After staying an extra day in El Zonte, I headed for Santa Ana early this morning. Again, the transit proved very frustrating due to the requisite bus transfers. At one of the transition town of Santa Ticla, I heard four rounds of gun shots as the bus pulled into the central market area – unusual of course, but it serves as a reminder that the country as a whole still sees a lot of violence; in fact, there is a heavy presence of semi-automatic firearms here, carried by the national police and private security personnel.
After arriving in Santa Ana, we decided to ride along Ruta de la Flores to go tothe weekend food festival in Juayua, some 25 km away – a trivial distance really, but again it took 2 hours to get there and a bus change. We didn’t reach the town until 3:30 pm and by then, the festival was already winding down. With a population of about 10,000, Juayua is another small town dotting the landscape. However, on weekends the ever popular festival attracts all sorts of locals from the surrounding towns along with a handful of tourists.
The center of town rises the famed church with the famed “Black Christ”. Adjacent to it is a lovely, small park replete with an old fountain in the middle. Life shuffles along here in merriment on the weekends as people sample all the indigenous food (from fried frogs to skillet rabbits) as the artisan crowd ply their bracelets and craft wares. The musicians serve up loud tunes all along the food stalls, singing at the top of their lungs all the old favorites, it seems. Children accost will accost you at every corner trying to sell anything from candy to local textiles.
It’s unfortunate that we didn’t have more time to enjoy the affair after arriving late in the afternoon. By 4:30 pm, the last bus bound for the transfer town of Sunate had already departed, leaving us stranded it seemed. However, after talking to some of the local artisans in the park, we were informed that one of the flower trucks would leave in half an hour – we could pay fifty cents to hitch a ride on the back Sunate to catch the bus. Thus I have chalked up another wild adventure of bouncing on the back of an old converted truck with 8 El Salvadorians, weaving through the misty hills flanked by volcanoes as the rain poured down at dusk.