Day 26: Antigua to Lake Coatepeque, El Salvador - Friday December 3, 2010

It came as no surprise that we missed one turn-off in Guatemala City and that it took over an hour to get back on the correct highway. Poor signage, one-way streets, limited access to the main highways and non-linear directional logic made it necessary to rely on dead reckoning and help from the locals. All major cross-country roads ran through the center of Guatemala City. What congestion!

The next hurdle was crossing the border to El Salvador. I found every border crossing - into Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador - to be degrading from the utter waste of time, lack of posted information and bureaucratic disorganization. It takes one to two hours each with confusion all around. I am dissuaded from driving back up Central America and Mexico to LA by the loathing of 7 border crossings taking 10-14 hours in all. The current plan is to ship the car from Venezuela to Florida and drive up to Nova Scotia to play golf.

There are huge coffee plantations in El Salvador. We saw the tired field workers with their empty baskets walking home after a day of work. Beautiful Lake Coatepeque is the caldera of an extinct volcano. It is only an hour or so from San Salvador and 30 minutes from Santa Ana so it is surrounded by nice vacation homes. The tiger fish for dinner was one of the best lake fish I have ever had, but the rooms at our hotel (Torremolinos) were faded and rustic. We knew this going in, but the magnificent lakeside view and fish that were swimming in the lake only an hour before we ate them made it worthwhile. My dreams in this caldera were very peaceful and funny – e.g., one of my losing stocks had a spike and triggered my sell order.

Joya de Ceren and Suchitoto are our targets today. The first is a Maya village that was buried by the nearby volcano, not unlike Pompay. Suchitoto is the premier artist colony in Salvador and also on a lake.