I might just as well say this right up front. The subject of this post was probably the greatest thing I’ve done in my life. It’s a game changer for Ashley and I. Since we left home in search of ourselves nine months ago, we have slowly weened ourselves off of material attachment, meat, and alcohol (mostly for financial reasons at first).  We’ve spent hours observing people, reading books, and discussing the workings of society among travellers the world over.  Probably the most important factor for us has been our detachment from the “system” by which I mean not having to go to work 5 days a week and discussing all of the talking points our modern media has laid out for us to discuss ad nauseam.  Unfortunately, you don’t have the benefit of our experience, so please read this with an open mind.

Sorry for the overly lengthy introduction.  What I really want to talk about is the 11 day “retreat” Ashley and I had at an El Salvadorian organic farm located about half way between the cities of San Salvador and Santa Ana. We discovered it through a website called HelpX, but you could find them just as easily yourself through WWOOF, Couch Surfing, or even stumble across their blog at http://organicelsalvador.blogspot.com/

The farm is run by Gloria and Mauricio. Mauricio is originally from El Salvador and Gloria is from Columbia. They met at university in the United States where they had the brilliant idea to move to Central America and start a project to help local kids. After travelling Central America for three years looking for the perfect place, they established this organic farm four years ago and have been living the dream ever since.

Welcome to the Farm

The farm itself has no animals, so some might call it a garden. Being part of the wwoofing program, volunteers are expected to work in exchange for room and board. We put in four hour days working 9:00AM to 11:00AM and again between 4:00PM and 6:00PM. Work consisted of a mixture of various projects including decorative projects, recycle projects (I built most of a bed out of scrap wood), harvesting, planting, baking whole wheat bread, shelling cashews, climbing fruit trees, and working with the local kids. They also asked for a monetary donation to help cover the costs of the children’s program which we were happy enough to pay. The donation is a set price, and is on a sliding scale becoming cheaper the longer you stay. Our donation averaged out to $16 per day for the two of us.

The children’s program is really a cultural exchange of sorts. The kids come to learn how to farm without the use of chemicals in a sustainable manner, and to interact with us gringos. Gloria and Mauricio teach them formal English classes, feed them, teach them to cook healthy food and provide money for transportation to and from the farm, while us volunteers work with them on various projects. In this way, we were able to practice our Spanish, which improved immensely, and the kids were able to practice their English. It was a very worthwhile project. The kids got a lot out of it, and so did we.

Working on the Bed

As for meals, we were provided three fully vegan meals a day, and all the fresh fruit we could stomach. There was never any shortage of food, and best of all it was some of the most delicious food either of us have ever eaten. Beyond just providing us with food, we were shown how to prepare various dishes. Naturally we walked away with a pile of new recipes, and a reasonable understanding of how subsist upon, and enjoy, a vegetarian diet.

We were also offered a free Spanish lesson each week.  If desired, more could have be purchased at minimal cost.

Outside of the 4 hour work day, there was plenty going on to help us develop mentally and spiritually. The day started off with free yoga. From there, Mauricio was more than willing to discuss his thoughts on self awareness and transcendence (both Mauricio and Gloria are part of the Hare Krishna movement). In fact, their house was a Hare Krishna temple before the civil war in El Salvador and still contains a small altar in a meditation room that we were encouraged to use. Mauricio keeps a good collection of books; all of them were free to read during our stay.  He has started to collect thought provoking documentaries which we watched as a group on a regular basis.

Why It Is a Game Changer

To get your head in the right place for this, I’m going to prescribe some documentaries that you have to watch. This is mandatory homework.

• Money as Debt – Best start off by realizing how messed up our society really is.
• The Corporation – Following the same theme as above, we are surrounded by lunacy.
• The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear – a BBC series just to keep you questioning the lies that the multimedia giants are feeding you.
• Peaceable Kingdom – A documentary about factory farms. If you don’t become vegetarian after watching this, you have no heart.
• Simply Raw: Reversing Diabetes in 30 days – Are diseases caused by vitamin deficiencies or are they strictly genetic?
• World Without Cancer – An oldie but a goodie, following the same theme as above.
• Gardens of Destiny – A documentary about the Canadian seed bank.
• Garbage Warrior – Why are we building houses when we could be building Earth Ships?

