by Randy Denmon
We braved the crowd and uncomfortable setting, managing to enter the little building where we had our passports stamped. I was then told to go to customs next door. This went rather quickly, but the agent wanted copies of my registration and passport that I didn’t have.
One of the hawkers who had followed me inside barked in my ear, “I make copies, two dollars, American only.”
I looked at the little man, trying to size him up, then at the customs agent who nodded. I removed my wallet and pulled out twenty dollars, all that I had, and handed it to the man.
“Just a minute,” he said and ran off.
Patiently waiting, I decided to change the Guatemalan quetzals in my wallet for some dollars, the official currency of El Salvador. I approached one of the money changers and handed him eight hundred quetzals.
I’ve spent a lot of my life in gutters, but the little con man had perfected one of the most ingenious scams I’d ever seen. He quickly pulled out his calculator, held it up in front of me and divided 800 by 7.7, the current exchange rate. The calculator screen produced 27.6. The little outlaw raised up his wad of cash, counted out the twenty-seven dollars, and handed it and some change to me.
I looked at the money, my mind racing. Something wasn’t right. Eight hundred quetzals should be about a hundred American dollars. I complained and asked him to redo the calculation. He raised the calculator up again, showing it to me and three other hawkers now standing around and watching. This time I took special care to watch him key the numbers and function buttons, but again the screen produced 27.6.
Perplexed, I wondered if American math and Guatemalan math were different sciences. I finally figured it out. The little thief had obviously switched the buttons on the calculator. The divide button was now something else, some exponential or maybe a programed function that produced a value smaller than the proper exchange value. How many tourists, or undereducated Americans, had he pulled this trick on? My first college degree was in mathematics, so I’m officially a math whiz. I asked to see the calculator. He protested, only dividing the numbers again to show me all was correct.
My anger rising, there wasn’t much I could do. He had my 800 quetzals and the entire crowd agreed with his little machine. The man who took my title and registration arrived with the copies, but no change.
“Me cambio,” I said.
The man only shrugged. “Un momento.”
I grabbed the copies, gave them to the customs agent, and spent another ten minutes signing papers before I got my sign-off. I looked back over my shoulder. The copy man had disappeared.
Dean sat in the passenger seat, the door locked and the windows rolled up.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” I said.
I drove on, through the two-mile neutral zone, hoping the El Salvador border wouldn’t be as big a mess. In only a few minutes, we approached the bridge over the Rio Paz. The only problem, the bridge was closed, a big crane parked on its deck.
“What now?” I moaned, pulling up to the bridge.
Four or five cars and a dozen people mingled around the bridge. I parked and stepped out. Three policemen stood beside their car.
“¿A que hora vamos el puente?” I said.
“Three-thirty,” one of the men politely answered.
My watch read one-thirty. I’m very familiar with bridges ruling my life, and the complexities these pose when not functioning. We Louisianans live with the ever-consuming challenge of having our freedoms dictated by them. They’re everywhere, and you typically can’t go anywhere without finding a bridge to get you there. Hopefully this wouldn’t be a major ordeal.
Dean and I went over our options. We had about 120 miles of range in the car, but we had passed nothing since Guatemala City, 70 miles behind us. To get to the other border crossings in the area would take a couple of hours of valuable daylight and critical range for the car. If we waited here and got across the bridge, we’d still have to clear customs and immigrations. No telling what that would entail. It might be close to five before we got moving again, and all this depended on the bridge actually opening at three-thirty.
We’d only have an hour and a half of daylight to find some civilization and a charge. I pulled out our map and only guidebook, Lonely Planet’s Central America on a Shoestring, 2013.
There were two towns across the border: Ahuachapán, population 38,000 and ten miles across the Rio Paz, and Sonsonate, population 65,000 and thirty miles across the border. Lonely Planet mentioned that Sonsonate was home to some of El Salvador’s most notorious gangs. Applying my correction of a Central American city’s population to the possible services, finding ample lodging, and charging would be difficult, especially late in the day or after dark.
