Juayua is a town that comes to life on the weekend with it featival gatronomica, where lots of streets are packed full of food vendors selling iguana, meat, vegetables and lots of other interesting dishes.

Duebto some transportation problems we only arrived towards the end of the day, but we still got to look around and taste a little bit. They say that the stomach gets full before the eyes does, but in my case, still feeling a bit rough, my eyes only made me a less hungry. Not the best time to visit a food festival! But Magnus assures it was really good!

The next morning we did a hike to the 7 waterfalls, through dense and sometimes challenging jungel. The hike was very nice and the scenery was great. Too get a waterfall massage and dip in the pool at the end of the trip was a nice treat. We even swam through a tunnel, which looked really scary at first, but nothing two vikings could’t handle.

As I said earlier Juayua comes to life in the weekends, but seems a bit dead on weekdays, so we spent most of our evening in the hostel talking to other travelers.

The next day brought us early to Tacuba by chicken busses (old American school busses), which is further west, close to the El Imposible national park. We were hoping to be early enough to manage to do some activities during the day, but sadly we were not. So we’ve spent the day playing cards, reading in the hammocks and relaxing. Sounds like a bummer?

Tomorrow we will mountainbike down to the beach and spend the night in Barra Santiago before moving on.

Apologizes for the long pause in our blogging. We’ll get to the reason for that shortly.

First of, El Tunco beach and New Years Eve! As we said in our earlier post we had arrived in El Tunco after climbing Santa Ana Volcano, and we were ready for some surfing (at least Magnus was), beach and a little bit of party.

El Tunco is a nice surfer/beach city with lots of hostels and international visitors. Many of the other internationals were vomunteer workers, either from the Peace Corps or Engineers without Borders. Needless to say, me and Magnus felt a bit bad with ‘just’ being tourists. But we were mostly encouraged that we were still doing good with spending our money there.

El Tunco was also the place were the now familiar phrase ‘you came all the way from Norway, for a vacation of 11 days, just in El Salvador? Why??’ became common.

Well, we enjoyed our first day in El Tunco. Magnus did some excellent surfing (DNV certified excellent he assures), and I did some excellent sunbathing and reading. I did rent a board for two hours as well, even caught a wave and stood all the way to the beach. But the hassel of getting out to the waves versus the gain of ‘maybe’ catching a wave just don’t make it worthwhile for me. Give me a hammock and book anytime over a surfboard!

Since El Tunco had many internationals there, even Norwegians and Danish, the New Years Party was good and in English. Sitting on the beach countin in the New Year, watching firework in the sky, having a refreshing New Year ‘cleansing’ in the sea and dancing was a great way to enter the New Year!

We just wished the Happy New Year would have lasted longer than the early morning of the 1st of January when I got sick, started to puke and used several minuted to get on just get on my shorts. Don’t think I have felt that weak ever.

Luckily I had Magnus there who got me water, medicine etc. He also tried hard to get us a new place to stay, since we were actually planning on moving on this day but due to my condition had to stay. Easier said than done since El Tunco is very popular with both tourists and locals, especially on the New Year weekend. But after some cancellations at our current hostel we could stay there anyway, which was a life saver!

The bad news about this? Magnus had also gotten sick, pukong etc. You know the story by now. So the 1st of January we spent in a hostel room, barely stepping out, and when we did we heard the comment: ‘Those guys are SO hungover!’. Thanks!

Well Magnus improved the next day, I did as well a little but still feeling a bit rough, so we decided to move on to Juayua, located in the western region of El Salvador, a town we saw when we climbed Santa Ana volcano.

We were picked up at 9.00 at our hotel by Alfredo, our guide for the day. The drive from San Salvador to Volcanoes National Park took around 1,5hrs. It was a nice drive, seeing the +\-2000 metres volcanoes in the horizon creeping closer until we finally reached our starting point, Cerro Verde. Cerro Verde is one of the four volcanoes in the park, and is the second highest. This is the starting point for the trips to the Santa Ana and Izalco volcano.

The Izalco volcano is the youngest in the country, only 200years, and is the picture perfect volcano with its perfect cone shape. It is 1700m high and is currently inactive.

The Santa Ana volcano, our destination, is the highest in the country with its 2365m, and was last active in 2001. The trail only opened up 1 year ago or so.

