El Mozote 25 years on

Some stories get stuck in your throat. There´s no good way to start them because they don´t make sense.

El Mozote is a small hill village in remote Morazan famous because the military massacred the whole town (primarily women and children) on Dec. 11, 1981. I go to see it with a couple of friends on Christmas day. Our guide is Maria de la Paz Chicas. Now 36, she was eleven at the time of the massacre. She had been away visiting the countryside that day. She lost six brothers and sisters and her parents.

Her story is told all matter-of-fact with one hand cradling her one-year old and the other on her pregnant belly. This is where the bombs fell, this is the well where nobody hid for fear of snakes, these are bullet holes made from aerial pot-shots. The church where children were shot (burned and replaced) , the hills where women were violated... The laundry list of atrocities rubs raw under a bright sky sky dotted with cloud puffs. Next to the crayola-colored murals there´s a rose garden where the children are buried. There´s chalky rubble where some ruins lay unexcavated--the relatives had no interest in digging up the past.

There´s something sinister about a beautiful day, when horrors have been about. We walk to Rio Sapo, where the sun is hot and families swim in t-shirts and shorts. We join them, relieved to be somewhere where life is thick.

The orginal story about El Mozote, written by Mark Danner for The New Yorker is at http://www.markdanner.com/newyorker/120693_The_Massacre.htm.

In Suchitoto there´s a restaurant called La Balanza. The owner is an ex-guerrilla, who put a sculpture of a scale above the entrance. One half holds the tip of a 500 lb. missle-head, the other a stack of tortillas. The misslehead weighs heavier, to say, the damage of the war cost us more than the hunger that started it.

Tremors in El Salvador

On Wednesday I bolted for the hostel garden at 2am, certain the sky was caving, or the beams shifting.

There have been over 800 seismic tremors since last Sunday in Northern El Salvador, one that was 4.8, the rest negligible, if sober bedspins and squaking barn animals don´t phase you. Most of these have been between 11pm and 5am, leaving me a zombie wreck, sending me to sleep with my room door wide open (they jam in quakes) that night. In San Lorenzo people just said the hell with it, threw their mattresses in the street and slept in jeans and sneakers. Over a thousand homes are damaged, mostly improvisory or old quarters inhabited by the poor.

Add this to the soup of everything else that disconcerts about El Salvador: Raw war images in the museum, precise folk art scenes tucked into a miniature carving like a strawberry or egg (sorpresas), retired school buses from Cranston and Cooperstown turned public transport--recast in psychadelic tones, gleaming clean, tossing passengers to the pavement without hitting one full stop. Men hissing and clicking appreciation, topped by an old woman who stopped me on the street to say, ¨Me alegro por tus ojos.¨ (it helps when they´re blue). It took me a week to meet other tourists. I was beginning to believe I was the only one. A suspicious feeling that is.

But---it´s mostly been lovely. I have had El Salvador to myself, which first meant holding hands with paranoia, then precaution. It has ebbed into drifting conversations with the streetside sandwich girl (wondering about dad--seven years gone in the US) when the bus never comes to the elderly neighbor who uses the skinny apartment entrance as his patio (¨Marco Polo, now that´s a story¨) and the deadicated surfers, radical sons of old money, and people--hands split, heaving hundred pound sacks--who bring us Starbucks.

There is no reconciling--the homicide statistics and the not-distant war with such, well, friendliness. As a traveller it is too tempting to make an explanation. Folks are willing to talk (best when they´re not the ones clicking or hissing), to walk you five blocks instead of giving the directions, to respond in a way that´s frank. It makes for something of a trip.

A Country Without Turistas

The plane to San Salvador is decorated with holly and the duty free shops are giving out shots of rum. It´s thirteen days til Christmas. Almost no one deboards in El Salvador, I spot no guidebooks and only one passenger with skin freckled enough to double-check. Am I the only one? I admit I am here because I have to be but there is that underlying curiosity: what´s this place about?

The immigration official is frowning. ¨Tourism,¨ I say. After delving into my date of birth and profession he asks again, ¨What´s your reason for being here?¨

¨Tourism,¨I repeat. Is it that hard to believe?

He gives me 60 days grudgingly (the limit is 90). I mention, ¨Is the limit 90 days? Because you gave me 60.¨

¨Yes,¨he says, ¨it depends on the case.¨ I´ve barely landed and become a case. Interesting.