Okay, you finished your homework, right? Oh, not yet… Well that’s okay, there’s a lot of it. Just grab a pen and paper and write down the titles. You can download  buy them when you get a chance and watch them over the next couple of weeks. Just don’t forget.

So here’s the truth. We lived 11 days on a vegan diet eating healthy organically grown food, working only 4 hours per day, practising yoga, meditating, and expanding our current view of the world through books, documentaries, and discussions. In only 11 days we had more energy, we felt healthier, and we were way happier than we had ever been.

Organic Food Enthusiasts:

The first thing we noticed was the food. Organic food is more delicious, and full of flavour than the stuff produced by the “green revolution”, chemical rich farming that we are accustomed to. This is because the plants have the time and environmental stimulus needed to develop a whole host of vitamins, minerals, and beneficial chemicals that we as humans should be eating. I’m entirely convinced that the addition of these vitamins to our diet contributed immensely to the way we feel. It is now our goal to supply ourselves with organic food as much as possible.  When we say organic food, we are not talking about the “Certified Organic” stuff that you can pay a premium for and purchase from just about any grocery store.  We are talking about plants grown from organic seeds in a “natural” environment with all the proper stimulus (birds, insects, disease, the works).

Vegetarians:

Being vegetarian is an ethical issue for us. Now that our eyes have been opened to the way the animals we eat are treated, we just can’t go back to eating meat in the vast quantities that we were before we started this trip.  As they say, some things when learned can’t be unlearned. Now don’t get us wrong, we don’t actually have a problem with killing animals and eating them.  Our problem lies with the way factory farm operations treat the animals from birth until death, confining them to cages, feeding them food that would kill them except for the copious amounts of antibiotics it’s loaded with, etc.  Some of the worst offenders are dairy cows and even more so, egg laying chickens.  I’m not quite sure how this will all shake out yet, but for now we have cut out meat and are trying our best to reduce our consumption of milk/egg products.

What it is All About

No Longer Slaves:

The modern day fiat monetary system creates more debt then real currency because of interest. It’s therefore impossible for the world to get out of debt.  Looking at it another way, the world will always owe more money than exists, creating in practice a form of modern day slavery that will always require unsustainable growth in consumption and borrowing to keep the system from collapsing.

As an ex politician, I see now that politics are futile.  This stems from the realization that politicians don’t have the power to make the decisions that need to be made to “fix” our broken system. The real decisions are made by those who control the media, fund the election campaigns, and decide what industrial projects are undertaken by approving bank loans. Our society can not be fixed, it needs to be abandoned.

Our laws do not just allow, but require companies to maximize profits at the expense of the earth’s resources and it’s people. Scarcity and exploitation are good for profits. We will never live in a world where our basic necessities are plentiful, and our lifestyles are sustainable unless the focus is removed from profitability.

Our food system produces unnatural/unhealthy garbage to put it politely.

But there is a way out, and we intend to take it. All we need to do is quit society.  What life beyond society will look like is a subject that we will be exploring for the next little while.  To give you some idea of what we are talking about, one of the plans we are considering is to purchase a piece of fertile land about 2 acres in size. With that, we could produce our own organic food, return to a 4 hour work day, connect with nature, and live rich and rewarding lives far superior to what we could possibly hope to find inside the “system”.

Mauricio’s farm… this could be our future

When we look to the future, we see ourselves not as reclusive hermits, but as a part of a community of like minded people. An organic community filled with people who are also fed up with “the greatest invention of man kind” (society) and want to live richer fuller happier lives. At this point, we don’t know where we’ll end up (geographically), or what we will end up doing.  In fact there is a tonne that we don’t know just yet, so in the interim, we are going to keep travelling, explore more of the world, connect with more people, and research. But the day will come where we will have our F-R-E-E-D-O-M!

What do you think? Surprised? Think we are idiots? Wish you could join us? Please, Please, Please all comments, suggestions, and criticisms are welcome. This is not a small step for us, and we want your help in considering it fully. Please add your comments to the discussion.

