The surfing in El Salvador is unreal. The waves in El Tunco were over 100 yds long and could be ridden for over 25 seconds. I got up on a good one and was feeling pretty good about myself before crashing hard into another gringo surfer. She came out of knowhere and I flipped over her back with my leash clothes lining her neck and then we tumbled into the wave with our leashes and boards entangled in a great mess. A real beautiful scene. It reminded me alot of a hard body check in hockey. The cool thing about El Salvador is that its pretty much unknown on the tourist trail. Here there are 90% locals and 10% tourists surfing while in a place like Costa Rica those numbers are easily flipped. Being a minority in this country also gives us gringo travellers alot of attention and I must say the El Salvadorians treat us like royalty for the most part as they know we are the keys to there future tourist industry. Even the little kids are pretty smart as they always try to hit us whities up for a dollar or two. In the grocery store one kid was being very consistent with his needs for a dollar but he kept asking in spanish so I kept giving him different yogurt containers. Eventually after about a 1 minute and refusing almost every type of yogurt they had on the shelf the little boy finally got annoyed and left me alone. Chalk one up for the gringo! Another thing about El Salvador that makes it alot different from Canada is that all the old folks have machettes here, while in Canada they got canes. In fact I´m pretty sure every kid gets a machette here when he/she graduates from kindergarten instead of the laim little pieces of paper we get back home. Safety wise El Salvador has seemed pretty good. There are two major gangs which cause most the trouble in the country but they generally fight amongst themselves and leave the tourists alone. Opportunisitc crime is definatly an issue though and a guide or police escort is needed to climb most any of the volcanos. As for today there are cloudforests awaiting. Adios
