War stories in El Salvador

El Salvador is the smallest and least visited country in Latin America. According to the British Foreign Office, it has one of the highest crime rates in the world and I should take great care in downtown San Salvador, where there are all manner of grenade attacks and bus hold-ups. Marvellous. My iPad and I are slightly apprehensive.

I decide to check it out and go for a stroll around the city. Well it's not so bad, except the error here was the word "stroll" - San Salvador is not really a strolling kind of place. The route into town smells like wee and is deserted. The barbed wire, gates and padlocks do little to invoke a sense of security, but I suppose it is Sunday so its unsurprising that the outskirts of town might be a bit quiet. Once I get to the centre of town the atmosphere is very different: a grubby frenzy of market stalls, pollution and noise, but nonetheless quite interesting.

Downtown San Salvador...

Lake Suchitlan (Suchitoto)

I spend a lot of time on buses in El Salvador. All of the ill-advised chicken variety of course. My heart starts pounding as we get pulled over by four armed policemen on my way to the beach - maybe this wasn't such a good idea? At least they are policemen I suppose, hopefully they might be trustworthy. They order all the men off the bus who line up alongside it. Is this normal? I look around and nobody else seems concerned in the slightest so tell myself it must be ok. They search everyone's bags. I smile tentatively at the policeman waving a big gun at me and am very grateful for my spattering of Spanish as he asks me to open up the small box I brought some lunch in. Phew, all seems ok, and we proceed on our way.

Playa El Tunco is a black sand beach with crashing waves: it's a surf paradise. The sand looks metallic to me and sparkles silver in the sunlight, though looks more like mud once I get it all over my feet.

More bus adventures on the way to Perquin, a mountain town that was home to guerrilla radio station Radio Venceremos during the civil war. It's the third bus of the day and I'm squashed up at the back amid a flowing torrent of school children. Three hours later, the ticket guy starts laughing at me as we apparently passed Perquin a few miles back. Well how was I to know that the Perquin bus didn't in fact terminate there?! Great - we are now in the middle of bloody nowhere and it's getting late in the afternoon. He jumps off the bus with my backpack, so I follow suit. He finds a car with two guys in it, who he asks to give me a lift back to Perquin. I size up the two guys and the car quickly as he throws my rucksack in the boot: an older and a younger teenaged guy - father and son, or accomplices in crime? There are 2 boxes of bubblegum balls and other sweets on the back seat. Hmm. Does the old guy have a sweet tooth or is he a member of some kind of pedophile circle stocking up on goodies for grooming young victims?

Bollocks. This is worse than the time I fell asleep on the night bus and woke up in Walthamstow. Would I rather jump in a car with two strange men (neither of whom speak English) in the middle of nowhere, or walk down random country roads with my excessive backpack as it's starting to get dark? I decide to take my chances with the car. The younger guy smiles and speaks patiently with me in Spanish. He seems pretty friendly, but I'm unsurprisingly on edge, and when he asks me about my travels and whether I have any friends here, I don't really want to mention that I know nobody on this continent. He says something I don't understand, and we swing off onto some dirt track. Was that "we just need to make a quick stop at a little shop down here and sell them some sweets" or "we know a great spot for you to dig your own grave down here, and nobody is going to find you ever again"? Thankfully turns out it was the former - they were really very nice despite my poor Spanish and dropped me right outside a hostel in town.

El Salvador is sadly best known for its vicious civil war in the 1980s, and this is the subject of the day in Perquin. A guide walks me around the war museum, a shot-down helicopter and the crater left by a 500lb bomb dropped on the town, and though I don't get all of the Spanish, he's keen to tell me about the solidarity shown by people from all over the world and all about the US-manufactured weapons. As I wait for the bus, another guy shares his war stories with me: I struggle to understand, so we get by with sign language - a poignant memory of a war that was still raging as recently as the 1990s.

Monumento de la Memoria y la Verdad: Tribute to victims of the civil war, San Salvador