The first time I tried a pupusa, I knew I had just discovered something special.  It was made by a Salvadorean lady in San Pedro La Laguna on Lago de Atitlan in Guatemala.  Before and since then, I’ve eaten some incredible street food… but nothing quite compares.  As I figured out on our travels through Central America, it’s rare to find them outside of El Salvador, unless you’re near the Salvadorean border.  I don’t think I’d be out of line in saying that one of the biggest reasons we wanted to go to El Salvador was for the pupusa.  You can judge me if you want, but please not until you’ve tried one.

The pupusa is El Salvador’s national street food.  It is basically a thick, hand-made corn tortilla, stuffed with beans, cheese, meat, vegetables, or some combination thereof, and fried on a flat griddle. It is typically served with curtido (a slightly fermented spicy coleslaw) and salsa roja (a watery tomato sauce).

The most common flavours seem to be queso (cheese, usually a soft cheese called quesillo) and revueltas (a combinations of queso, frijol (beans) and chicharron (cooked pork meat ground into a paste, not to be confused with fried pork rinds of the same name in other countries)).  Our personal fave is frijol and queso.  It’s nice having a favourite that’s not super popular, as we always get freshly made ones right off the grill.

Pupusas in Juayúa

There is a lot of variation in the flavour and quality of the dough, fillings, curtido, and sauce, but luckily there’s a pupuseria on just about every block to experiment with.  We’ve paid anywhere from 25 cents to 60 cents (at a pricier beach community) per pupusa, with 30-40 cents being the most typical prices.  It takes 2-3 pupusas to make a meal for one person.

Our time in El Salvador was limited, so we tried to make the most of it – we ate pupusas for 2-3 meals a day when we could, supplementing our nutrition with bags of mangos for snacks.

All in all, in our first 7 days in El Salvador, we consumed 57 pupusas (not each, but between the two of us… how gluttonous do you think we are?).  While they made for ridiculously cheap meals (think $1-2 for both of us), it wasn’t just the price that kept us coming back – it was the absolute satisfaction we felt from eating something that’s so delicious.  And if we were without a kitchen for a week, we would do it all over again.

I’ve heard rumours from other travellers that there exists a pupusa wall – a theoretical point where you just can’t bring yourself to eat another one – but I just don’t believe it.  My body would never betray me like that.

Viva La Pupusa!

Note: When Mike found out I wrote a post called “Ode to the Pupusa” and it wasn’t a poem, he was quite upset.  So here’s his version of “Ode to the Pupusa,” written and recorded immediately after a delicious pupusa lunch.

Playa El Tunco is a small little town made up of as many restaurants, hotels and souvenir shops as could be fit between the beach and the main road.

This town has one purpose in life, and that’s surfing. The waves come rolling into the stone-littered black sand beaches day and night, and the surfers are there to ride them.

The Rock Littered Shores of Playa El Tunco

Not knowing anything about surfing, we thought it was high time we learned the basics and indeed that’s the sole reason we found ourselves in this surfing village. It had previously been recommended to us as a good/cheap place to take lessons, and since cheap is our middle name…

Originally we had intended to spend 4 nights in El Tunco, taking lessons on the first day, and honing our surfing skills for the rest of our time there. Things didn’t start out quite as planned however. I started the week off with a rough sinus cold and a harsh cough that seemed to sap all the energy from me. Instead of surfing, I spent the first three days in El Tunco eating pupusas and composing terrible poetry (more on this in our next post!).

Fortunately, near the end of our time on the beach – the last day we had available to us – I started to feel better. It was time to surf.

After careful consideration, we decided to part with some cash and take surfing lessons. We paid $15 each for a 1 hour 1-on-1 lesson with board rental included (had we just wanted to surf, boards could be rented for $5 to $10 per day).

We started our lesson on the beach in the same manner you do for many sports, with stretches. Very important when you get to be our age. After we were all limbered up, we laid the board down on the sand and practised pushing ourselves up from the laying position to the surfing position. It’s accomplished with one quick action pushing hard with your arms, and popping yourself up onto your feet. If all works out well, you should be standing with your legs spread wide, balanced and ready to take the wave.

Then we got in the water. We walked out until we were about waist deep and got right to it. The first bit of instruction was identifying the proper wave. The wave needs to be uniform and perpendicular to the shore. There were plenty of them, so we didn’t have to spend much time waiting.

