Deer Park

A long excellent day. First of all, the day track below for reference. This is almost half the length of the country. Small, the nearly 7M people make it the mostly densely populated Central American country.

So I had to head back to El Tunco this morning early. Something I’d forgotten. There are two ways south down to the plains from the volcano. The way through Santa Maria (the way I came up yesterday) or through Berlin. So off I went for the steep ride down and lo and behold it’s perfect dirt the whole way. But from the top, the morning view down through the volcanoes

Looking the other way

Then down quickly into the jungle! Yay! Monkeys (no)!

Lovely, fast, narrow

See the house?

To the bottom, 20 miles later, and another pretty river. There’s a fisherman almost in the centre of the pic, just a bit to the laft

So I walked down to watch him, and caught his net just before it hit the water. He only casted twice in ten minutes. Patience

Then, on the flats, navigating cows. For the moment i’d blanked and forgotten how to say *get out of the way you fucking cows!* in Spanish, but they don’t spook easily anyway so we steered through them

And the ride down was over. So the loop up to Alegria and down, with the connecting main road, is now my favourite all time loop. Why do I think I’ll be back to do it again? Here it is, for your trip down here

Then off fast to El Tunco for a couple of hours to get my chore done. Then back again, but we took a diversion about 30 miles down a dirt road, following the Rio Lempa to the ocean, which was just out of sight at the start. It was a dead end so we saw virtually no one. This can be a bad thing, and we had a random incident with a local in a pickup who didn’t think we should be here.

Incredibly lush land down the road

Exotic trees

Until we got to the end of the road. No ocean access without a hike and I’m not leaving Lucinda alone

But we were beside the Rio

Then, tired, we raced up the side of the volcano, pavement side, back to Alegria.

What a difference a border can make. El Salvador is a completely different animal. More on this in a few days.

I’ve read a few ride reports from others and I can’t remember anyone whining as much as I have about the heat. And I can’t use being Canadian as an excuse because some of the others have been too. Oh well.

So the plan was to head up to altitude to escape it for a few hours.

Next to El Tunco is a town of 35K, La Libertad, which seemed like a good place to explore.

So I rode around the backstreets on my way to the Lake this morning. Here’s the town behind the waterfront

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Then off. John 3:16. Uh oh, looks like he means it.

Up to the mountains. The road around the lake was superb

Our first view. It’s a massive volcanic caldera and new, about 60K years old.

A few miles of  pavement down from the crest, then dirt for a few miles around the lake. It’s a continuous community

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We arrived at a tiny restaurant over the water.

The water, according to all reports is supposed to be cool. It isn’t, it’s like a bath. Back to the temperature thing. My usual greeting to people isn’t *Buenos Dias*, it’s * Mucho color. Es normal?* which translates roughly to *Christ it’s hot. Is this normal or what?*. The Latinos are pretty intuitive and reply, kindly, * no it’s not normal* which means *as your host in this country, since you’re obviously suffering, I’m going to be tactful and pretend this is abnormal*

After lunch, up to the caldera rim and back onto this beautiful road

Here’s the riding perspective

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With great views of the lake below. Lucinda insists on hogging the photos, showing off her new Rotopax, which she thinks is very ADV’ish

On the other side of the road, the landscape is gorgeous, and mostly farmland. El Salvador is tiny, only 8K square miles, with 6M people. But it doesn’t appear that densely populated so far

Closer

Then back to the coast. A cop pulls me over, mostly just curious again. Things are slower here for the most part and he reads the registration word for word. Patience…

Then the ocean

The track. Yup another wrong turn in there