El Salvador II: The Beach Life

As the sea swallows the sun at the end of its course, the jagged, towering rocks that jut into the air -- right where the land meets the water -- are thrown to black, their silhouetted forms cutting shapes out of the fading salmon and purple sky behind them, like pieces missing from a grandiose puzzle. Their presence there, on the black sand beach of El Tunco, changes the whole character of the scene, defines it, dominates it, like an elephant at a dinner table. Beaten and torn by the unyielding sea, the massive stones stand like stalwarts, bracing themselves against the incoming waves -- big, amorphous walls that build and swell and collapse in on themselves in majestic curls -- sending the biggest and most tumultuous of them over the top in explosions of white and foam. The water is warm and imposing, the air salty and breezy, the sand dark and covered with smooth rocks and stones ranging in size from a baseball to a Smart Car, all latent with sandy potential.

No, all beaches are not created equal.

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El Tunco is a surf town, in the truest sense. People come from around the world to ride the famous rights and lefts, beach breaks and point breaks (these are all new terms to me, too). Thanks to Lonely Planet's highest recommendation in its latest editions, the tiny town is also becoming a backpacker's mecca, and is slowly going through the modest transformations that come with that: Beachside property is disappearing, humble little hotels and hostels and restaurants are appearing. From my observation, there couldn't be more than 100 locals that live in the town, and about the same number of foreign travelers. There is no ATM, no grocery store, no paved roads, but all this is part of the draw: people come here to surf, lie in hammocks, watch sunsets, throw frisbees, meet fellow travelers, escape the world, smoke pot (its a surfer's and a backpacker's mecca in one, what did you expect?), and pretty much do a whole lot of nothing for days on end. And that's exactly what I did for 10 days, seven days longer than expected.

It was not the surfing, however, that kept me there so long.

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Water has never really been my thing. I grew up thousands of miles from the nearest ocean, and maybe partly because of that I have never been quite so comfortable around it. It is ominous, unsettling and unpredictable, its murky depths latent with danger, haunted with beings sinister and capricious. It is an infinite, unbounded force, utterly indifferent to my well-being, and for, that I resent it.

But surfing always seemed so, well, just so cool. The tiny amount of knowledge I have about surfing and surfer culture has been strictly third-hand, and it has led me to believe that a) the experience of surfing is so sensational as to be nearly spiritual, and b) in general, surfers have tatoos and long hair and use hand gestures to show enthusiasm. The latter has been emphatically affirmed. The former is still in question.

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I never really had a chance out there.

The first time I took a board out, I decided I was just going to paddle and float around on the board and get used to the feeling of it all. You know, start slow, no need to rush out there all headstrong.

The second time out, I was just going to stick to the shallow end, so to speak. I waited close to shore, where you could still touch ground beneath you, and waited for whatever came my way. I actually got up a few times here, but only on the white wash, the surfing equivalent of hitting a homerun of a batter´s tee.

The third time out, I went for it. I walked up to the ¨The Point,¨ where all the real surfing goes on, down at the end where the beach bends out of sight. ¨The Point¨ is Playa el Sunzal, the main attraction, a constant series of towering three-meter breaks that slowly rip to the right across the shore line for thousands of feet. To enter them, I paddled in from the side, like I´d seen everyone else doing, in order to go around the waves, to come in on them from the back and avoid having to paddle into them head-on, a fruitless as well as dangerous endeavor. This, however, combined with the fact that the waves break way the hell out there to begin with, makes the paddling to get into position -- before any of the fun can even be attempted -- long and brutal, especially for someone with underdeveloped, shall I say, ¨paddling experience¨ like me. It took over 30 minutes of straight paddling -- neck arched, arms swinging, board twisting and flopping about with every wave -- just to get close to where all the real surfers hung out, back there sitting on their boards in scattered clumps, bobbing up and down and waiting for the one. I could barely go on.

Out there, every wave that starts to build in front of me is extremely disconcerting to me. Every wave is the one: the one that takes me out, the one that sweeps up my unwilling body and has its way with me, tumbling and tossing me about with wreckless abandon, breaking my board and my bones and hopefully nothing more. I just have no idea how to handle big waves on my board, no method of approaching them, no sense of their temperament or how to read them.

So naturally, as soon as I got into position, I was immediately hit by one of them. Somewhere in the hurtling mess of water and lims, something hard cracked me straight in the bridge of the nose, and I appeared from the water with salt in my mouth and blood in my hands. The pain and the bleeding weren´t that bad, not bad enough to make me panic and loose my cool 500 feet from shore, but bad enough to make me want out, immediately. I oriented my self and desperately clamered back on to my board and starting paddling back towards shore. I didn´t feel quite safe until I was lying on sand.

The only bit of pride that I can afford to feel about this whole experience is the fact that I got up again later that day and went back out, though I had been very ready to give it all up on account of me just not enjoying the whole thing.

