I think we over-prepared.
The Boquerón volcano hike on the edge of San Salvador is a well-maintained trail leading from a nice little visitor’s center to an overlook at the top of a caved-in volcano crater. It was delightful, and tourists of all abilities were either scaling or huffing and puffing their way up the 3-4 miles of dirt trails and paved staircases. It was really more of a city park than a Central American adventure, despite my temptation to present it to you all that way.
The highlight for parents of six adorable kids was a memorial garden with a picture of butterfly wings painted at a height just asking to be instagrammed.
If you think that’s cute, you should have seen her practice jumping while watching the bigger kids take their turn.
I think Alicia and Isaias’ daughter Nan probably best captured the spirit of the display.
Whereas I most certainly did not.
Embarrassing. I’m going to blame the backpack, the camera angle, and/or the height of the wall.
We made it to the top of the hill, where the aforementioned mango lady was the real attraction for the under 7 set.
But the rest of us were pretty impressed by the view.
The visitors center had several nice little exhibits about the history of the region that none of us read, because we were melting over our kids digging through the traditional El Salvadoran dress up section.
I know.
The hiking banter between Aimee, Cicely, and Alicia was why El Salvador had such a stunning and well maintained park, while Nicaragua had nothing of the sort, despite having equal if not more impressive natural scenery. Alicia did a bit of Wiki-research on her cellphone, and told us about the five-fold higher remunerations that El Salvador has over Nicaragua. Because of a variety of factors (mostly luck, timing, and politics), El Salvador refugees that fled war and natural disasters were allowed to live and work in the United States, whereas most Nicaraguans doing the same were not. The money that these refugees send back to their family make up a staggering amount of the El Salvador economy, despite being a trivial amount of ours. And far from being a quirk of history, this is being actively debated in Washington DC. Their Temporary Protected Status is currently scheduled to end September 9th of this year.
And if El Salvadorans were coming home to beautiful volcano hikes, guarded neighborhoods, and private beach clubs, I’m sure there wouldn’t be enough flights to handle them all. But the reality is that most are not. Cicely’s housekeeper regularly mentions another person that has disappeared from her definitely not guarded neighborhood in casual conversation. As we drove to lunch from the volcano park, Cicely pointed out downtown, where despite living in the city for over two years, she has never been. “It’s a no-go zone for embassy staff.” And later that day, we would smell the distinct odor of open sewage that Cicely would explain to us is from the river of human excrement that flows through an overcrowded shanty neighborhood illegally set up under the main freeway through San Salvador.
Our vacation is very intentionally selecting from the more attractive elements of this country. But we are most certainly not seeing El Salvador in its entirely. This place is rough. It’s also beautiful. And once again, I’m glad we have the means to skew our agenda towards the latter. Not everyone is so lucky.
On one side of town, you have disappearances and sewage rivers. On the other, you have Hobbits. Seriously. We had lunch at one of the fanciest restaurants I have ever been to. The view was stunning, and there wasn’t a plate for less than $20 (which needless to say is a ton of money out here) Yet it also had several playgrounds, a hobbit garden, and a petting zoo. It is run by an eccentric recluse, and definitely followed its own building code. Aimee told me about the rickety bridge on the end of the cliff she and the kids had to take to get to the petting zoo. I missed out on that, since Isaias and I stuck around at the table for some much needed dad beers. Someone had to watch our stuff, after all.
After lunch, we headed back into town for a little swim at the embassy pool, as was becoming our custom. The drives that day weren't particularly long, so Mimi still hadn't taken her nap. I took one for the team, and taught Mimi how to take a hammock nap. Parenting is all about sacrifice.
As you can tell from Spiderman's reappearance, it took a bit of convincing and distracting to get a two year old to nap at a pool when all of her friends are splashing around twenty feet away. But we pulled it off.
And I know I'll miss the days of all day infant napping, but it's nice to start getting a few photos of Quinn with his eyes open.
Rested and refreshed, we spent the rest of the afternoon splashing in the pool and playing in the embassy park. It was the perfect combination of US-grade playground equipment and tropics-grade mojitos.
All week, Cicely has been giving us the hard sell to join the Foreign Service. So that afternoon she invited the embassy doctor to join us at the pool and tell us how nice his job is, as if the pool and mojitos weren't already doing the selling. I get it, guys. I get it.
We swam a bit more as the sun started to set, and I somehow didn't drop either of my kids in the pool as I distractedly pondered the third draft of my resignation letter.
Since the embassy is just a couple of miles from Cicely and Donyel's house, it wasn't worth hiring a car and driver, or checking out an embassy van, our usual modes of transport around here. So we all packed into their Honda Pilot and hoped that their diplomatic license plate would keep us from getting pulled over.
Back at the house, Mimi read Baby Coconut a bedtime story, and we all turned in for an early night.