But I had a bigger concern. In Latin America, three-thirty can often mean five, or even three-thirty the next day. On the Guatemalan side of the border, only four or five derelict shacks were built into the side of the two steep hills on each side of the road. The cars now backed up past a curve, as far as I could see.
A second, more immediate problem loomed. My gut stirred. I needed to find a restroom. There was nothing at the border crossing, and the hills beside the road were too steep to use the portable potty. I scouted the situation.
Dean had gotten friendly with the three Guatemalan guards. He now had the hood open and the guards were taking pictures of each other with the car.
I explained my situation to one of the guards and he told me there was a bathroom on the other side of the bridge. I could walk across to El Salvador and potty. Perfect. I’d solve my problem, clear my mind, and as I cantered over the bridge, the civil engineer in me would review the repair issue and make an educated guess as to if or when we’d get to cross.
The stomach problem only cost a quarter to fix, and on my way back, my inspection of the bridge told me the work wouldn’t be finished for weeks. The crew was pulling rebar to replace the concrete deck. The bridge closing was obviously only a scheduled daily closing for the work. No critical part had to be repaired or replaced to open it. The workers simply had to stop work and open the bridge.
I spent a few minutes examining the exquisite suspension bridge, a fine work of art and engineering. I later discovered that the structure was somewhat of a forgotten jewel. It hadn’t been painted in decades, but looked fine, sturdy. Completed in 1949 by John A. Roebling and Sons, the builders of the Brooklyn Bridge, it was designed by Charles Sutherland, Roebling’s chief engineer on the George Washington Bridge in New York City. The bridge had a 209-foot main span and employed some of the first pre-stressing technology in bridge building. If this place was in the middle of nowhere now, I could only imagine how remote it must have been then.
Nonetheless, sixty-five years later, the twenty-first-century engineering marvel was waiting on the twentieth-century marvel to be patched up with nineteenth-century techniques.
Back at the car, I picked up the map again. There was the option of driving down to the coast, only forty miles away. It shortened the distance to La Libertad to only seventy-five miles. The night before, I’d done a little internet research on one of the coastal towns near the border. There was little, but one traveler had posted something to the order of: “Great waves. Recommend day trip only. If you do stay, don’t travel at night and secure your car and belongings.” So it went when overlanding in Central America.
I asked the guards about the coast road to La Libertad. Maybe the coast had other tourist towns, but I was quickly told the road was bad and passed through no towns of significance. As I continued to look for an impossible solution, I heard Dean conversing with someone in fluent English.
I got out of the car and introduced myself to Mario Aviles, a healthy, five-foot-four-inch, black-headed, fair-skinned El Salvadoran with a wife and kids in Dallas who earned his living importing and exporting. He had gotten to the bridge by driving his BMW motorcycle around the line of cars. We showed Mario the car, which he appreciated. Wanting his advice, I told him our problem
and asked if he knew a good spot for us to sleep and charge.
With a big smile, he said, “No problem. I’ll just lead you guys to San Salvador. It’s about sixty miles. I know a short cut. I also have a friend at the Marriot Courtyard. He’ll get you a charge. I’ll call him to see if it’s okay.”
I studied Mario. This was too good to be true. Could he be our savior? He didn’t look or sound like the immoral type. “We don’t drive very fast. It drains our batteries.”
“No problem. I’ll call my friend now.”
“Many thanks,” I said, hoping our problem might be solved.
• • •
At about three, the construction crew began to wrap up, and the bridge scene transitioned from despair to optimism. I looked across the Rio Paz to El Salvador. We’d be in our third country sometime today, hopefully. What an adventure. Studying the scraggly, brush-covered brown hills, I couldn’t help but wonder if we were being lowered into a fiery caldron or deadly crevasse where return, at least with the car, would be unlikely.
In no time, we rolled over Mr. Sutherland’s masterpiece and were routed to the right side of the far bank by a border guard. I got out with all my papers. Through the unruly scene, I conversed with one of the agents as a mangy dog tried to make love to my leg. The agent needed copies and pointed to a little store. The proprietor was honest and provided the service for two dollars.