There was no blood on this final attempt, but it pretty much ended the same way: I didn´t ride shit, I enjoyed very little of my time, and was prematurely back to land. I had conceeded to the sea, renounced my desire to conquer her. Probably to avoid the complete and inevitable feeling of failure that would normally ensue from such an experience, I came to some agreement with myself sitting there back on solid ground that surfing just wasn´t for me, that I gave it my all and can cross it off my list without too much shame. But I´m not sure I´ve totally convinced myself of this.

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On my third night in El Tunco, while sitting at the bar of a neighboring hostel and awaiting my soon-to-be delicious pizza, I ran into Nicola, a traveler I had met just a few days earlier at my hostel in San Salvador. He had given my lots of advice on the road that lied ahead of me, on account of the fact that he had started at the sourthern most tip of South America and had worked his way up through South and Central America over the past 14 months ago to get get to his present location sitting next to me at the bar. In Central America, there are two types of backpackers on the move: Ones heading south, like me, starting in Cancun or Mexico City or Guatemala City and working their way towards South America, and ones moving north, like Nicola, starting in South America, often Santiago or Buenos Aires, and working their way toward Central America. Hearing tails from the road ahead is one of the most pleasurable experiences to be had while backpacking. They build anticipation and excitement and stir visions of adventures and experiences of endless possibilities lying just around the bend.

Anyway, the day before I met Nicola at that bar in El Tunco, I was sitting at the same bar with a fellow traveler named Steve, watching a group of friends laugh hysterically and uncontrollably about something that I did not witness and would not understand. They filled the air with their loud and carefree boisterousness, their heaving and sucking and snorting and yelling, like can only happen between good friends. Steve turned to me and said, ¨You gotta have a laugh like that every once in a while, just to keep your sanity. It´s good for your health.¨ I realized that I could not remember the last time I had laughed that heartily, the last time I had a laugh that hurt my stomach, that made my face feel all stretched out and sore afterwards.

But then I met Nicola.

Nicola is a crazy Italian bastard from one of the most famous and storied cities in the world, Rome. He has traveled just about everywhere (thats a relative statement) and spent most of the past decade living and traveling around the world. We became quick friends with the help of his wild and varied tales, as well as with the help of two paddles, a ball and a table.

We owned the ping pong table at my hostel. For the entire week that followed us meeting, we competed in an continuous tournament that quickly became very serious. Games would start with a ritualistic hand shake and tossing-off of the sandles, and would continue into epic struggles that drew crowds and awed passerbyers. His innane ability to return shots too lightening-quick to even register on his retina was a perfect compliment to my striking backhands and net-skipping forhands. Coming into our last day in El Tunco, the series was tied at 7-7 in sets of five. Though we built much antipication for the final, tie-breaking match, we fittingly never got around to playing it (intentionally unintentional, I think), and the series ended tied... for now. Someday, somehow, we decided, he or I will appear at the doorstep of the other´s home with two paddles and a ball in hand, and it will be time.

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Aside from playing ping pong, Nicola and I, sometimes along with a Swissman named Claudio and a local El Salvadorean surfer named Marcos who rounded out our little group, hung out and did much of nothing. We watched movies, lied in hammocks, threw frisbees, played pool, ate pizza, got high, tackled waves, barbequed fresh fish over open flames, shared stories, and laughed, deep, sidesplitting laughter, often at unspoken things that an outsider would not even have noticed or understood. The hang-out spot was my porch, where a hammock, a rocking chair, a bench and a table sat, all mine, just 100 feet from the beach. Along with my own porch (and bathroom), right outside of my room was free internet, a kitchen, a TV/DVD player, a pool table and the infamous ping pong table. And I had a group of friends. It had been a long time since I had felt so at home, so comfortable in a place. And so I kept staying, but eventually, as it always does, the power of the road compelled me and it was time to leave.

----------MORE TO COME----------

There was going to be a presidential election in El Salvador in just days, an event that was utterly consuming the country. Flags and posters and stickers and tshirts for the two competing parties filled the streets everywhere I went. I am probably not qualified to try to summarize the El Salvadorean civil conflict of the past 40 years, but this is what I picked up during my time in the country and from talking with more than a handful of locals:

For as long as people could remember, the right-wing had been in power. A tiny privileged few families (notoriously known as The Fourteen Families) had most of the wealth and power of the country, while the campesinos, the peasants and farmers and the poor, were lucky to just have electricity. Inequality like this usually leads to trouble, and the band of guerrilla organizations known as the FMLN was there to lead an insurrection on behalf of the campesinos against the US-backed conservative regime. Civil war ensued, and the bombings and death squads and assasinations and all sorts of terrible things that come with it, until a truce was finally made in 1992.

The conservative party stayed in power, however, and the FMLN began its transition from a guerrilla organization into a legitimate political party. This election was the first election where a competing party had a legitimate chance at beating the right-wing (now under the political name "Arena"). The competing party with a chance was FMLN. Many of the leaders of the current FMLN party, though not the presidential candidate, are ex-guerrillas.