Our drive to the volcanoes showed a lump of clouds above the Santa Ana peak, but we started the trek with hopes it would clear. The trek starts walking down from Cerro Verde, then up Santa Ana, before you head back down and up Cerro Verde again. So actually you are climbing two volcanoes for the price of one!

The trek was relatively easy for the fit Norwegians, yes I mean me and Magnus. The view this day was a bit hazy, but still it was amazing seeing the landscape of El Salvador, spotting several volcanoes in the distance. When we got to the top the clouds were still there, but the huge crate with a greenish sulphur colored lake was still visible. Simply amazing!

Well back in the car Alfredo, being a good guide, handed us our well deserved cold beers, and we shared some Walter’s Mandler (Norwegian chocolate).

We drove the costal highway back, which gave nice views of the cliffs and beaches El Salvador has to offer. Really nice, and we couldn’t wait to test the water. We ended up in a surfer town named El Tunco, which reputeadly has one of the best point breaks in the world. And yes, the water was great!!!

Still experiencing some jet-lag we are relaxing tonight, getting ready for some surf, some hammock reading and of course welcoming the new year!

Have a great new year’s eve party everyone, whereever in the world you are celebrating it

Yesterday evening, after relaxing a bit in the hotel, we went to a resturant/bar/stage called La Luna Casa y Arts. And I suddenly felt I was back in Paris having jazz brunch with Simon.

The atmosphere and the live music made it a really nice ending to our first day in El Salvador.

We left Norway quite early on Tuesday, waking up at 3.30 in order to catch the first train to the airport. The trip to Frankfurt and then on to Houston went without delay and big problems, but Magnus didn’t have the best time. Seated in the middle seat between two strangers for 10hrs with your knees touching the seat in front is not what you would call comfortable. We might opt for paying extra to have an emergency exit seat on the way back.

‘Houston we have a problem!’. So cliché, but in Houston our luck seemed to change a little bit. The plane was first delayed 3 hours, but was in the end delayed/cancelled until the next morning (yet another early start of the day). So we were booked into Hilton Hotel! This is the second time we have stayed in a Hilton Hotel in one month (also in London) so you can say we are getting spoiled with the standards these days. Hard to be a working man!

But was this delay so bad? Me and Magnus is rarely trouble by things we don’t have any control over when we travel, so we saw it as yet another experience along the way. Since the hours were quite late (both in Houston and definetly back in Norway!) we didn’t go into town, but we did take a taxi to a local electronic store. I forgot my SLR camera at home, which made a perfect excuse to buy a new one, won’t you agree? So I bought a new compact camera, Sony TX5 (thanks for the tip Daniel!), which is waterproof, so expect some surfing photos later It also turned out that this camera was 150USD cheaper in Housto than at the airport and in San Salvador, so the delay was not that bad!

Houston, we have lift off! Our plane to El Salvador were on schedule the next morning, and we finally made it to San Salvador, where we have been spending the day.

A couple of interesting ‘fun’ facts about San Salvador:

- It has one of the highest murder rates in the world- It is one of the Top 10 cities you don’t! want to visit in the world

Which may be true and we don’t think we will spend much time here, but walking around today has still given us some good and interesting impressions. The city goes gradually from poor and dangerous in the east to rich and safe in the west, which was also the direction we followed. We started with the busy El Centro where we walked through busy markets selling everything you’d want, visited nice plazas where locals gather to relax and listen to street music and saw an very interestig church, the Iglesia El Rosario. From the outside it don’t look like much, but the inside is quite spectacular, bathed in marvellous colored light from the windows (will upload photos soon).

Then we moved on to Zona Rosa, which is the rich and hip neighbourghood in San Salvador, where the elite enjoy hotels as the Sheraton and Hilton and party in cool clubs. We enjoyed a few drinks there before heading back to our hotel, where we rest a bit before heading out to a resturant/bar to end the evening. All in all we got a good view of the city.

Tomorrow we are climbing the Santa Ana volcano, which is the highest in the country with it’s 2365m.

It is really good to be out on the road again! Feels great!

Me and Magnus is back on the road again, although for a very short period. We are visiting El Salvador this time, the smallest country in Central America. It is not a country many tourist visit because of it harsh past with a civil war ended recently in 1992. But that is one of the reasons why want to experience El Salvador in the first place.

We hope we will have a great time, so keep tuned. Will try and update the blog daily