Less than a minute after getting my toes wet, I was laying on the board, with a wave coming up behind me, pushing me towards shore. I jumped up, fell, got up again, and walked back out to the waist deep water where my instructor was waiting for me.

For the next hour, we kept repeating that pattern- we laid on the board pointed towards shore, caught a wave, jumped up, fell, and waded back out into waist deep water. In the end, I pretty much was at the point that I could ride the wave in a straight line all the way to shore. Ashley could probably have used another lesson…

I’m the guy taking the photo, not the guy surfing.  One day though…

To me, it seemed that the price of the lessons and the experience of the instructors (they had been surfing for about 12 years) was really good value at Playa El Tunco. Talking with some experienced surfers, I’m not sure that the beach itself is the best for a learner, as it does drop off quite quickly. Apparently, the best thing for a learner is a shallow sloping beach that allows you to ride a small wave a long long ways so you can really practice your balance. But I didn’t feel that learning at El Tunco was overly challenging either.

All tallied, I can see how surfing could be a lot of fun. But it’s going to take a lot more than a single one hour lesson before we start calling ourselves surfers.

Will we try it again? Yes, I think so.

Surfing ’til the sun goes down

 

Lonely Planet describes the Ruta de Las Flores (Flower Route) as the “wildflower of Salvadorean tourism… a 36-km long winding trip through brightly colored colonial towns famed for lazy weekends of gastronomy and gallery-hopping, as well as more adventurous pursuits like mountain biking, horseback riding and hiking to hidden waterfalls scattered throughout the glorious Cordillera Apaneca.”  What doesn’t sound great about that?

What’s a Flower Route without some flowers?

Mike seemed pretty up in the air about the whole thing, but I insisted we needed to check it out.  I didn’t care so much about exploring the entire route, but wanted to experience at least a town or two.

We ended up making the beautiful town of Juayúa (who-ah-you-ah) our home base, since it’s famed for it’s weekend fería gastronómica or food fair.  The fair happens every weekend, so we arrived on a Friday so we wouldn’t miss out on anything.

Weekend market

Juayúa is definitely set up for tourism, but it was interesting to notice that we were some of the very few foreign tourists there.  It seems that most of the tourists that visit are Salvadorean, which leaves the authentic cultural experience intact.  Everyone was incredibly friendly and helpful, and we met quite a few people that just wanted to chat.

Market stalls lining the street

We spent most of Saturday wandering the cobbled streets of Juayúa, enjoying the beauty around every corner.  The town is one of the “greenest” we’ve encountered in a long time, with trees and flowers bursting out from every yard and fence.  Every street offers a view of the volcanoes and mountains in the distance.

The Saturday food fair was up and running, though it was a little more low-key than the one described in the LP (no barbecued iguana, guinea pig, or frog skewers to be seen and the live music was a woman singing karaoke-style in the food tent), but it was still busy and full of options.  We decided on sharing a $5 USD steak platter, which included a large, juicy and tender steak with chimichurri sauce, a grilled potato, a “sandwich” of what we think was mashed yucca and cheese between two really thick corn tortillas, some spicy coleslaw and a grilled green onion.  We figured that the really interesting stuff would come out on Sunday.

Food fair

Yuca frita (fried yucca) from the food fair

Alas, our timing was off.  It turned out that Sunday was election day in El Salvador and, as a result, no food fair.  You might think this was enough to turn us off the town (we did, after all, come to the Ruta de las Flores specifically for this food fair), but we were so enamoured with the charming town and its surroundings that we couldn’t be disappointed.

Church at sunrise

Rather than hiking out to the nearby waterfall, we decided to spend Sunday morning exploring another of the route’s towns, Ataco.  Ataco is a brightly coloured town, with murals painted on several of the buildings.

Mural on one of the local businesses

Mike and I spent some time debating which town was prettier – Juayúa with it’s greenery or Ataco with its murals – but it was an impossible decision to make.  They are both lovely.

Without a doubt, I could easily spend a month or more taking in everything the Ruta de Las Flores area has to offer – waterfalls, nurseries, fresh fruits and veggies, coffee farms, furniture building, etc, etc.  Unfortunately, we had upcoming plans to volunteer with an organic farm so were limited to two and a half days in the area.  The charm of the area has left its mark on me, however, and I would definitely recommend a visit to the Flower Route to anyone travelling through El Salvador.