I will use two conversations I had with El Salvadoreans, one passionately supporting each party, to illustrate what I believe was the mindest of the people.

Porfílio was the night guard at my hostel. In conversation with him, I learned that he earned $7 a day for 12 hour shifts starting at 6 pm. He told me he had not slept while it was dark out for over a year. He has four children. What he wants is simple: ten dollars a day, instead of seven. He told me that the FMLN is fighting on his behalf and on behalf of all the "little people"; that everyone should have the right to "comfort and a steady income"; and that the division in power and money should be like this (holding hands together), not like this (holding hands way apart). When I asked him to clarify, he told me, well, there will always be rich and poor, but it should be a lot more even than it is now. He also told me that the people of El Salvador are with the left, the FMLN, and if the right wins again, there is going to be another revolution. But don't worry, he told me, it would take a few months for the people to get organized, so I would have time to leave the country safely before I was in danger.

José was the owner of a small, pleasant hotel I stayed at in a town call Suchitoto. He was a family man, owned a car, helped to support his sick mother in San Salvador. He was wearing an Arena t-shirt when I arrived at his hotel two days before the election, and was very eager to talk politics with me (it was a very lopsided conversation, but I patiently listened for over an hour). He told me that the FMLN was simply using the support of the poor people to get to power, that they were taking advantage of them for their own purposes, their championing on behalf of the poor simply a facade to feed power hungry leaders. The poor were so desperate for "change" simply because it was "change," but really didn't understand what was best for them or even what exactly the change was that the FMLN was promising them. They simply heard change and wanted in. The FMLN is friends with Chavez and Castro, he told me, and they wanted money and control, and to achieve this they would take money from those that had any. He didn't call them outright communists, but he was very close. He said that things have been getting better in El Salvador anyway, that things were heading the right direction, that the campesinos now regularly have electricy and running water, shoes and even cell phones. If the FMLN won, it would be devastating, it would reverse course on everything that they have been working on since the war ended.

My position on all this stayed fairly neutral, mostly out of ignorance. I did not and still do not truly understand the implications of either side winning, or what is actually "good" for the El Salvadorean people or the region. But for obvious reasons, I simply wanted to witness this historic event, to be there when it happened.

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Two days before the election I arrived in Suchitoto, a town situation on a large lake/lagoon in northern El Salvador that shares the name. It was a very pleasant, clean, white-washed colonial town. I had decided that I as going to, after 10 days of debauchery and uselessness, spend some time alone, do some reading and journal writing and get back on a good sleeping schedule. However, you can't turn down good company when it falls on your lap, and it is hard to avoid meeting other's when you are traveling alone like I am.

I met Gerek and Corrin, another backpacker couple (I find myself traveling with lots of romantic couples as teh third wheel, I'm not sure why...) on the bus to Suchitoto. We rented a canoe and paddled around the massive lagoon, past locals fishing with strings and hooks, hawks and egrets and ibises standing on the shore and flying overhead al around us. We ate lots of pupusas, the national food of El Salvadorean, like the taco of Mexico. You can get three pupusas for a dollar and be stuffed full.

Alcohol is banned for the weekend of the election (the election is on a sunday), and because of this, everyone gets drunk in the privacy of their homes, instead of out in the bars. The son of the owner of the hotel, who was managing the hotel while his parents were in El Salvador for election purposes, had friends over, and they invited us to get drunk with them off bottles of cheap vodka. We did, and it was a crazy night, a night in which a rock was thrown at our roof from some neighboring houes, sending debris falling on our heads. After that, we were a little more quiet. The night reminded me a lot of college. When a hurricane was heading towards Miami, school would shut down, strict curfews were enforced on our dorms, and alcohol was doubly banned. In spite of, or really because of all this, everyone naturally loaded up on beer and alcohol as the storm approached and had what we called "Hurricane Parties," where a small group of people would sit alone in a dorm room and, with no where else to go and nothing else to do, got drunk.

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The day of the election finally came, and Gerek, Corinn and I had moved on to another small town, way in the north by the Honduran border. During the day, all seemed fairly normal. Their were more people on the streets than usual, large crowds and lines all over the place, but everything was in order, everything was running smoothly. If I handn't already known that there was an election going on, I could easily have not realized anything special. In fact, it was very unexciting. I am not sure what I expected, but this was not it.

But when night came, and FMLN was declared the winner (51-49), parties broke out in the streets. Parades of honking cars and trucks passed through the streets, masses of people wearing red and swinging flags and signs hanging off all sides, singing and chanting together, hugging and crying. I walked around and took photos, thinking I was going to be an iReporter on CNN or something. Regardless of the politics of the whole thing, it was exciting to see another country, another people and culture, so empassioned for their election, just a few months after the Obama election in the States. I was glad that I stayed to witness it, but first thing the next morning I left the country.