After fifteen minutes of turmoil, we were ordered to the other side of the road. There we parked and went inside to present our papers.
A polite El Salvadoran soon inspected the car, but then the problems started. What they were, I didn’t know. I sat on a bench, smoking cigarettes as the minutes passed, by the tens.
Mario had pulled his motorcycle up and continued to patiently wait, conversing with Dean. Finally, after forty-five minutes, I asked Mario if he could lend a hand.
He gladly agreed and entered the building. A few minutes later he returned to explain the problem. The international customs declaration forms for vehicles require both a VIN number and an engine number. The problem: the Tesla didn’t have an engine, which perplexed the bureaucrats—how to fill in all the blanks? I would later learn, much to my chagrin, this was not a problem unique to El Salvadoran customs agents.
I considered bribery, but another man approached, an older, educated-looking Salvadoran who spoke English. He began to chew some ass, lambasting the officials. My guess at the translation: “These are tourists, just wanting to come visit our country. You wonder why the world thinks we’re a banana republic? Yada, yada …”
I sat down on the bench and lit up. We’d been across the bridge more than an hour and a half. It was after five, the shadows growing long. I couldn’t believe that Mario still patiently and politely waited for us.
Ten more minutes passed, our problems besieging me. Where would we stay tonight? I walked over to Mario, feeling guilty that he’d waited so long. “I don’t know if they’ll let us go or not. You don’t have to wait on us.”
Mario picked up our map, circling the best route, and writing his phone number on it. “I’ll wait a little longer, but here are the directions, and my number. Just call me when you get close to San Salvador.”
I spied the sun, hanging over the horizon. San Salvador seemed like a reach.
One of the customs agents emerged from the building, handing me some paperwork.
“I can go?” I said in Spanish.
“Sí.” The man nodded.
Not believing my ears, I pointed. “San Salvador?”
Smiling, the man nodded again. “Sí, sí. No more.”
Our ordeal had ended. The only good news was that again the paperwork had been too cumbersome for Dean to get a driving permit. I turned to Mario. “How about you just lead us there? Don’t worry about the speed. I’ll keep up.”
In the waning daylight, we followed Mario (driving more like Evel Knievel) and his BMW that raced around curves and volcanoes, passed cars, switched lanes, and made several turns. Possibly, the writer from Frommer’s had been following Mario on one of his excursions through Central America when he wrote that passage about the driving in Guatemala.
One of the volcanoes we passed was the massive Izalco, an ominous, intimidating pyramid of gray rock and cinder blotting the horizon. It was once active enough to earn the title, “Lighthouse of the Pacific.”
“Mario told me,” Dean said, “that El Salvador doesn’t have any topes.”
Too busy to look up, I replied, “The roads are a hell of lot better than Guatemala, that’s for sure.”
Dean lifted up our guidebook. “Lonely Planet says there are half-a-million guns in El Salvador. It’s a gun toting society.”
“How many people in El Salvador?”
“Six million.”
“We’ve only got four-and-a-half million people in Louisiana, and I bet we’ve got ten million guns. I’ll take guns over topes any day.”
At twilight, Mario led us into San Salvador, through a dizzying maze of roads, freeways, turns, interchanges, and on and off ramps. I didn’t know if we were going east or west, and neither did the GPS. Soon, we took two rapid turns, went through a large traffic circle, and out of nowhere, pulled up at the seven-story Courtyard beside a modern pedestrian mall.
Mario pulled off his helmet, shaking out his thick black hair. He walked into the hotel and soon appeared with his friend, César. Hotel guests and staff came to look over the car with the now typical Latin awe.
César smiled as Mario hopped back on the BMW and rode off. He then led us around to the back of the hotel. In the mechanical room, beside three big boilers, he showed me a socket, a modern three-pole, 240-volt, 30-amp outlet.
In Spanish, César conveyed only one request before we were allowed to hook up to the lifeline—he and a few of the staff wanted to look at the car and get some pictures. I patiently waited as the Salvadorans crawled in and out of the car, snapping pictures, their friendly smiles stretching ear to ear.
