South Bound

8/10 – 8/20: Arrival Back to The Boat and San Salvador Days: It was hot and humid at the airport of San Salvador, hotter than I remembered. My battery of my Salvadorian cell phone was dead and I spent a few minutes to charge it outside at the hot dog stand around 7pm in the darkness. Then I called my local buddy Santos to arrange a taxi to get me ( in order not to pay over price at the airport ). When I arrived to the river mouth of Bahia del Sol there was one of the guys waiting to give me a ride to my boat. Closer look at my boat revealed that there was a party going on – some cruisers and some local guys had decided to welcome me with a little surprise party.
The boat projects that I have had Santos do meanwhile I was in Finland were not even close to ready and they needed some whipping to get to somewhat closer although never completed. The boat was looking nice though – new foam and covers in the cabin, 8 coats of varnish on floors, re-caulked and sanded down teak decks and also 3 coats of varnish outside everywhere.
The next couple of weeks we went several times to San Salvador with Santos to get some missing tools and items and on the way back he wanted to show me some El Salvadorian culture in different villages.
Many experiences later one of these return trips turned out to be more strange than others. This time he wanted to show some local females, but it was hard as typical pupusa shops ( pupusa = a thick taco with various things in it ) did not have any other than the familys teen age chefs ( that typically already had kids as well). He was calling around and finally we got some directions to a ‘dance place’ that right at the entrance turned out to have a stage, dancing pole and rooms on the side for other services. The definite shadiness of the place did not impress me or even Santos. As an example some local kids wanting to go and get beers for me with my money, of course the beers or money never came back to table. I got my money back with my semi aggressive Spanish thanks to lessons from Santos and we were on our way out. There could not have been a worse place to get stuck than this dark jungle with a twist of violence in the air on back yard of this shady place with even shadier people; so the car of Santos did not start, batteries were completely dead 4th time in a week. Btw. His car did not have bumpers, light bulps were sticking out hanging from wires and the paint of the car had one time back in the day been red when Mr. Kennedy (either brother, son or cousin of President Kennedy’s) had given this car to Santos as a gift on his navigation explorations. So we started pushing the car, of course those shady kids came out little while later and came for my surprise to help us. Then we saw police car approaching. The spot lights turned on and 4 cops approached with machine guns. At first there attitude was to nail Santos for anything he had or hadn’t done. I decided to step in with my vulgar Spanish to explain a few things to protect ‘my driver’. Very quickly the main chief changed his attitude and wanted to tow us out from this supposedly violent area and explained also that the guy I got my money back was 18’s local chief who just got out of jail( 18 and La Mara are the most biggest gang problem in all north and central America).
Santos’s tow ropes were as Salvadorian as his car – they were breaking up every 50 meters – the cops had a lot of patience though and as we were towed we were wondering if they want to arrest us at the police station any ways. Instead they introduced us their favorite cows and pigs that they confiscated few nights earlier and we met all the cops at the station talking about Finland, world politics and other random stuff while Santos and couple of other cops were working on the car. They offered earlier if I wanted any water, but I politely refused and walked to get my last beer from the car. TV was playing their favorite night watch show, Playboy. Pretty late but amused of the few last hours we got the car started and left with a strange drive move to hide the other headlight that was out.

8/21-8/27: Turtles and Pirates. We did couple of jungle tours with my little inflatable to explore the river estuary of full of mangroves, from time to time little river restaurants with variety fresh shrimps and fish and a local turtle protection farm. They bought the eggs for higher price and then made sure that the eggs were safe in the sand and that the turtle got out to the ocean safe.
Little documentation about the turtle farm and some contacts to fund raising started an idea that we could have Santos funnel the money directly to the turtle farm as they seemed to be lacking some motivation due to lack of everything. I created a pretty cool movie clip on it and we got a good momentum going on for it.
Also a boat called Talofa, a fairly famous tall ship that looked exactly like a pirate boat came in to the anchorage. The Captain was totally out of money, blew up sails, semi broken engine and the crew was a woman who didn’t stop smiling, but was also out of money. They did some tourist tours to be able to eat. One time I showed up in my pirate costume to amuse the local tourists. It worked that well that we did it again with local school kids who were promised to be taken for a tour if they only spoke English during the cruise. This turned out to be success and the Captain ( me, only one in pirate costume ) had to sign 40 wooden swords and take 40 photos with each one.
Last day before taking off toward Nicaragua was crazy, million things to do. I borrowed the car of Santos to get groceries to speed up things a bit. Needless to say, it did not start and another towing session and battery exercises were needed. Tractor and an extra battery were used to jump it … all on all we had to jump finally also the tractor cause all died one after another but luckily one of them was always running.
I had to tune up reggaeton louder to get my thoughts away from a possible accident as only one of the tires was breaking and there waere cows, chickens, horses, bicycles and kids running around on the highway. I got most of the stuff squared away for next day and considered the boat almost ready – which is typically very good state of mind in boating.