Driving around El Salvador

Driving around El Salvador, I tried really hard to pay attention and take everything in because I want to be a writer and writers are supposed to pay attention and describe everything to their readers.  So, I tried really hard to take everything in and remember all the little details, and then write stuff down when I got home.  This paying attention and writing lasted for the first few days I was in El Salvador and then I stopped writing about all the randomness I saw while riding around El Salvador.  I often ended up on sensory overload trying to pay attention to everything.  Especially when Cesar was driving everything went past so fast and there was so much to see, hear, and experience when driving around El Salvador.  There just so much going on, sights, sounds, smells, and they are all so big and overwhelming.  The streets seem so chaotic compared to the calm streets of the suburbs back home.

Here´s some random sights, sounds, and experiences that I experienced driving around El Salvador to try to give you a little taste of what it’s like to drive around El Salvador:

There´s graffiti all over the place.  Sometimes I think it is just part of the normal decoration of the houses and stores and buildings.  There´s gang graffiti, political graffiti, advertising graffiti, religious graffiti, and the graffiti that I can´t tell what it is.  It sends messages of all levels of importance: “this territory belongs to my gang”, “Jesus saves”, “Funes is a good or bad president”, “smile”.  It adds color to the already colorful landscape.  Graffiti is a platform for expression- perhaps most importantly for those people who have few other options for communicating their needs, wants, and opinions.  Practically every surface along the road is painted or decorated in some way- Salvadorans love murals.

even the guardrails have been painted

Religious mural

Political mural

Advertising along the highway- no billboards required

Then there´s the black, grey, white exhaust that comes from cars tucks and busses.  It hangs in the air.  Sometimes the plumes of thick black smokes come out of the rusted tailpipes of busses as they accelerate.  Other times it´s the lighter grey exhaust constantly being spewed from the 30-year-old car.  You drive past a bus struggling to get up to speed and it projects out toward you a thick cloud of hot black exhaust.  You try to hold your breath so you don´t breathe it in, but just as the air clears enough to think that you can breathe without immediately developing lung cancer, another dark cloud of exhaust is extruded by another passing bus.  It’s really gross. 

There are always people around.  It´s quite rare to drive around without seeing people all over the place.  People walking, people diving, people riding in the backs of pick-up trucks, people carrying things, people selling things, people buying things.  El Salvador is a very densely populated country and it is very obvious from all the people you see while driving around.

There are all sorts of makeshift stands like this one along the roads

One day when we were driving around in San Salvador traffic.  I saw a truck with a bright blue loveseat and stuffed chair in the back.  A man was sitting in the chair while the truck was driving down the road.  He was sitting in that chair just as he might have been sitting in his living room watching his favorite TV show.  This is the way to travel, especially if you have to ride in the back of a truck, which isn’t the most comfortable.  The thing that most struck me about this scene was that it was something that I never would have expected to see, but the man and everyone around just acted like it was a normal thing.

There’s the stores and houses that we pass by.  It seems like the little stores and even the house try to paint and construct themselves in such a way as to attract as much attention as possible, but in a hodgepodge sort of way.  People use whatever is available to make things useable and practical but also to make things pretty and attract attention.  

I think my favorite by far were the animals crossing the road.  Horses, cows, goats, dogs, chickens.  Yes, chickens really do cross roads- it’s not just a joke.  I just loved it when cows stopped traffic.  I’m not really sure why I find it so entertaining or funny, but it always brought a smile to my face to see cows on the road.