El Espino…the El Salvadorian beach

A very long, hot bus ride with multiple stops from Santa Ana via the capital San Salvador. The final leg of the journey included a slight hiccup when we realised we’d missed the last bus to our beach ‘resort’ 😳.  After a few moments of panic  (standing by a big main road with people burning plastic bottles next to where we were standing), we decided to hitch-hike and within a couple minutes,  a lovely family had scooped up a bewildered looking Baggot family from the side of the road and put us in their pick-up truck to take us to our accommodation half an hour away! The kindness of people has frequently amazed us on this journey, and I will definitely remember this. This kindness is even more impressive given the absolute poverty that many people in Central America live with and the boys have certainly witnessed this a lot on our trip. So many of the people we have seen are living in wooden shacks, and lying on the dusty ground with only an open fire to cook their tortillas on but despite this, they are willing to help whenever they can, and more importantly, they are full of smiles, are welcoming and generally appear very content with their little-lot despite it being what we would consider to be nsqualor! 

We arrive at our hotel which is a little basic beachfront hotel, with beautiful gardens and a gorgeous pool, a bit of a relief for the boys as we haven’t been in a pool since Mexico. We were the only people at the hotel which seemed strange, as we had in our minds a busy El Salvadorian resort, but this it was not! The beach was very natural with dark sand and amazing waves, but beyond this there was really nothing apart from dusty streets, ramshackle housing, stray dogs, an entire family of skinny cows and a few ‘restaurants’ that resembled garden sheds filled with chickens! At first we wanted to hot-foot it out of the place ASAP, but as in so many places we have visited, by the time we left, we had grown to love the beach, the people and the general no-frills vibe of the place and we felt that we truly understood how a good ol’ El Salvadorian family spend their time. We were certainly the only travellers to visit  this place in a while and we were definitely the star attraction in the village but as usual, the people could not have been any more hospitable towards us. A few lovely relaxing days spent here before our next adventure through to Nicaragua.