Well, hi there! I know it´s been a while! We´ve been in the Amazon for the last 8 days. But more about that later.
We miss you all! And anyone in SF that gives extra love to Loki from us will be richly rewarded when we return. Lots of doggies and kitties (and monkeys and sloths for that matter) in these countries are getting extra love from us as we are missing our pets!
First, a fun story about San Salvador.
We learned from our almost-mistakes in Costa Rica, that we should leave some time in between flights in case things don´t go... um... quite as we expect. So, we built in an extra night in San Salvador between Guatemala and flying to Peru.
I sent a package home after Guatemala (hope you got that, Rainbow House - it was a ceiling fan box that we got from a grocer and cut and taped together to send a cool souvenir back to the house) and sent back my Lonely Planet Central America guide with it, figuring we wouldn´t need it anymore. Oops - forgot about that night in San Salvador! I asked at the airport and the airline special was for $240 for a night. Yeah, right. So, I asked the first taxi driver I saw, how much into the city of San Salvador and off we went. I asked for walking distance to a restaurant and ATM and safe. He got us to a great and super cute place for $50 including breakfast across the street from a bar and grill kind of place and an ATM! Sweet. I will post pics when I can, but we can´t find anyone in Iquitos that has picture to CD capability. I´ll try again in Sao Paolo in 2 days and may just buy the camera cable that I accidentally left at home, that can connect the camera to the PC directly. But if you´re ever in San Salvador, I highly recommend the Escalon Plaza Hotel. http://www.escalonplaza.com/
But anyway, we loved our great room, had a good dinner, a few drinks, got cash for the Amazon and generally were super happy. True to what I read and researched about El Salvador, people are SUPER friendly and helpful. We felt very comfortable there.
We had to leave for the airport at 11 the next morning (it´s about 40 minutes to the airport from the city which is really large). And strangely enough the currency in El Salvador is the american dollar. Weird, but that made things easy at the ATM. =) So, we had a little time to wander the streets, just checking things out.
And then we discovered the other interesting thing about San Salvador. There was an armed guard at the entrance to EVERY store. Even the art supply store. Some with machine guns. They were everywhere. We felt very safe, strangely enough, although the necessity for heavily armed guards at every store was something that made us think twice about walking around, even at 10 in the morning. So, I guess their plan is probably working if the bad guys feel that way as well. I even asked one in a store that was standing in front of the Hallmark cards if I could take his picture, and he let me. I wish I could post it, but you can imagine it was pretty ironic.
***We got our photos on CD so now you can see the guard above*** This cafe is a bit slow on the photo upload, so I´m not sure how many pictures we are going to post this time.
Anyway, since I have much more to write before we brave the water balloons (more about that in my Iquitos post) to get to a restaurant, I´ll end there about San Salvador.
We then flew off to Lima!
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