Day 21: Bus from Flores, Guatemala to San Salvador, El Salvador

Bought a ticket yesterday for today’s long bus ride at the same tour agency that we got our Tikal transportation from. We paid $30 each and made sure to ask (three times) that it would be a direct bus on a Pullman (the big “Greyhound” type, not the reconditioned old school bus, aka “Chicken bus”). However, like most things, the 9 hour “direct” bus turned into a 12 hour stop-every-quarter-mile-or-so-to-pick-up-more-passengers-than- there-are-seats ride.

We were pretty pissed, not so much because of the stopping and packed conditions but that we had paid extra to get to San Salvador in time to work out our ticket to Managua.

It was a long boring ride and crossing borders was no issue. We didn’t even have to get off the bus! When we arrived in San Salvador, we were hit with some major culture shock. It was like being in Texas. San Salvador is an extremely “westernized” city with Pizza Hut, Burger King, shopping malls, etc on basically every block. Not to mention they use the US dollar as their national currency (they have a currency but it has fallen out of circulation and the dollar is used instead). We ended up eating at a Central American fast-food chain Chinese restaurant (China Wok). It was really nice and surprisingly clean inside with meals costing around US$4-5. But our waiter was, let’s say, less than patient with us. We tried our best at ordering in Spanish, which we assumed was pretty much the most straight forward thing one can do. But no—he had about 20 questions for us in the most rapid speech I’ve ever heard, in any language. We spanglished for him to slow down as we don’t speak spanish well. He seriously laughed and then spoke even faster! How does he do that?! We looked at each other and back at him not having any idea what he wanted. After at least a minute of total silence, he just left and brought us some food. It was actually quite tasty but for some reason, when Chinese food is served in central America, it comes with a dinner roll. Same experience in San Pedro Sula (we know, it’s really weird to be eating Chinese food here but we LOVE Chinese food).

After our tasty meal we headed back to the hostel. We stayed at (Ximenas Guest House), a real dump. The bathroom was awful, the shower was not even worth using (and let me tell you, we have low standards and we desperately needed showers but it was that bad), and the beds, well, I don’t think you can call them beds. They were bunk beds that someone had made from some scrap wood (no big deal). But the “mattress” part was an unsupported 1/8 piece of plywood with a thin (3 inch max) sliver of foam pad on it. Since it was unsupported the whole bed was dipped in the middle (where your butt goes) so it was kind of like sleeping in a really hard hammock. Seriously, had a large German Shepard not already claimed the spot, we would have preferred sleeping on the floor. We were pretty tired from a long travel day and have to be up at the butt crack of dawn tomorrow so we were off to “bed” pretty quick.