i think camping would be a bit sketchy as well. i was down there in1998 and it was …tense, for lack of a better word.
i hear its changed alot but based on my experience i would advise against camping anywhere . we stayed in a few places ,zunzal,la libertad and out east . it was right after hurricane mitch hit and killed all those people in the floods and mudslides.
at one of the places we stayed , the guy renting to us told us to close the windows at night and lock them. we did this for about a week and at night it was like an oven in there. impossible to sleep. one night these two local guys show up , their surfers , and one of them pulls a 12 gauge pump out of his board bag and says “you need it around here.”
enough said.
anyway we stay up till about 2 a.m. talking, drinking and shooting off the 12 guage with these guys and decided that things were safe now with this gun around and since sunrise was only 3 hours away what the hell, sleep with the windows open.(by the way there were steel bars over the windows as well.)
so about 4 in the morning i woke up for some reason and i see this silouette in the window fishing out anything he could get through the bars with this 15 foot long bamboo pole with a hook on the end. he got a bunch of clothes and was just about to empty out one of our bags that contained passports, money etc. i yelled ,he ran.
he had tied a sock between the bars and was silently cleaning us out one item at a time.
the next day we tell this security guy who was guarding the place next door what had happened. he returned an hour later with quite the proposition, he would find out who took our stuff and execute them in front of us if we could get he and his family passage into the states. unreal.
for the remainder of the trip we stayed in “group” accommodations.
safety in numbers , it felt that way anyway.
the difference in classes down there was staggering. saturday night in san salvador, college kids in volvos and beemers on cell phones, doing the club thing,while right out of town people literally living in boxes in the dirt.
i can understand the motivation, work for months on end to be able to afford a pair of trunks,???or just grab a few pair in the middle of the night from some guys who can actually afford to take time to just go surfing???
pretty easy decision.
i have to agree wit doc ,in that if we hadent found some local guys (luis and rodrigo the shotgun guy) to guide us through the last week of our trip it would have been a TOTALLY different trip.
sketch was the word. i honestly cant remember relaxing while i was there .the guys i went with share these feelings. in fact, i left 2 days before them,and on their last day (easter. see: alcohol+latin machismo+no tollerance for said alcohol= problem)they were out at zunzal and heard this whizzing sound followed by a “CRACK!!!” after a few of these they realized that some genius had decided that a great way to celebrate easter would be to get blind drunk and take shots at the surfers with a rifle.
sweet.
again these are my own personal experiences , at the time the country was just a few short years out of a civil war and there was still alot of heavy vibe in the air. lots of guns floating around too i was told .things may be completely different now.
actually, i met a couple of guys recentley in baja who have been going every year for five or so years now and they swear its the best thing going. one of them is in finnace and he helped this local guy crunch some numbers and get a hotel going with surf tourism in mind.
it turns out the salvadoran guy doing the hotel is my old freind that showed up with the shotgun at our place years before.
small world.
i dont know if el salvador is a "camping " kind of place. the resort/hotel trip might be a better choice for this particular country.
the waves are great,the countryside is beautiful, you should have a good trip.
just keep an eye on your shit and use common sense , as you would in any third world country .