I too produced a big grin as I pulled out our charging adapter. In only an hour and half, we’d gone from a hopeless situation, our worst of the trip, to the best setup since McAllen.
We Ain’t in Orange County
I’d been to San Salvador once, seven or eight years before. It’s rumored to have the best nightlife in Central America so I hoped we might finally get in some late-night entertainment. As I checked in to the hotel, I asked the cute girl at the hotel’s front desk for an after-hours recommendation.
She cocked her head back, exposing her long, smooth black locks and wonderful bronze skin, before flashing her deep brown eyes to Dean and then me. “The national elections are tomorrow. The law mandates no alcohol is sold in the country for three days before the election.” She smiled. “Sorry.”
“Not anywhere?” I asked.
“No.”
Dean spoke up. “That’s some crazy shit … voting with a clear conscience and without chemical enhancement? These Central Americans are getting serious about this democracy.”
I chuckled. “In Louisiana, elected officials would be tarred and feathered for this.”
The young girl looked at me with perplexed eyes.
“It’s a gringo joke,” I said, returning her smile and walking off.
El Salvador’s election laws may have been a blessing, because our charging situation wasn’t as ideal as I’d initially thought. Though I’d set the charging rate at 26 amps, we’d flipped the 30-amp breaker after only two hours of charging. This was the third time this had happened since leaving the States, further mystifying my simple little brain when it came to determining available power. Luckily, I realized it by nine, while César was still at work, and he had the hotel maintenance man reset the fuse. Checking the car’s trip meter, we’d gone 234 miles that day in ten grueling hours. I set the charge rate at 17 amps and did a quick calculation. We’d be fully charged by ten-thirty the next morning.
I then walked next door to the pedestrian mall to buy a large chees
e pizza from Pizza Hut. Heading back to our room, I picked up a recent copy of The New York Times that somebody had discarded in the hotel lobby and skimmed the headlines. Not much going on in the States, just the everyday stories—the Republicans and Democrats fighting about everything, something about the drought in California, and a story about the Super Bowl, to be played the next day.
Back home I devour the news, reading three or four local papers daily, and any number of national news websites. The Times didn’t pique my interest. I had all but divested myself from the twenty-four-hour news cycle that saturates daily life in America. It didn’t really seem that relevant now. Mine was a simple existence, my only purpose: finding 240-volt electrical sockets, daily sustenance, a roof over my head, avoiding bandits, and not getting lost. My only guide was the compass.
I spent an hour sending Marcus some more pictures of the car at the border crossings and Lake Atitlán. He had the day before called Dean complaining that we needed to send him more pictures with the car in front of famous places or signs.
“We ain’t in Orange County, where you can drive out to Disneyland and take a picture with Mickey Mouse,” Dean reminded him. “We’re in the jungle. Nothing to see, maybe some cows and huts. And if that car’s not moving, it’s charging. It takes every hour of daylight to get it down the road and plugged up.”
Munching on the pizza and drinking a Coke, I tried to do some planning for the next day. I had no idea where we were headed or how we’d get there. The first chore was to find out where we were in San Salvador, a city of more than a million and a half. Google Maps found the Courtyard. We were fortunate. The hotel was only a mile away from the Pan American Highway. The bad news: we had barely gotten into San Salvador and had to cross almost all of the metropolis the next day. Hopefully the signs would be clearer here than they were in Guatemala City—though I didn’t hold out much hope.
I spent thirty minutes painstakingly writing out directions to get us out of town. The problem was: where to go? Studying the map, I settled on Choluteca, Honduras, 187 miles away, but on CA-1. Our Lonely Planet had only three paragraphs about Choluteca, stating it was an agricultural center with banks and gas stations. It mentioned no hotels. Wikipedia said it had about one hundred thousand residents. One site said that year-round it may be the hottest place on the planet. That was more bad news as the Tesla’s power-consuming AC was off limits for us. Tripadvisor.com listed only one hotel.