The customs guy was another story. After briefly glancing at my passport he slips in my name, ¨Tienes unos ojos muy lindos, Carolina.¨ Then he translates it for me. That´s what I like, as a former English teacher, a bilingual come-on.

¨Thankyou,¨ I say politely, still afraid someone will revoke my tourist card.

How long am I here for? ¿Tan poco? I have to press the button on the baggage traffic light, the traveller´s Wheel of Fortune.

Green.

¨Ah, te vas Carolina!¨ This is my welcome. He lets me go, out of the airport (clammy and swarmed at dusk by parrots) and into San Salvador.

The Gaps in the Guidebook

(If guidebooks are making travel too routine, the tourist trail too rutted, adventures still stand in the ambiguities on the page).

Chasing Waterfalls

Sunday and the sun is glorious. So far my friend Rachel has been graciously tagging along on my rainy discount lodging tour of Costa Rica. We have crammed in a handful of cities behind us, but haven’t once stepped onto Mother Nature’s patio.

Goal (destination)
An afternoon off. Descriptions of Rio Celeste’s waterfall gush, "electric," "impossibly blue," and "like a frothy blueberry milkshake." As writers, we are suckers for a good description. The park—Volcan Tenorio—is one of Costa Rica’s newest, hardly visited and hard to get to.

Caveat (transportation)
The book mentioned you might convince a local to taxi you for $12 USD.

Worried? Ha. Fluent in Spanish, conversant in charm. That’s the power of a sunny day for you.

We bus to a regional hub then hop another headed toward Nicaragua, getting off at Bijagua. It looks closed for business. Mutts nap in the road, the shop is shuttered and men drink beers in the shade. After a good haggling session, I get a guy to take us to Bijagua, 13km away. Gas up (siphoning from a jug) and we’re off!

An hour later we are at the park. It’s 3:30pm, but the rangers won’t let us hike without a guide since the forest darkens early (though the trail is less than two miles long). Our friendly driver takes us to a soda (outdoor café) with the only budget lodging around. I pay up $15 dollars but the driver insists we agreed on fifteen thousand colones ($30 dollars). What????? A ruckus ensues. While haggling, we had tossed around numbers in the teens, never thousands. But this is Costa Rica, he tells me. Exactly. The only Latin American country where you hear English and use dollars half the time. Half the time. My bad to assume.

He wins. It smarts. Forget security, we tell him not to bother returning for us the next day. We’ll find our own way. Never mind my tight schedule and the fact that that there are no real options around, save a dirt bike and a few spirited horses.

The Unexpected
Our karma changes the second we meet the Ordonez family. Witnesses of the public spat, they handle us (ugly Americans) with kid gloves. The Senora offers us coffee, brings us packaged cookies. At $5 a piece we take their bare-bones cabin. Feliz.

Boys chase each other on the cement floor of the soda while old men play cards with our hostess, all with money down. Alex, a local guide and the son of the hostess, puts in a video of tapirs. Now that they are protected they are no longer hunted, but Alex’s father Evelio used to hunt them and monkeys as well, as a pioneer here forty years ago. That’s how he discovered the waterfall with a group of friends.

I wondered, was it special? Did they take their families on Sunday outings to see it?

"No," Don Evelio says, "Nunca pense 'eso me va a dar una vida'." (I never thought 'this will give me a living.')

The waterfall was beautiful but far. There was plenty of work to do on the farm. They certainly didn’t think folks would pay to see it someday. Nor the hot springs or the bubbling thermal vents, the stuff in their backyards in the middle of nowhere.

Now we are here. Will we see it? How can we not? It is practically a dare.

We will have to start hiking at 6am to make our ride out. After our reticence to jump on the back of Alex’s dirt bike, one by one, for the return to town, Alex negotiates our ride out with the 7am milk truck that delivered from area farms to Bijagua.

The sugary smell of orchids fills the night, but then comes rain, downpours, drumming the tin roof. We will twitch in our saggy beds wondering if this was Another Stupid Idea.

It turns out that the waterfall was only the premise to the adventure. Then came the Ordonezes, with their stories of settling the jungle, the droves of bats at twilight and the milk truck hauling half dairy, half locals grabbing the rails. We did easily make the waterfall in the yellow first light, swearing that the startled rustling in the woods are tapir.

The rain had finally ceased, but left its mark on the famed waterfall—now a memorable, muddy brown.