View from the streets of Apaneca, another town along the Ruta de las Flores

After saying goodbye to my mom in San Jose, we headed back up to Nicaragua with a plan. We were working our way back north to Guatemala to celebrate Semana Santa in Antigua. There were a couple of Nicaraguan destinations we missed out on with mom, so we hit them up on our way through second time.

This roundup covers both legs of our Nicaragua journey. Anything posted in bold is from our most recent trip through, but we thought you, the reader, would appreciate a total country summary as well.

Somoto Canyon

Nicaragua Summary:

Note – Statistics from this visit are in bold. Overall averages for the country are given in [square brackets].

Length of Stay: 6 days [22 days]
Average Cost per Day for Two People: $31.95 CAD [$31.84 CAD]
Cities Visited: 4 [10]
Distance Traveled: 430 km in 7 automobiles [1209 km in 19 automobiles and 2 boats]
Days Sick: 0 for Ashley, 0 for Mike [0 for Ashley, 1 for Mike]
Number of Items Lost: 0
Biggest Tourist Traps: none [touts at San Juan del Sur]
Exchange Rate: $1 CAD = 23 Cordobas

For more great stats, check out our statistics page!

Our Route:

1st trip (southbound, in blue): Honduras border – Managua – León – Las Peñitas – Granada – Isla de Ometepe (Moyogalpa, Merida) – San Juan del Sur – Costa Rica border

This trip(northbound, in red): Costa Rica border – Managua – Esteli – El Tisey Reserve – Somoto – Honduras border

Highlights:

• Seeing my mom!!!
• Full moon lava hike at León
• Fried yuca at the market in Granada
• International Poetry Festival in Granada
• Hiking through El Tisey Reserve (and snacking on the Swiss cheese made there!)
• Cliff jumping in Somoto Canyon
• The towns of Esteli and Somoto… they helped us find that love of Nicaragua we were looking for

Tisey Reserve

Lowlights:

• The food at Hacienda Merida on Isla de Ometepe (it was exceptionally tasty, and expensive to match. The alternatives were likewise cheap, and not so delicious)
• The “typico” Nicaraguan meal from a mall food court in Managua… should have known better
• We couldn’t stay in Granada long enough to experience more than a night of the International Poetry Festival
• Troubles with chicken buses… it seems some of the “schedules” are more of a suggestion that an expectation

Tisey Reserve

Surprises:

• Nicaragua is supposed to be the poorest country in Central America, but we didn’t really get that impression… there were a lot of cars everywhere we went.
• We had heard Nicaragua would be cheap. While the prices were definitely reasonable, it wasn’t as cheap as we were expecting.
• There is good cheese to be had in Central America… you just have to go to the middle of nowhere to find it!

Tisey Reserve

Lessons Learned:

• Travelling quickly through a country makes it difficult to fall in love with a place. We easily could have spent more time at nearly every town we were in, but were limited by our visas.
• If your gut tells you to go somewhere because it sounds like your cup of tea, trust it. It likely will be.
• Always reapply sunscreen after playing in the surf. Ouch!

Refrescos: Cacao(left) and Cocoa(right)… we just had to figure out the difference

Nicaragua Journal – Where Did We Spend Our Time?

For a detailed summary of each of the cities on our first trip through Nicaragua, check our original roundup.

Managua – 1 night
León – 2 nights
Las Peñitas – 2 nights
Granada – 3 nights
Moyogalpa, Isla de Ometepe – 1 night
Merida, Isla de Ometepe – 3 nights
San Juan del Sur – 4 nights

Managua – 1 night
Again, Managua was just a layover on our way to other destinations. We crashed here for a night and started out early the next morning.

Esteli – 1 night
We really enjoyed walking around the town of Esteli and people watching here. This was our home base for our trip to El Tisey Reserve.

El Tisey Reserve – 2 nights
We took a chicken bus out to the Eco-Posada at the reserve and rented a private cabin. It was really beautiful here and we hiked around much of the area. We probably could have spent more time, but alas we had to move on.

Somoto – 2 nights
We splurged on a tour to Somoto Canyon that included hiking, swimming in the canyon and cliff jumping. It was an incredible day spent in a stunning environment!

Tisey Reserve