itzalco, a 4 hour clamber up one of the world's newest volcanoes. 250 years ago Itzalco did not even exist. Then it just shot up in the geological equivalent of teenage growing pains, grumbling, scaring people and spouting lava everywhere.

It was my lucky day and it was to be Itzalco. There had been some robberies on the volcanoes a couple of years back, so myself and an American couple had 2 policemen and a guide to accompany us. Struck me as odd though why bandidos would choose people hiking on a volcano to rob. Surely people don't carry the crown jewels and a 1000 dollars in cash whilst climbing? Whatever.

We started off, rather depressingly, descending 900 steps through a rainforest only to come out and stare up agog at this picture perfect gray volcano monster. We made the top slowly, where a mixture of clouds and fumeroles covered us in cold and hot steam. We surfed the way back down, followed all the time by 2 vultures who had their eyes on the rather chubby, looking like she was going to collapse American girl. Then it was the 900 steps back up again, where I lost the couple and hung on to the lead policeman who was as fit as a ferret at 37 years of age. We made it back up ridiculously quickly, and I found out the reason why. At 2pm on the dot the heaven's broke. But I was already tucked away in the comedor having some pupusas and drinking coffee. The couple arrived half an hour later, not looking too happy.

Photos